Slashdot Mirror
Easter Eggs in Open Source?
David Symonds asks: "We've all known our fair share of easter eggs, in the form of hidden screens or messages that are activated by a certain keystroke sequence, or clicking on a certain pixel, and so on. Easter Eggs have been around for ages, from the old "xyzzy" command for "Colossal Cave" (a text-based adventure), to that move in International Karate (for the C64) which would cause your opponents pants to drop, to the various "about:..." entries in Netscape. My question is, are Easter Eggs a dying breed, and has anyone found any good ones in open source software?" I've always thought that the best Easter Eggs in Free Software was found in the comments of the source-code. What was your favorite easter-egg? I remember the secret room from the Atari 2600 Adventure game, mainly because I had found that one all on my own.
its fixed now. i think it was due to clusters of proxy servers.
I mailed CowboyNeal, to no avail, but then checked the slash page on sourceforge, where there was a bug report.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Uh... i'd try that, but i'm not insane
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
BTW, any one know what happened to the C64 great programmers? Jeff Minter, Andrew Braybrook, Shaun Southern, Archer Maclean?
Well, I know Jeff Minter's webpage is at http://myweb.magicnet.net/~yak/
--
Email address is real.
It was "To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero".
:wq
And you can even moderate them.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Before I started the mainframe guys here came up with one. IBM had changed some device ID field from 1 byte to three bytes. (I'm not sure of all the details)
The emngineers knew the girl who was assigned to test this change, and she is short. So when they sent the patch to use three byte fields to test they put in code, if the device Id was set to all 8s it out output an error: "Field too short, get taller tester." They finially removed it just before release, it was never discovered.
I accidently introduced one. Our product has a hot standby, and early on in the design someone came up with the idea that we should check out the hot standby every day to make sure it is really working. The issue was the cable from the backup controller to the hardware could break without being detected since it wasn't in use, and when the primary broke you had no controller. So I introduced code that would make it switch controllors once a day if configured to. Well marketing changed their minds on the need for this, and I set the default to off. But I forgot to tell those who wrote the configureation - they thought the default was on, and so in certina times it was possibal to activate a confiuration, which when the software doesn't see a value for this field sets it to the default (on) and tells my code to turn it on. QA never caught it, and since I never work with a configuration (that being the only configurable thing in my part of the system) I never caught it.
Many of the engineers I work with agree with you, add known bugs. If QA finds 90% of them you can guess that QA found about 90% of the accidental bugs, if they find 5% then you tell QA to get back to work. The only problem is often fixing an intentional bug introduces a different acidental bug that may not be caught because you are mostly done with QA.
...and don't forget warez.slashdot.org for your cool popular software that should be instantly recognizable. Get yours today before it gets slashdotted.
I'm just waiting for mp3.slashdot.org to get started.
When you boot Redhat 6.2 for Sparc with a serial console, the following message shows up after the serial driver initializes:
"And remember that cereal is a part of a good breakfast."
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
if you're running enlightenment, try typing :)
'eesh -e "fx raindrops on"' in a terminal window.
use 'eesh -e "fx raindrops off"' to turn it off
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
To quote from sudoers(5):
A feature which can be turned on and off in the config file isn't really an easter egg in my book.
As far as the "printer is on fire" message, there might be an argument for this one. I'm not clear on the specifics of this, but, basically, some printers are only capable of delivering one error message for any condition. If the kernel is talking to one of these, it has no idea if it is out of paper, jammed, whatever, so:
else if (!(status & LP_PERRORP)) {
if (last != LP_PERRORP) {
last = LP_PERRORP;
printk(KERN_INFO "lp%d on fire\n", minor);
}
}
(drivers/char/lp.c, circa line 450, in 2.2.14)
Fun, though.
There's an easter egg in Window Maker (a fairly obvious one). Go read the source and find it. It's not as easy as you think.
To continue the thread of embedded games and easter-eggs in console games:
In the "Making of Lunar: Silver Star Complete" CD (in the full Playstation limited edition version) there is an easter-egg that--with a combination of button presses--starts up a multiplayer game of Pong.
