Depositing My Data
By Dale Dougherty
Roger Ebert has written about cinematic formulas repeatedly used by lazy filmmakers. For example, he has observed that in many martial-arts movies, when a gang of attackers confronts the hero, they'll inevitably line up to attack the hero one at a time. I've noticed some formulas that explain how large computers work on the big screen.
A recent movie called Entrapment featured Sean Connery as a burglar who, with a lovely young accomplice, attempts to break in to a bank; what they're after is the bank's enormous central computer on the upper story of a high rise. Insert the first formula for movie-land computing: The machine runs all by itself. This bank's data center is an unmanned mainframe of shiny metal without wires, displays, or lights. There's not a system administrator in sight, so the robbers have an easier time breaking in. They only need to get past the ground-floor security station, take an elevator to the data center, and then fake out a retina scanner to gain admittance to this room. I understand not being able to find a system administrator when you need one. What I don't understand is how any machine room runs without a team of system administrators and operators. If they're not present 24/7, they're tethered to the machines by pagers.
Once in the machine room, the robbers take advantage of another formula: All computers are easily interconnected. All you hear is, "There, I've got it." These robbers set up a laptop, establish a connection immediately, and access everything on the massive mainframe. No cabling problems, no network-addressing issues, no incompatibilities-just pure plug-n-play.
