The writers of that show take is as a challenge to come up with ludicrous technobabble that fools laymen but causes geeks to bite through their keyboards.

The more rage the better.

What makes that one so funny is that they tried. You can just imagine the conversation between a writer and a technical consultant.

Whereas this one ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y2zo0JN2HE

My father is a big fan. I saw some "enhance" sequence once and decided no thanks. I was at his house and this episode came on. cringe It seems like there should be a reasonable middle ground between NCIS and reality. Sneakers was pretty good. :)

Also The Net, Antitrust and David Fincher's Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have very realistic computer sequences.

Antitrust and Social Network also show real source code that compiles (C, Java, Perl, Bash, HTML), Antitrust even explains "Open Source" to the audience. The camera work (especially showing relevant parts of the computer monitors and pan around to keep it engaging for a longer time) on all four movies is really fantastic.

* The Net (1995) - filmed one year before the World Wide Web got traction with the first fully graphical Mosaic web browser: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/

* Antitrust (2001) - famous for highlighting the open source movement, features a "CEO" that resembles a mixture of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in one person as evil character, shows Linux desktop and command shell, and shows real Linux developer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/

* Social Network (2010) - very realistic, based on real detailed technical blog posts from 2004 on LiveJournal from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin's memory: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/

* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) - nmap tool, etc.: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/

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* Jurassic Park (1993) - real 3D file manager application on Unix desktop, first use of OpenGL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/ , see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ and http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

* movies (like The Matrix reloaded) that use the nmap tool: http://nmap.org/movies/

If you are interested, check out gmunk work on Tron:

http://work.gmunk.com/search/tron

Hollywood has gotten better about faking technology. At least some people in Hollywood have. "Silicon Valley" on HBO went as far as having a Stanford CS professor develop a viable compression-rating system to be used on the show (the "Weissman Score," named for Professor Tsachy Weissman).

I've been really impressed by the TV show Halt And Catch Fire in this regard, the sales guy is slightly incorrect as a sales guy would be, but the engineers are bang-on.

Halt and Catch Fire is doing a bang up job of reflecting the technology and even the market of the time. Really refreshing to see.

The first two seasons of Alias were pretty ok regarding the use of computers. Granted, they still did impossible (highly advanced) stuff with them but it looked plausible. But after season 2 they jumped the shark in all regards.

It's important to note that this is not intended to be realistic. It's a parody of hacking sequences in TV and movies.

No..... Oh wow.

http://xkcd.com/1053/ (everything is new to someone)

I wasn't lucky. I would have preferred not to see this.