In "Tales of Destiny" (a Namco RPG for Playstation) there is a section in one of the towns that has the complete arcade version of "Tower of Druuaga". (Then again, Namco is downright infamous for in-references, and especially in "Tales of Destiny"--there are many super-deformed versions of characters from various Namco games in the background (chibi Jack2 (Tekken 3), chibi Heihachi (the Tekken series), a few other assorted characters from the Tekken series and Soul Edge) as well as some decidedly more obscure (to non-Japanese) sources--like the kitty from Namjatown (an amusement park Namco runs in Japan). For that matter, in Tekken 3 itself there is an in-reference to their amusement park chain--Xiao Yu's stage is in the middle of the Wonder Eggs amusement park (yes, Namco runs an entire CHAIN of amusement parks in Japan, rather like Paramount owns Kings Island and Carowinds and whatnot here in the States). :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Not really an easter egg, because it was advertised on the box, but getting into it was just like any "real" easter egg... The Sega Genesis version of Pitfall Mayan Adventure contained an entire, fully playable, copy of the original Activision Pitfall game for the Atari 2600. To get into it, you had to play to a certain point in the game then do something particular. I forget the exact incantation, but it was really cool to see an old game entirely embedded inside a modern game.
--Jim
The delight to easter eggs is derived from the same delight behind the real thing: the surprise of discovery. It's hard to hide a delightful surprise in open-source code without severely obfuscating the code.
The other danger, of course, in a less-controlled open-source project is that the program will become more easter eggs than actual functionality. I don't see this happening with, say, Perl, which has a strong central clearinghouse for source code, but it could well happen with other projects that are controlled by a fairly large group. I know I'd hate to see an otherwise useful project for Linux or *BSD get bogged down due to source bloat and programmer distraction.
Easter eggs have also changed through the years. They used to be fairly easy to get to, and they used to do fairly simple things. Excel's easter eggs, for example (last I checked, anyway) were getting completely out of hand, and it's (a) hard not to resent the code bloat in Excel as it is, and (b) it's so obscure to get to that I don't think anyone would have figured it out if it hadn't leaked out of Redmond.
Now, perhaps in a strong-clearinghouse type of project, the clearinghouse might opt to maintain one bit of code that isn't immediately open source---at least, not until the next significant release (as deemed by the clearinghouse). That code would control both how the easter egg is accessed and what it is, and as soon as it's changed, the old version is released.
It's sort of an odd way to look at open source, I realize, but it would provide an environment that provides for the delight of easter eggs, and also not let them get too much out of control.
Just a thought.
It was John Romero's head on a stake. Perhaps an omen of things to come?
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
I always loved the secret worlds in Metroid. The basic idea was, you shoot open a door, stand in it and let it close on you. Then you press down (to go into a ball) and up as fast as you can to kind of slid your way up into the wall. Then you hit the jump button to bring the screen point of view up with you. Do this enough and you will have horrible cramps in your hand, and you might make it into a bizzar secret world. This world may or may not have gravity, bad guys, power ups, doors that lead to nowhere, etc.
It was a fun way to waste time with a old favorite Nintendo game.
Finkployd
I'm just glad that I'm a porn connoisseur, or else I wouldn't have know what a "fluffer" is and gotten myself in trouble.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Not that many people read code so the comments are effectively hidden. Not that many people sit around trying strange key combinations or decompiling executables so the closed source easter eggs are hidden. When I think of "Easter Egg", I just think of a pleasant surprise that is not immediately obvious. Perhaps the type of easter egg that would be found in open source is fundamentally different. After all, the source code sort of IS the point n'est pas?
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
I got a win 95 machine at work from someone. One day I was messing around typeing random things in, and I happened to type 'loadlin'. It started up this weird easter egg called linux.
_______
2B1ASK1
There was one easter egg in version 1.0.x of The GIMP, introduced in 1998 by Adam D. Moss. It was rather hard to find because you had to use the DB Browser and see that one plug-in registered itself as "plug-in-the-egg" but did not appear in any of the menus. If you tried to invoke this procedure, it would display some pretty animations on your screen.
But a few weeks after this was added, it was taken out of hiding in the developer's version of the GIMP (versions 1.1.x), where it registers itself as Filters->Toys->The Egg. As Adam wrote when the hidden plug-in was revealed, I guess we need a new easter egg for version 1.2...
-Raphaël
> Extra credit: Can anyone name the historical significance of this particular tune?
Not like I knew, but google is always on standby with 4000 Linux machines to help. I found this right away.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Better yet, here it is in an audio link.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Kewl! I've got a 2600 and a copy of combat at home (picked it up at a car boot sale in London a coupla years back for 30 quid!). I'll give that one a try!
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
We made up all sorts of fun variations on the game. Kamikazee mode where the first one through each door won, no matter what it took to get through first. Defender mode where you won by saving your brother from getting shots, a la the secret service where you take the bullets. I think we had a couple others that were fun too.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
(nb: I'm kidding)
A virus, for the Amiga, which would step the heads (3 1/2") to play a song, and in the process throw them irrevocably out of alignment.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
on the Mac.
