film techniques - Why all the fancy technology in most movies?

In most of
the movies and TV-series I have watched, whenever there is some kind of "technology"
involved (say, like a tracking device or hacking something important), there is a lot of
unnecessary, impractical key-pressing and fancy colors and sounds (a lot of 1's and 0's
going on the screen and a lot of "beep"s).

For example,
take the TV-series href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808096/">Primeval. Their device for
tracking anomalies have a lot of the things said above.

Why
do movies and TV-series employ this kind of false-looking tech? It would have been much
easier to use a real OS (like MacOS for normal things and Linux for hacking-kind-of
things), maybe with a custom-made software suited to the task. It would have been more
realistic.

So is there any specific reason for
this?

Answer

Well, I think there is perfect reason for it: audience
appeal. Of course those things are totally unrealistic and over the top, but show a
simple black-and-white console to the audience or a basic database application and they
will just find it boring to look at or think there is not much to
it.

Of course it bothers the hell out of those who know
better, but the average guy that uses his computer for YouTube, Facebook and maybe
Office is just more pleased with colorful displays and stunning graphics in a simple
database query and is more likely to accept that there is something interesting going
on. It's about conveying the information inherent in those abstract and hard to grasp
processes in an interesting and entertaining way, thus sacrificing some realism for the
sake of story-telling.

(And of course all hackers fluently
communicate in 0s and 1s, which makes them so awesome. ;-))