He is the only one on the island but there are more developers. Hammond even says to “call his team In Cambridge”.
If I was the only onsite Devops and my professional support lived in Cambridge with an 8 hour time difference, I’d have a hard time not selling corporate secrets to the highest bidder.
He also had Samuel L Jackson.
Yeah, he was always ready to lend a hand.
Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.
Stares motherfuckerly at you…
🥇 You just won my comment-of-the-day awards 👍
I’m pretty sure Nedry was the engineer. Arnold was systems administrator / operator. Neither were computer scientists.
Nedry was literally a computer scientist and systems designer / programmer from Cambridge. Arnold was a theme park engineer (designing rides and control systems; some programming involved but a whole different paradigm than developing large systems).
Source: Have read the novel 50+ times.
👍
I understand your opinion of sysadmins but they still fit the definition of an IT guy
They are UNIX systems, they don’t need an entire team to be managed once installed and running.
I’m only half joking. It’s not UNIX but I’ve been working with “legacy” systems like IBM i mainframes, and those things don’t need much to run. Sure, you have to update the system and the software once every few months, manage backups, role switches, etc., but it can mostly be done by a few people. But yeah, systems like this were (are) insanely expensive so most of his budget probably went there.
When I was young I thought “who needs 3 computers at once ?”
Now I get it.
Hihi, little you entering a atom power plant control center would have been funny 😁
In my country, even trash burning systems have control centres where 5 people work on about 50 screens 😄
(It is a garbage burning facility which takes out all the things still usable (like metals) after the burning process, and it gives heat energy to the houses around, and it captures the produced CO2 prior it enters the atmosphere, but probably creating “green fuel" out of it 😌. non the less, I am quite proud about this facility, even if recycling plastics would be even better, but being realistically, there are only two plastics which are good recycleable (PET and PE-HD) and those get collected selectively in my country anyway.
Hope someone thinks this is interesting
Hahah, silly ADHS me
Linux users. So we can troubleshoot how we borked one machine on one of the other two that we haven’t yet borked.
One to break, one to fix, one to use.
Not only that, but a poorly paid and mistreated guy who volunteers to sell out major secrets.
Samuel L was also an IT guy, right? But yes, an expense was spared
Nedry was the systems engineer, Arnold was the operations admin. One was a construction worker, the other was the architect.
Holy shit, this thread made me realize Hammond invited the scientists and grandkids to the island with a hurricane inbound. Not like those things just pop up like tornadoes. You know it’s coming as much as a week in advance.
Yep, but he needed to push through legal and investor complaints, so rush rush rush, damn the risk. They’re “captains of industry”, they couldn’t possibly fail!
Newman had multiple monitors before it was cool.
Was it multiple monitors or multiple systems? Can’t see if there’s another keyboard and mouse there in front of the one behind him. Though I suppose it was all supposed to be mainframe terminals (running Linux in the movie, which I’m not sure had a mainframe version, as I understand, it started as a Unix for desktops, where Unix was the mainframe OS).
Pretty farken standard. IT isn’t considered important unless they want their personal laptop de-porned
Newman.
I dont remember the movie well but I thought everyone left the island and this was the minimum team left behind.
I was just thinking about this yesterday - and how it seems like one of the very few flaws with the film was how unclear they made this. Nearly everyone misunderstands this. It would have really helped if there’d been a couple more lines on it, or shots of staff clearing out, etc. Instead it seemed like there were about 10 people at the whole park.
Yes, they were on a reduced crew because of a storm.
Yes, Nedry owned his IT company, but Hammond was withholding Nedry’s final paycheck until debugging was done. Which had already gone over budget due to feature creep, so Nedry was doing it himself because he didn’t have money to pay his people because Hammond wouldn’t give him the money they agreed on. Hence why Nedry was looking to make some side money, he’s literally doing all that debugging and final system fixes for free on the promise that he won’t be screwed again by Hammond. IIRC anyway, its been like 30 years since I read the book… And a lot of my perspective changed as I got older and I got more experience in the industry.
I have been in his position, and while I didn’t betray the client and get killed, I really understand his mindset and “Fuck-it” attitude. Hammond is wealthy and using his position and power to spare as much expense as possible and step on as many contractors as possible. Kind of like an Orange Cheeto I know of. I had a company I work for that had to file bankruptcy because a half-billion dollar a year company hired us then charged back their initial payment and refused to issue final payment unless we did a ton of extra work, and when we did that, they just said “thanks” and vanished. Apparently American Express lets you contest a payment 6-12 months after it was issued and their stance is if you want your money you should sue.
“I didn’t betray the client and get killed”
Betrayed the client and lived? /s
Yes, actually, I betrayed the client by preparing lots of paperwork and examples of the system working so when they went to court they would actually have to defend their position.
It didn’t help me not get laid off though because losing 4 months of payroll in a chargeback is pretty brutal for a company’s books.