Make 5 boxes, select one, "command+shift+option+k" repeat with the other boxes.
Does this work with other OSes anyone?
Dirt doesn't need luck.
There are several EEs in BeOS (check the BeOS Bible for an incomplete list). The one I'm fond of is that just about any exotic keystroke-mouseclick combination on the browser's "About" box brings up a pop-up window with the message "Stop looking for an easter egg. There isn't one."
GNOME is full of easter eggs
well 3
1: April 1st, Wanda the fish will die
2: Triple click the right mouse button on the panel tab in the control centre, and a new tab will appear with a GEGL waving.
3: Type GNOME on the About GNOME program and the logo changes to the sqeaky gnome toy, and it sqeaks when you click it.
Thats all.
Here's a place you can start.
I don't know how up to date it is. You can set them up yourself. It's not hard.
--
+&x
Nope, I'm certain it was piss. I was quite surprised when I stumbled on it. We had been typing in various obscenties etc... of course, and when we got to piss, it asked for a direction. So, we went about pising on things until we got to a guard.
It's another cheat, but what the heck...
Also Ultima 2, I think. We discovered that you could do other command, and type is piss or urin (only took 4 letters) on a guard, and it would charge you 100 gold, and the guard would disappear. The guards were normally invincible.
Well, you take your average egg, boil it for (I believe) on the order of 15 minutes, pull it out, cool it, dry it, and color it, usually using dyes or paints or some such. And, provided it's fairly close to the Easter holiday, Voila! You have an Easter Egg. :)
I think they're defining an easter egg as being a snippet of code that requires the user to use the program in an unusual way in order for it to be seen. So, if they have to enter a bizarre sequence of keystrokes at a place where keystrokes aren't normally called for, I'd call it an egg.
Actually, the reason why the guy was fired was because he wrote a time-triggered event where at one time, there would be HUNDREDS of guys kissing.
:)
This "Egg" even made national news, and Maxis offered to take the games back for replacement. Why they didn't just put "rated T for Teen" labels on the package instead is left to the ages.
For more information, click here.
I'm not at all convinced. Some of the things out of the IOCCC are amazingly small, so they don't cause code-bloat, and amazingly dense, so that you could never work out what they do by reading the source. Perfect for open-source easter eggs. My favourite is this.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
After trying to emulate the linux shutdown message for a text adventure I was writing I was poking through the source code for init and friends and discovered that if your username is 'tyler' and the system is being rebooted you get an additional "Going down Mr Tyler?" as well as the normal 'System is going down for a reboot now' message. :)
My favorite Egg was the +30 lives for Konami's Contra on the NES. It was something like, up-up-down-down-left-right-A-B-start. Although not open source, it helped to pass an otherwise impossible game.
Of course that's a cheat, not an easter egg.
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.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
great site!
I particulary like <a href="http://www.eeggs.com/items/906.html">this one</a>
---
Of course, you haven't denied cheating either...
Right at the end of the project a coworker put in an easter egg where if you clicked on his name in the about box, you'd see a full-screen photo of him holding his newborn child. This was in the first 2Market CD in November of '94
He showed me this and I asked to add myself. When you clicked on my name, you'd get a recording of me saying "Hi Mom", then giving instructions to search for something in the product search.
We'd already screwed with the search keywords so that searching for certain terms resulted in product matches that were somehow funny. I think if you searched for "Mike" you got a spy camera. I think nearly everyone on the project has a product associated with their name that they got to choose themselves.
The easter egg wasn't discovered until after a quarter million CD's were pressed. Even if they could afford to re-press them, there wasn't time.
The result of this was that I was assigned the special job of ensuring that this never happened again at Medior.
Medior was later acquired by America Online and renamed AOL Productions. I think it's since been shut down.
The fellow who assigned me the special task of ensuring no more easter eggs were programmed into our products was Barry Shuler, who is now some bigwig at AOL and is pictured here in a CNet article.
2Market happened just as the web was just beginning, before there was a significant amount of e-commerce. I think we did a really good job, and I was impressed with how well everyone pulled together to ship the product. I think the user experience of shopping from the CD was much better than shopping via a 28 or even a 56 kbaud modem, which is still what most people have.
But it didn't last long, I think competition from the Internet put it out of business. I think some kind of CD/Internet hybrid, where bulk content like sound files and multimedia movies of product demos on a CD, interacting with a web site to get live content and updated prices would be pretty cool.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Yes, it was a line from Willy Wonka, but my signature contributes it to it's original author. That's where Willy got it from.
