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Go here and post your eggs. Hopefully others will follow. ~N

A few here and there

1. Eeggs.com is good site for Easter Eggs in general.

2. You'll find a few web sites with Easter Eggs here.

If you are bored, pick up your copy of Kernighan and Ritchie and look up "recursion" in the index. Okay, I know it's lame. But I found it at eeggs.com which is kind of a cool website, if you like that sort of thing.

if Microsoft's programmers spent more of their time on writing clean code and less time on coding Easter Eggs in Office Applications, Internet Explorer and Windows.

if Microsoft's programmers spent more of their time on writing clean code and less time on coding Easter Eggs in Office Applications, Internet Explorer and Windows.

if Microsoft's programmers spent more of their time on writing clean code and less time on coding Easter Eggs in Office Applications, Internet Explorer and Windows.

if Microsoft's programmers spent more of their time on writing clean code and less time on coding Easter Eggs in Office Applications, Internet Explorer and Windows.

if Microsoft's programmers spent more of their time on writing clean code and less time on coding Easter Eggs in Office Applications, Internet Explorer and Windows.

if Microsoft's programmers spent more of their time on writing clean code and less time on coding Easter Eggs in Office Applications, Internet Explorer and Windows.

if Microsoft's programmers spent more of their time on writing clean code and less time on coding Easter Eggs in Office Applications, Internet Explorer and Windows.

if Microsoft's programmers spent more of their time on writing clean code and less time on coding Easter Eggs in Office Applications, Internet Explorer and Windows.

Subject: "Opening the Open Source Debate"

Date: 31 May 2002 15:45:59 +1200

Some references you might wish to consider before publishing your article "Opening the Open Source Debate"

http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_headline.cgi ?bw.053002/221502375

Bruce Schneier, one of the recognized leading expert on computer security on Kerckhoffs' Principle and Secrecy, Security, and Obscurity of software.

http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0205.html#1

Dr. Blaine Burnham, Director, Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and previously with the National Security Agency (NSA), gives an keynote speech overview of current encryption and security technologies and outlines possible strategies for future defense.

http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?st ream_id=411

Also you might wish to address the issue of Microsoft's disproportionately high number of open vulnerabilities in its Internet Explorer components. All of which where discovered without access to the source code.

http://jscript.dk/unpatched/

Richard Purcell, Microsoft's director of corporate privacy, has recently stated that any major improvement in regard to the security of it's products may be at least "5, 10 years, maybe".

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may 2002/tc20020523_6029.htm

As for the issue of Trojan horse injection into open source code, it is far from being an open source only issue.

http://www.eeggs.com/

Or were all the "Easter Eggs" currently found in Microsoft's products officially authorized?

If you are looking for a methodology for providing a suitably secure and hardened solution, start with a real world example.

http://www.openbsd.org/security.html

I welcome any open debate.

If anyone owns the X-Files: Key of X soundtrack, the whole dang conspiracy is explained at the end of the CD's final track (around 10:13 or so). Some of us are already ahead of the game (and time zones I guess). :)

Here's some more info on it.

Flight Sim in Excel 97 and probably later

1. On a blank worksheet press F5.

2. In the "Go To" windows enter "r97c12:r97c24"

3. Press enter.

4. Press the TAB key.

5. Hold down Control + Shift.

6. Click the chart wizard tool-bar icon.

7. Have fun and enjoy.

2) Drop the in-jokes please. Calling everything "GNU-" putting funny little things in the help files etc. etc. etc. we want to convince people that we're making a professional quality product. And nothing spoils that faster than giving the appearance of a hack.

Yeah, I mean, nothing makes things look more professional than putting in a flight simulator for the credits!!!(WARNING -- ANNOYING JAVASCRIPT POPUPS!)

"When homer stpes into the 3rd dimension (It's in a halloween episode, i think) there is a string of hexidecimal numbers that read: 46 72 69 6E 6B 20 72 75 6C 65 73 21 when converted to ASCII, this reads Frink rules!"

"Is this the first recorded easter egg in software? Or were there prior ones?"

Looks like the first recorded easter egg was back in 1973. Are there any eggs that pre-date this?

I use the Excel flight simulator on a daily basis. Do you know of a Linux spreadsheet with that functionality?

This has been answered already, but still.. I suppose you are talking about same system of quality control that would make it nearly impossible for the easter eggs get through, not to mention the (hopefully unintentional) security holes.

Because Easter Eggs Rulez!

Seriously though, there is a beautiful ineffable quality in hiding something just below the surface . There is something fun about hiding thing's in your own creation, that perhaps the occasional observant individual ot jammy git will discover. There is also something fun in discovering them - that feeling of conspiracy between you and the author, that you share a secret that few others know about.

Anyway.... about cool game hacks. I have seen (or not seen, as the case may be) in Quake II, an "invisible" player:

"WTF? Why is the wall shooting me?"

Also, I see this guy who was running around at about 200mph.... like his game character was caffiened up to the eyeballs.

It's actually quite amusing at first, and a rather cool hack. Yes, it can be annoying. However, the really decent players have a tendency to hunt down and specifically annihilate/embarrass any cheats.

