This post by Jakob Nielsen gave me a laugh:

• Usabil­ity in the Movies — Top 10 Bloop­ers

The article’s summary:

User inter­faces in film are more excit­ing than they are real­is­tic, and heroes have far too easy a time using for­eign systems.

I thought this was pretty inter­est­ing and it val­i­dated my thoughts. Every time I watch a movie with com­put­ers in it, I think to myself, “I’ve never seen any com­puter soft­ware that looked like that.” I par­tic­u­larly like the part about how easily heros can use strange com­puter sys­tems. The best exam­ple is from Juras­sic Park:

In the film Juras­sic Park, a 12-year-old girl has to use the park’s secu­rity system to keep every­one from being eaten by dinosaurs. She walks up to the con­trol ter­mi­nal and utters the immor­tal words, “This is a Unix system. I know this.”

Um, yeah…most 12-year-olds know Unix.

Via 456 Berea St.