Brad Johnson
--We are the Music Makers, and we
are the Dreamers of Dreams
Brad Johnson
Do the following in MS Excel '97:
1) in Excel open a blank work sheet
2) press F5 and type X97:L97 in the REFERENCE box, then click OK
3) now hit your tab key once (you should end up in cell M97 )
4) press CTRL and SHIFT while clicking once on the CHART WIZARD icon (the one at the top with the blue-yellow-red bar chart)
(Accelerate with the left mouse button, and decelerate with the right mouse button. Hit Esc to exit. Don't miss the part about the nachos.)
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
Good! Then I'm not the only one who does this!
I have to write up "ops procs" (Operations Procedures) for anything I assign to our Ops staff, and usually they skip the "definition of terms" and go right to the "type this, type that".
I've started putting restaraunt reviews in the definitions, just to see who's paying attention.
Meow
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
Just for the record, I know what it's referring to. I'm just questioning how an Easter Egg is defined.
it has to be the first one I found without being told it was there.. in doom2, on the final level, the hidden area with an impaled developer that you can only get to by using the noclip cheat and walking into the the middle of the boss monster :)
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
I've only seen it once or twice, and it was YEARS ago, when Linux was less stable. (Even then, you had to be doing something dangerous to see this...)
The Linux kernel would say "Aiieeeee!" and complain about not being able to access code-pages or something like that...
You could just tell that the coder figured, "If it ever gets this bad, the kernel is fscked... might as well be up-front about it..."
Just one more reason why I love Linux...
--jd
>> Q: What do computers have in common with air conditioners?
>> A: They both stop working when you open windows
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
You found the secret room in Atari's Adventure all by yourself? Without any help or hint that there was an Easter Egg there?
To do this you had to:
1) Haul the bridge around inside the Black Castle.
2) Set it down and walk through a wall.
3) Pick it up and try a different wall.
4) Repeat, repeat, repeat.
5) Do this everywhere else too in the game because you wouldn't "know" there was a secret in the Black Castle.
6) Do it all again because that magic "key" is only 1 pixel wide
7) Eventually have the idea to walk through the end wall in the main corridor to end up in the magic room.
With all due respect Cliff, I doubt it.
--
dman123 forever!
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
There are enough bizarre, hidden things in that game to make almost any other adventure game look incredibly shallow in comparison.
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It wasn't Tetris® because I haven't seen it on Tetris.com, the place for all licensed Tetris products (anything else using the trademark is illegal. However, it may have been a drop-in replacement like Tetanus, Quadra, Bedter, or the one that comes with some distributions of GNU Emacs (Alt+x tetris RET).
Will I retire or break 10K?
You had to find three grey dots hidden in the walls of certian rooms. If you gathered all three together, you could walk through a special wall that lead to a room with the easter egg. If you didn't have the three dots, you'd just see another (empty) room.
I think the easter egg had the names of the programmers, but don't quote me on that.
Shortly after finding this, I proceeded to tourture the machine with a screwdriver...and "programmed" a few new games.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
VAX/VMS V5.5, on my MicroVAX 3100...
:== $SYS$SYSTEM:TECO32 MAKE
$ MAKE
$ MAKE LOVE
Not War?
*
LONG LIVE TECO! ^_^
what is the best easter egg of all time? None other than the dopefish!! It has become bigger and bigger ever since its first appearance in Commander Keen. It was last seen in the Well of Wishes in quake 2...or so i think.
I had a Mac 2Ci that when booted up on a specific date would show a photograph of the development Team. I'd sure like to see a photo of the guy who wrote that @#$* paperclip in office.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exception of handg
i think the easter egg in fallout 2 takes the cake. it was an actual in-game item called an easter egg, and looked like (you guessed it) an easter egg. it was hidden behind a shelf in the basement of some store and the entrance to the basement itself was hidden as well. to pick it up you had to click on one specific pixel.
in the item description, it said something to the effect of "congratulations, you've found an easter egg." the egg did absolutely nothing. i thought it was a great tongue in cheek addition to what was an amazing (and hilarious) RPG.
Power Corrupts
My favorite easter egg was in the home version of Mortal Kombat 2. If you played 200 games in a row in two player, you and a friend would get to play a round of Pong.
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Hold down control, alt, and shift on the left side of the keyboard and press the be menu button. The menu should have an extra submenu that's called "Window Decor". Pressing one of "BeOS", "Windows 98", "MacOS", or "Amiga" will allow you to change your window borders.
