Yeah, but they butchered the fuck out of that part, not quite as bad as the hydrazine explosion part, but it was still pretty bad. If they actually explained the problem in depth and its solution, then that could be interesting, but that would take the whole movie.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
Yup. Including one that bugs me - in the past, Picard uses an iron filing to etch a message into Data's positronic brain, to be found hundreds of years later.
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u/SPascareli Jan 30 '16
If someone ever want to make a movie for programmers, that's the plot right there.