Classic BOFH
Someone else has noticed the infinite resolution CCTV and pointless shiny UIs that make these CSI style programmes unwatchable!
Classic BOFH :)
“Can you just come here for a moment?” Ray - the brand spanking new Boss with the IQ of a pot plant - asks, ducking into Mission Control. The PFY and I follow – after all it’s a Friday morning and there’s an hour or so till the pub opens for lunch. “Can you tell me what happened here?” Ray asks, once he’s led us to the …
but you forgot it is not an infinite resolution camera! They use "image enhancement" to sharpen the image. That's the magic!
I keep asking why, when matching fingerprints, the computer shows each record on the screen. Just think how much faster it would be if it didn't have to do that, and say, just did a relational database search on a hash of the loci!
Only topped by the real-time IR satellite images down to a resolution of about 5cm that appears in Behind Enemy Lines. I'll also swear that the first missile fired at the F/A 18 is in the air for nearly two minutes, whilst following highly evasive manoeuvres.
...and why do they always use the keyboard when they're doing these things? If it's a GUI can't they do it with the mouse?
"enhance square echo two..."
clicka-clicka-clicka-clickety-clickety-clickety-clicka-click.
"and zoom in..."
clicka-clicka-clicka-clickety-clickety-clickety-clicka-clicka-clicka-clicka-clicka-clickety-clickety-clickety-clicka-click.
It's like a touch typist updating their CV, FFS.
“Yes, I think things started going downhill when my assistant pointed out that no one in the audience was retarded enough to believe that even the best image enhancing software could pull the license plate of a vehicle 27 blocks away from the reflection in a shop window caught by a 640 by 480 CCTV image in an off-licence.”
When watching most TV series you are required to suspend belief. CSI is no different to the rest. How many cop dramas have you watched where the murder is solved by a single cop (or a pair of partner cops who don't quite get on) relying on intuition and some dodgy questioning? But they fail to show the hundred uniforms doing the door to door investigation, or the forensics teams in white overalls doing a painstaking fingertip search of somewhere over a number of days.
What makes a TV show fun is not necessarily the accuracy, but the characters. Gil Grissom for example is a very compelling and interesting character which make CSI Vegas very much worth watching. I've never found as compelling a character in the other CSI series and therefore don't watch them.
But appart from that an accurate post.
I have to say, in spite of the obvious inaccuracies, I love CSI (Vegas, not the spin offs). Grissom is a great character, his integrity and dedication to scientific process is an example to all of us. I know they "spice it up" but it's a great programme.
Yes I can suspend belief.
It would be nice if sci fi script writers understood science.
"Reverse the polarity" OMG dont they rectify anything, yes you can phase shift that by 180 degrees but it wont do anything, wow to achieve that they would have to reverse the polarity of everthing in the ship.
Normally thats fine on TV show but then one day the following happened
Turn on TV
-old CSI rerun on (only partially pay attention to it cause its normally pretty lame pap)
"So you want me to run up a GUI interface using visual basic to track the killer’s IP Address?”
-Jaw drops, ROFL. worst technoable ever!
Wife doesnt understand why I just go to pieces whenever the show is on now.
Damn you CSI!!!!! I can't get that line out of my head!!!!
"Or that you can copy the entire contents of a 1 Terabyte hard drive to a USB stick with 2GB stamped prominently on the side in 14 seconds.".
Yes you could. you could convert it to a Jpeg with maximum loss and zip it. On the other side, unzip the file, and convert to maximum gain jpeg, and the convert to 1Tb data.
Mathematically it can be represented by
data -> jpeg mximum loss -> zip............ unzip -> jpeg maximum gain -> data
voila
Mine's the one with the super compression algorithm in the pocket.
Just to be pedantic:
1) USB 2.0 has a max data speed of 60 MB/s (480Mb/s). This means to fill a 2GB memory stick running at the maximum possible speed requires 33s.
2) I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on hard drive speeds and assume this 1TB drive is on SATA 3. That gives you 6Gb/s (including protocol overhead) which amounts to about 600MB/s of raw data. That is over 1600s just to read the contents of the drive, which is almost half an hour.
3) If you use lossless compression, then depending on the entropy of the data, there is a very very good chance that a 1TB drive will not compress down to 2GB.
4) If you use lossy compression as you suggest, then the transformation needs to be represented as: data -> jpeg mximum loss -> zip............ unzip -> jpeg maximum gain -> horribly corrupted data. The data corruption will be worse if it isn't image data since jpeg is specifically designed to compress images in a way that the loss doesn't look bad to the human eye.
Next time you try to be pedantic and claim that the BOFH has made a mistake, please think carefully, the mistake is most likely yours.
You aren't taking full advantage of read-caching from the hard drive, nor overclocking the USB slot. As for the corruption, that's why you use .jpeg compression: You run it through the image enhancement software back at the lab, and get more detailed evidence than was originally present!
I can't explain why the .zip step, though. I recommend .lha instead.