There's also some funny stuff in the Be header files, such as the functions is_computer_on() and is_computer_on_fire(), as well as the list of platforms, including the Z80 and the Timex Sinclair.
If anybody has a copy of Rhapsody for Intel to give away, drop me an email.
When you find something in a closed source product (say Excel 97) its a neat thing. However, you have no control over the decisions made at Microsoft, so you accepted it with a smile.
With open source, however, its another story. One of the goals of programming is to develop small, fast, and tight code that leaves as small a footprint as possible. Of course there are numerous examples of bloat ware out there (how many times have you heard "Damn, excel 97 is enormous.. must be because of the flight simulator they included!"), in open source there is no reason why someone should make more bloat than necessary. In other words, with all the talent that is developing open source projects, why should a space-waster make its way in?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I enjoy eggs and I like to see them, with open source projects, you're only going to increase the size of the code (and possibly the complexity too, in hiding it) to add the eggs. If we're trying to prove to the world that open source is a better alternative, then why not try to streamline it as much as possible?
Still, I'm waiting to find that egg in KOffice that lets me play pac-man in my spreadsheet.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
okay, so it's not software or open source. so sue me; it's what I thought of.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
So, you want an open source easter egg?
The GNU C compiler used to have an interesting easter egg: at one point, the ANSI C draft (it wasn't finalized yet) said that the effect of #pragma was undefined. At the time, GCC had no pragmas; RMS didn't like them because you couldn't use a pragma in a macro.
So the easter egg was this: if your code contained a #pragma, gcc would attempt to launch a game of rogue or hack. If it couldn't find either program on your system, it would print a message reading "You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different".
See this link for more details.
Doom 2 had a funny one: at the very end of the game, if you weren't cheating, you had to make it to an elevator in the center of the room and shoot at a hole across the room once the elevator was as high as it would go. If you were cheating, and I couldn't beat the game without doing so, you could get into the little chamber you were shooting at. Inside was (I think) John Carmack's bloody head on a stake.
:)
Actually, it was John Romero's head. You can tell by the hair.
It was funny--the head even had pain animations so it would scream when you damaged it.
Another easter egg in Doom2 was the sound that played when you entered the final room that had the hole where you had to shoot into (and damage the head). The sound was some bizarre language being spoken. If you take the sound sample and reversed it, you'll find it's Romero with lots of heavy reverb saying, "To win the game you must kill me, John Romero."
/// Zoid.
> If you take the sound sample and reversed it, you'll find it's Romero with lots of heavy reverb saying, "To win the game you must kill me, John Romero."
Ah-ha! Now we know that the "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" from the latest Microsoft scandal wasn't really the password to a backdoor, but just part of an unfinished easter egg!
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Heh.
/usr/doc/HOWTO/HOWTO-EasterEgg
/etc/easteregg.conf
/var/log/easteregg/found
*cough*. Obviously, there should just be single, large "easteregg.lib.so" that people could install or not when they set up the system.
Any app that wanted to do an easter egg could just dynamically link to the lib. This would have several advantages:
- reduce code bloat in apps, yet provide a very large library of cool easter eggs.
- Easter eggs could be themeable under Gnome and KDE.
- It would be possible to upgrade easter eggs without modifying applications
- Make it possible to abstract the easter egg functionality - for example, on a machine with X, a fancy graphical easter egg could be displayed, but on a console, a simple message could be printed like "If you had X, you would see the really cool easter egg here... Congratulations".
- Debian users could just "apt_get eastereggs", and RPM people could "rpm -i eastereggs" for maximum convenience.
- A useful set of files to know:
- Each Linux distribution could customize the easter eggs without modifying the source of all the included apps.
- Other advantages are left as an exercise to the reader.
(Just kidding. Sort of.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
"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
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Yes, but it clearly does not work. I had a whole case of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in my refridgerator, and it still reported it "not found".
I demand an update from the Enlightenment team immediately.
The cake is a pie
They used commodity cassettes for some copies due to production underrun early on. Of course, this meant they had extra space on the cassette. What to do? Six and a half minutes of the Frogger game music, and someone saying 'Goodnight'.
What I'd like to know is who the hell was whacko enough to play back the entire Frogger program cassette in a audio tape deck.
.sig: Now legally binding!
It was part of the game, scrawled (ISTR) on the wall in a cave, and essential to the game's completion.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Atleast for a while, Windowmaker would pop up a window with a smily face and play music if you clicked in some special way on the "about" box.
