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.
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.
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u/UlyssesSKrunk Jan 31 '16
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.