I could have my facts wrong here (help me out...), but I believe this used to be called "smurfing". There is also some unrelated cracking technique called smurfing I think. I remember hearing a story about one of the very first networked academic computers. They had this old vector-based dog-fighting game. One day, a few people were playing. Suddenly, the Enterprise appears from nowhere, and instantly destroys all the players with a photon torpedo. To this day, nobody knows who it was, or how it was achieved.

My guess is that they're either trying to hock more of their $79.95 Comprehensive Thesaurus plug-ins, or they're trying to kill off all possible "I'd like to see Bill Gates naked and petrified" -> "I'll drink to that" thesaurus misfirings.

There are non-computer Easter eggs tabulated here, covering everything from Timex watches to chocolate dispensing machines, from oscilloscopes to Furbys. The site's a pain to navigate, but there's good stuff to be had.

Intersting picture of the journalist.
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11 d2-A769-00AA001ACF42


Ok ok, I do know what it really is.
--------

The 3D maze was in Excel 95. The flight sim is in Excel 97.

They can be found in the archived /. at http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/01/1424204.shtm l

and in the Easter Egg Archive.

Heheh. Everyone time Easter Eggs comes up, I remember the ones back in Need For Speed (PSX).

Mine was this one: Players can only enter names with that a maximum 8 chars. I was a little annoyed that my name wouldn't fit, so I had the name entry screen automatically append the "I" when you entered in my last name.

And I remember the day Dave (fiziks guy) put in the machine gun cheat. Lost productivity that day :)

Now only if we could find that nude cheat in Dungeon Keeper. :) (Hey, Peter Molyneux said no one found it, at last years GDC talk or at Blue's new's link)

Check out the rest of the website, too. Neat stuff.

Check out the rest of the website, too. Neat stuff.

There's also a lot of other hardware listed here. Look under "hardware" and "other".

A short list:

• Elevators (get to your floor in express mode!)
• Libertel MN-2 phone (tetris)
• HP ScanJets (music, among other things)
• HP Oscilloscope (credits & games)
• Canon Printers (music)
• LG televisions (tetris)

There's also a lot of other hardware listed here. Look under "hardware" and "other".

A short list:

• Elevators (get to your floor in express mode!)
• Libertel MN-2 phone (tetris)
• HP ScanJets (music, among other things)
• HP Oscilloscope (credits & games)
• Canon Printers (music)
• LG televisions (tetris)

There's also a lot of other hardware listed here. Look under "hardware" and "other".

A short list:

• Elevators (get to your floor in express mode!)
• Libertel MN-2 phone (tetris)
• HP ScanJets (music, among other things)
• HP Oscilloscope (credits & games)
• Canon Printers (music)
• LG televisions (tetris)

Its not much, and its computer hardware only, but here's a few hardware easter eggs.

It seems from reading the news articles that the writers don't agree on what's worrying about this. Is it worrying because...

1. ...the crackers could have modified Microsoft source code? No. Look, does anyone believe MS don't use version control and offsite backups?
2. ...the code could be used in other people's products without permission? Perhaps, but not much-- that's what Easter eggs are there to get in the way of.
3. ...everyone will read the code and discover defects? That's a good thing-- after an initial phase of instability, Microsoft will have to bring out patches. It's the opensource idea of the collective benefit of having millions of eyeballs read your source (what ESR calls "Linus's law".
4. ...people might discover that the source is flaky in places, badly designed and so on? That might be more of an embarrassment to MS, but there's little opensource software which doesn't have flaky parts, is there? And better that people know about it than not.

"The term 'Easter Egg', as we use it here, means any amusing tidbit that creators hid in their
creations. They could be in computer software, movies, music, art, books, or even your watch."

As copied and pasted from http://www.eeggs.com/ and if you can't trust them to define an easter egg who can you trust?

Devil Ducky

This one is my absolute favourite. Platform independant and cute ;-)

Yah.... goto www.eeggs.com there are a ton of them

BTW, if you want to know the names of the people to blame for the office assistant, follow the instructions for this Easter Egg. It worked on the office computers here.

If you want to know about Easter Eggs in games, apps, OS', movies, etc... go to E-eggs. They have some pretty interesting ones there.

There's a collection of easter eggs at the Easter Egg Archive. It lists a couple for Linux and one for gcc.

------

This site (www.eegss.com) has a big list of them! My favourite one was the doom-style thing in one of the M$ Office applications - It had a shrine to Bill Gates in it!

For further fun with easter eggs, I recommend The Easter Eggs Archive.

Anyway, more of this stupidity can be found at The Easter Egg Archive.

Regards, Ralph.

There are loads of these at http://www.eeggs.com/. I particularly like "I'd like to kill Bill Gates" in Word 97 American English thesaurus giving you "I'll drink to that" as a suggestion (although that is one of the few _un_intententional ones).

I was wondering when folks would get around to this...folks, oddball responses you get from the Word spelling checker and thesaurus are NOT EASTER EGGS! For more information please see an explanatory page on www.eeggs.com for an explanation for this odd, but understandable, behavior.

www.eeggs.com has a list of easter eggs in various programs.