I never would have known this, if I hadn't been digging through the source, looking for something else. Ah...the joys of open source.
I never have gotten it to trigger, though. I think you have to compile with a special option for all the bells and whistles. I kind of like Easter Eggs, though...
--Lenny
Macro: int ED
The experienced user will know what is wrong.
Macro: int EGREGIOUS
You did what?
Macro: int EIEIO
Go home and have a glass of warm, dairy-fresh milk.
Macro: int EGRATUITOUS
This error code has no purpose.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Slashdot has the hidden discussions.
This one was totally cool. It required MS SQL Server 6.5, SMS 2.0 and perfmon. Basically, you installed SQL and then SMS. Then you open perfmon and have it display CPU activity. When you do, you'll see the easter egg (a red line at 100% since one of the SMS components gobbles all your cpu and renders the machine useless.)
They removed this easter egg in SMS 2.0 sp1. Pity, as it was pretty cool, and you triggered it whether you wanted to or not!
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
It's the 5P, not the 4P
It's the one with the green scan button in the front.
And YES, this is the coolest hardware easter egg ever.
Music made by moving the scan head back and forth and the whine of the motor plays the notes.
Amazing!
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
My question is this: Can an easter egg still be exciting if all the mystery is taken out of it. If i can download the source, i can look for the egg that way, and although i may not bother to read it all, i'm sure somebody has read any given portion, and the eggs will all be ferreted out fairly quickly.
The other option would be to hide them by obfuscation, but i think that is a fairly irresponsible thing to do in a case where other people actually have to put up with your source. Now on the other hand, they could still be thrown in there to amuse users. Most of the pieces of software i use, honestly, i don't ever read through the source, i just build it and install it. I guess i'd still get a kick out of those then, but i think i'd go and read the code for the egg anyway.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
How can we possibly compete if open source spreadsheets don't credit their programming team via an obelisk that you have to find via the carefully hidden flight simulator built into the thing? Oh, wait, we might actually just put their names prominently on the project web site, and in the README or NEWS file, or provide a documented way to find information about the project.
</sarcasm>
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
It was a really nicely done one with a photo of the courtyard inside the Infinite Loop engineering complex at Apple, and superimposed on the photo (and apparently in the center of the courtyard) was a reflective flagpole with a flag of an iguana with an electrical power plug on his tail.
The flag waved, responding to the blowing wind, and reflections of the courtyard and the waving flag appeared on the flagpole. You could change the direction of the wind with your mouse and by moving your mouse just right you could cause the wind to blow the flag off the flagpole so it fell to the ground (not visible below the frame).
It was extremely well done and apparently was custom coded just for that purpose. It didn't use any of the 3D api's in the mac, the 3d was handrolled. I don't think it used 3d hardware accelleration in the graphics card, I don't think those models had 3d hardware accelleration.
Also there would be scrolling credits at the bottom of the screen, in a couple of the systems you'd see my name (Michael D. Crawford) listed among them. I was very proud to be there.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Well, OK, maybe that isn't REALLY an easter egg...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
There's a collection of easter eggs at the Easter Egg Archive. It lists a couple for Linux and one for gcc.
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
While Easter Eggs may not be as prevalent recently, I have been happy to find many Easter Eggs placed on DVD's. My personal favorite is the Evil Menu on the Austin Powers 2 DVD. Easter Egg hunters should checkout "http://www.dvdeastereggs.com/easter_eggs.html" for some cool easter eggs.
--C:\DOS C:\DOS\RUN RUN\DOS\RUN
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!
Also, when compiling Eterm, you'll see a message like this:
Not really an easter egg, but definately worth a laugh.
Brad Johnson
--We are the Music Makers, and we
are the Dreamers of Dreams
Brad Johnson
That's one of those great questions like, "Am I pretty much just stealing from my employer when I'm pontificating about these things on the clock?"
Slightly offtopic, I know, but I was once reviewing a document for a serial-port driver or some such. As these things usually are, it was page after page of mind-numbing detail about hardware registers, state graphs, interrupt handlers and the like. About 3/4 of the way in, the author described yet another hardware register, which had three or four bit fields of varying length. One of them was called "EAD - Earn a Dollar".
Being the naive newbie engineer I was back then, I went in and asked him what that was, and he promptly handed me a dollar. He said he had put that in just to see if anyone would read that far.
On the HP ScanJet 4P SCSI :
It will proceed to play "Ode to Joy" using variations in the scan-head motor speed.