And that company never came back from it. A subdivision of the company, survived, but the company lost its building, and most of its employees during the bankruptcy and restructuring. And it happened right before Christmas, so the entire company got laid off for the holidays, it was a lot of fun /s. Fuck predatory self-help companies…
Wow that missing back story really explains quite a bit. It wasn’t just greed it was revenge and getting what’s owed.
Sounds about right.
This joke comes from people ignoring the following:
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The presence of Ray Arnold the Chief Engineer who also worked with computers (not to the same level as Nedry)
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Jurassic Park was operating with a skeleton crew at the time and Hammond thought the automated systems would work because he was assured as much from his Chief IT guy.
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Nedry has a whole team working on the park’s IT system. And I’m not just referencing book material. Hammond even said in the BLOODY movie “call Nedry’s team on the main land” when shit started going down.
So no. Hammond was not stupid enough to trust the entire park’s computer infrastructure on just one guy.
Also, it’s not like the problems were only caused by Nedry or his team being understaffed or incompetent. Quite the opposite. He was a bad actor. And a bad actor in the right position can cause a lot of damage. He purposefully sabotaged the park in a way that couldn’t have been easily averted.
It was a low bid contract and Nedry was complaining about how he underbid and wanted more money. So Hammond was delusional when he said they spared no expense, he cheaped out on labour.
Wayne Knight is a fine actor, what are you talking about.
The presence of Ray Arnold the Chief Engineer
Two IT guys
Jurassic Park was operating with a skeleton crew at the time
The opening scene - a working class schlub dragged into the Velociraptor cage because the transport protocols weren’t up to the task of containing a dinosaur - illustrates the core conceit of the movie. That humans and their modern technology simply aren’t ready to contend with a far more primal and powerful animal kingdom.
The hurricane flushing everyone off the island illustrated a major vulnerability. But the premise of the movie is that this park was never going to work precisely because the people running it were consumed by their own hubris and incapable of seeing the full extend of risk at play.
Nedry has a whole team working on the park’s IT system.
A team he’s undercut and sabotaged in order to afford him the opportunity to steal Hammond’s embryos. The subsequent movies are all around various mega-corps trying to seize control of the island and its bounty of dinosaur specimens and failing time and time again. The issue isn’t merely that they’re cheap, its that they’re all greedy, myopic, and self-destructive.
Hammond was not stupid enough to trust the entire park’s computer infrastructure on just one guy.
He was stupid enough to get locked out of his own systems by trusting a skeleton crew to manage the park during a hurricane. But that’s just the kick-off of the story. Crichton could have written it differently - an engineering problem that the hurricane exposed, dinosaurs that outsmarted the security, the EPA coming in to shut the park down Ghostbusters style, animal liberation activists trying to free the dinosaurs - and ended in the same place.
In many ways, Jurassic Park is a retelling of King Kong. Just swap out the big monkey for a big lizard. But the core of the story - the belief that humans can turn these primal forces into an entertainment commodity revealing man’s hubris - is tied up in Hammond’s belief in his ability to control the uncontrollable.
Nedry is just an example of one more thing Hammond can’t control.
I wasn’t ready for this level of quantum level analysis of Jurassic Park.
I’M JUST HERE FOR THE DINOSAURS!!
But the Dinosaurs think you’re here for them.
They’re hungry and have ketchup ready.
Bravo!
Nedry bid for the job. He was literally the cheapest.
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My friend is sole IT guy for two production lines, managing security, multiple production buildings, redundancy, sensor lifetimes, emergency concepts etc, he has one colleague managing the human IT part
Like he manages all the machines and the other one all MS-Shit
It is always very interesting listening to his stories about managing multiple production lines where it costs so much if the machine is not running for some time
It is about producing chocolate, lol
I love the redundancy on tech level, but not on the human level. I can only imagine the manager’s dashboard with risks and mitigating actions.
I contract at a place that has lost well over a million in the last 11 months in downtime that’s specifically for low voltage/comms failures. They have been looking for an electrician for 11 months and 49-65k USD is the salary range.
They could have paid triple that and saved money AND got the deliverables for the year. They won’t now.
“Guys, you don’t understand, my MBA specifically said this would work!”
Often followed by “Hmm, can we pay someone to help us solve this personnel puzzle? Let’s find a consultant. I’m no rube though, I’m a shrewd business cretin - if we don’t find a consultant with an MBA fancier than mine, we’ll just be wasting our money.”
Haha, yes
They are so fucked, if some mad lad is road raging and prevents my friend reaching his workplace
Prime raise negotiation environment
You’d think so, but it really is just like Jurassic Park.
one it guy who you could distract with a shiny can of shaving cream
Don’t even, all of us thought that can was cool
As a young child who didn’t yet know what Barbasol was, I was still a little disappointed to find out that the can was not, in fact, filled with delicious whipped cream
