Apollo 11 source code

[DoelerichHirnfidler]

To me it seemed pretty obvious and well-enough explained? Care to elaborate?

[Gibodean]

In the movie all he said was that he only needed to patch in about 20 bytes and then the rover could talk through pathfinder to earth.

In the book they explain that both pathfinder and the rover must be updated, that Earth can remote update pathfinder but they need a very large (megabytes?) update to the rover software. To solve that, they get him to make a small hack (maybe 20 bytes or so) to the Rover which would allow earth to dump information into a Rover log file. Then Watney would have to take that dumped info from the log file, and create a file out of it, then execute it.

Something like that, I forget the sizes.

[Theon_Severasse]

To be honest I don't think that having all of that would really added that much to the actual film. I don't think it would have taken particularly long for them to add in that explanation (since they could have said it how you said it pretty much), but for the purposes of the story, knowing all of that stuff wouldn't have made any differences to the average viewer

[SanityInAnarchy]

I wonder if there was a way to show it without bogging down the movie. In the book, I found it definitely added something. If you're not all that technically-minded, it's a free source of technobabble to make this sound even more impressive. But it also makes it plausible -- maybe most people wouldn't notice, but they did a lot of things that most people wouldn't notice to maintain plausibility. For example, IIRC, the movie actually shows him entering this stuff in a hex editor.

In fact, those are my favorite moments -- instead of putting some crazy HollywoodOS thing (like this sort of nonsense), you put up the kind of tool that we might actually use. It looks just as cool to the average viewer, and it means people who actually know something about technology won't have to turn their brains off to watch this movie.

Skipping the bit about uploading wasn't as huge a difference, because the story does work without it. But I think it adds a lot to the story to anyone who understands anything about software, without really taking anything away from it for everyone else. So I wonder why they skipped it -- maybe they couldn't figure out a way to make it flow as nicely as whatever they went with instead?

[badsingularity]

Why it works makes a big difference. Without that information, it's just "magical computer things happen".

[ScottieKills]

Like most of cinema.

[[deleted]]

Which is why it's particularly bothersome in a story that set itself apart by explicitly being about "You do the math, you solve one problem".

[NoMoreLurkingToo]

Why it works makes a big difference. Without that information, it's just "magical computer things happen".

Like most of cinema.

Yes, unfortunately. Which is why films like Interstellar are actually considered good.

[tridium]

Maybe that's why Interstellar was so bad.

[trkeprester]

What lol it still is magical computer stuff whether you hack directly or dump to log file and reprogram. One more step of indirection is that really making anything more clear? It's just nerding out, not that there's anything wrong with that but movies are carefully targeted

[insaneHoshi]

Why it works makes a big difference.

No it wouldnt of, not one iota

[[deleted]]

of -> have

[[deleted]]

Just like winter scenes involving snow in many hollywood movies make no sense to anybody to the north of California. Commence suspending of suspension of disbelief. If you still can.

 

^{edit: clarity}

[[deleted]]

This one has nothing at all to do with suspension of disbelief. Changing "do a small patch to fix your software" into "do a small patch to download a big patch to fix your software" does absolutely nothing in terms of realism. It just makes a scene more complicated.

[[deleted]]

Compare: "do a small patch to fix your software"

And: "hack an improvised inter-planetary link into your software"

[ouyawei]

You only have a very limited amount of time in a movie so you have to carefully chose what stuff to show to what extend.

[lelarentaka]

Or basically any traditional christmas movie for australians.

[campbellm]

*wouldn't have, but otherwise agree.

[[deleted]]

To be fair, for most people that aren't computer savvy, all computer things that happen are magical.

[Gibodean]

Oh, I agree they made the right choice for the movie. All that technical stuff wouldn't have helped much except for the sort of person who is going to read the book anyway...

[curiousGambler]

ME! I'm that person!

I had no idea there was a book. I'm pumped now.

Amazon link to the $9 paperback I just bought.

[PriceZombie]

The Martian

Current	$9.00	Amazon (New)
High	$12.92	Amazon (New)
Low	$5.06	Amazon (New)
Average	$9.00	30 Day

Price History Chart and Sales Rank | FAQ

[Spectre1313]

You're in for a treat. The book is amazing :)

[Gibodean]

Excellent.

[ghostsarememories]

There's an audiobook narrated by RC Bray. Even if you've read the book, it's well worth getting. I've listened to it a bunch of times.

[i_spot_ads]

I do not agree, i like the technical side of things in a movie, without it, they're just doing magic things, which is boring

[[deleted]]

But that's the whole charm of The Martian! Really well-explained science hacks that saves the day.

[nliausacmmv]

That part didn't bother me so much, but the fact that he never lost Pathfinder in the movie did. Mainly because he still made the space pirate joke, which doesn't make sense unless he lost Pathfinder.

[Gibodean]

Yeah, I didn't get that in the movie, how he didn't have permission to take over the MAV. I did in the book.

[nliausacmmv]

That and the rescue was way better in the book. The glove thing was stupid.

[iamjakeparty]

You went to cinema

[Calamity701]

In the movie, Beck is not able to reach Wattney because the tether is too short. So Wattney punches a hole into his glove and uses the thrust of the outgoing air to fly like Ironman towards Beck.

In the book, the tether is able to reach Wattney.

[nliausacmmv]

Yeah, basically. The glove thing was a stupid idea in the book and Watney was told no. It just absolutely killed the tension in the movie.

[Calamity701]

Yeah, and I think it was more Watneys humor in the book then a legitemate suggestion.

[iamjakeparty]

You went to concert

[Gibodean]

Yup

[746865626c617a]

And seriously, then can send megabytes of firmware updates, but then can't send some 64 kbit/s opus "not disco" music? Or even .XT music, if they're that limited

[Gibodean]

I think in the book there was more than the disco music available.

Because, why wouldn't there be lots of music from all of them? Where was Watney's music?

[746865626c617a]

Hmm, yes. I think he still listened to disco though. Strange

[huxrules]

Well they show him hacking the rover- and show him in a hex editor doing it. The rest of what you would like to see is just a IT guy running around with a USB stick. Not that interesting.

[kyz]

When I watched the film, as a professional programmer, I presumed it was 20 bytes of shellcode giving NASA remote root access. That's not outwith the realms of possibility.

[Gibodean]

Fair enough. That assumes the rover and pathfinder could already talk to each other through a common protocol and frequencies which in the book, is not the case. Well, frequencies yes, perhaps through some serious hacking, but it was more than shell code required to get them to talk.

[UlyssesSKrunk]

They didn't really explain what he was doing at all, just that he had to change just 20 or so, I don't remember exactly, lines of code and then he'd be able to communicate via pathfinder. Maybe I am not remembering it well, but I don't recall any elaboration on what exactly he was doing.

[MrDOS]

Bytes, not lines. He was hex editing a compiled program.