MovieChat Forums > Jurassic Park (1993) Discussion > Ray Arnold is supposed to be a computer ...

Ray Arnold is supposed to be a computer programmer, right?


So, there a reason why Ray Arnold a computer code programmer or whatever couldnt figure out the computer and security problems caused by Nedry?

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It's explained in the book better. Nedry and his programmers designed and programmed the Park's entire computer and security system. Ray Arnold was not part of Nedry's team. There's also the fact that Nedry put in a kind of bug into the system that screwed it up. That's why Arnold could not fix it and why they had to turn off the power and thereby reboot the system Nedry intentionally screwed up.

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"There's also the fact that Nedry put in a kind of bug into the system that screwed it up."

Nedry never screwed anything up, he deliberately wrote code to temporarily suspend the security systems long enough for him to both enter the genetic material lab and get the samples to put into the Barbasol can and to escape to the dock. Basically, Nedry compromised the systems to throw everything in the park into chaos while he could get away, but left the most dangerous dinosaurs safely secured at all costs.

"That's why Arnold could not fix it and why they had to turn off the power and thereby reboot the system Nedry intentionally screwed up."

That was a fatal mistake. By shutting off the power, ALL of the fences INCLUDING the Velociraptors' were turned off, allowing them to escape. That's why, later on, when the gamekeeper sees this, he comments in a scared voice that even Nedry "knew not to mess with the Raptor fences."

It's possible that if Nedry had escaped the island with the genetic samples, he would've communicated the password to bypass his hack to Arnold via radio and return the park to normal, but it was not to be. Hence, the chaos we see in the movie.

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Sorry. I hadn't listened to my audiobook of it in a while. The movie doesn't exactly show what you just said. It shows him hit a button on the computer that says execute so you don't know what exactly he is doing.

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Ah, I remember more now. He was also synchronising the stopwatch on his watch at the same time he clicked on the Execute button, the computer of which also had a stopwatch app which started when he clicked Execute, so he could disable the locks and cameras on the genetics lab just long enough to get in and get out, at just the right time.

I can only guess he'd been planning the heist for weeks, writing the code, etc.

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"Nedry compromised the systems to throw everything in the park into chaos while he could get away, but left the most dangerous dinosaurs safely secured at all costs."

That's not true, he disabled The T-Rex fence, which is where the action begins.

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Thanks for the correction, it's been a long time since I've seen the movie.

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Because Arnold was stupid. He failed to realise that the best programmers in the world are HACKERS, and Nedry was a hacker, hence Arnold's angry response to Nedry's little "you didn't say the magic word" animation when Arnold failed to get the password, as in "PLEEAASSEE, GODDAMNIT, I HATE THIS HACKER CRAP!"

A real-life example would be id Software's John Carmack, who himself is a real hacker and programmer, and who along with John Romero gave us the best ever videogames of the 1990s on PC in that time, due to their unparallelled hacker skills with how to make the most of the limited PC hardware of that time.

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No different than anything else: Nedry was better.

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He stated he could fix it if he found the proper line of code. He just had to find it. One line out of "about two million".

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It would have taken a single programmer 200 years to write that code if the "On average programmers write 30 lines of code per day" saying is true.

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That seems very low. I could see a programmer doing 30 lines per hour easily. Plus most professionals create blocks of code (anywhere from 10 to several hundred lines) for repetitive tasks or diagnostics that can enter as needed. So it’s not unheard of.

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That means debugged and tested code. Of course to produce that could require writing more lines total while debugging and testing. Anyway, it's just a saying I have heard a couple of times and may even originate from the 80s and not relevant anymore.

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