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Would You Add Easter Eggs To Software Produced At Work?
Mr. Leinad writes "Do you add Easter Eggs to the software that is produced at the office? I mean, if you have complete control over the final product, do you spice it up with that little personal touch, which, as unlikely as it is that anyone will see, carries with it an 'I was here' signature? I've just finished the development of a large software product, and I have a couple of days left to try to add my own personal Easter Egg code, but given that the software is quite professional, I don't know if I should. What do you think? Should we developers sign our creations?"
Getting such things past the pointy heads is just good fun. Getting the doomsday code past them is a riot.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Easter Eggs? No, funny comments/error messages, and bizarre variable names, absolutely.
I will never forget the day a student who was using my software for a project asked during a meeting what an 'out of cheese' error was. The poor kid was so confused :)
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
What if you are the goatsx guy?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
One of Microsoft's head programmers tried a little stunt like the one you're suggesting. It cost him his career... his dignity... and if the suicide note was of any indication, even his life.
His name was Andrew B. Clippy, and his "personal touch" tore him asunder.
Don't forget the Windows95 Easter Egg where a simple series of actions on the desktop would get you a blue screen with a special message from the OS.
I used to work in the visuals department for a flight sim company and it was common practice for the image database devs to sign their names and leave each other messages at something like -10m below the airport's primary runway.
This was all well and good until we had some sort of glitch on a sim under test and the customer's chief pilot managed to land through the runway and the entire cockpit view was filled with something like "Fuck off Dave!"
Management were not pleased!
AT&ROFLMAO
Then you might want to consider taking a photo of the OTHER end for once.
I worked with a text editor in college where upon triggering an unlikely error the user was prompted with the message:
"Are you A) Blind or B) Stupid?"
The user had to pick one to continue.
I am a robot. I do only as instructed. Beep beep. Bloop Bloop.
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to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Does a rooted backdoor count as an easter egg? :D
Less-geeky computer repair alternative for Lansing, MI
Blame the intern.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
Yes, I want it to reverse current and shock me so my heart pulses out jingle bells! Whilst the readout shows vectored pine trees!!!
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to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Hey, it still works in Vista!
I'm not insane! My mother had me tested.
Aren't easter eggs supposed to be hard to find?
Back in the mid 80's (the dark days of DOS) I had a habit of looking through executable code with the Norton hex editor. One day I came across the string "Nosey, aren't you." I thought it was pretty funny. In terms of the code I write, sometimes just something cute in the comments. Once when looping through some records I put a comment "these aren't the recORDIDS you're looking for, move along!" Probably nobody got a chuckle but me...
Any good software company should allow easter eggs. Back in the good-old days at QuickLogic, we had an awesome movie-like credit's screen with something funny about every contributer. At the new company I founded, I've lost control over our easter-egg policy, and they've been removed :-(
There was one funny episode at QuickLogic. Bill Falk was the manager, and he just about had a heart attack any time there were show-stopper bugs found late in a software release process. So, after we already bought something like 4,000 copies of our release on floppies, a very special easter egg went off. It detected if your name was Bill Falk and if it were a specific date, and then invoked some of the worst possible crashes - the stuff that's random each time, and depends on debug mode vs compiled. We all laughed so hard when Bill went ballistic, we never dreamed our easter egg would work so well. After seeing how hard it was on him, we decided never to do that to him again. The next release came around, and this time there was a real show-stopper late-stage bug, and Bill was convinced we'd planted another easter egg. It got pretty ugly.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Please tell me you made Stupid the activated control.
...and with the other guy who does the code with me, we agreed to include "disco mode". We're still thinking what set of conditions to pick to trigger it.
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Subtlety is indeed a key. There was a Russian developing team working on games for a big American company. So the manager demanded that the coders would not put the word "dick" (in Russian it is as offensive as "fuck") anywhere in the game. He stressed that repeatedly saying that Russians are notorious for mentioning the dick somewhere on the wall or something. He pleaded and begged, saying the game is for children and he would fire everyone before getting fired himself.
So they released a game, and only few noticed that if you look at some plane drawing smoke pictures in the sky from a certain angle, you would see that it writes the infamous "dick".
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
All programmers leave back doors in their systems that like to play "Tic Tac Toe" and "Global Thermonuclear Warfare"
"You have chosen STUPID. Please enter your social security number and bank account number in the provided fields so we can, uh... register your software. Yeah."
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Do civil or mechanical engineers leave easter eggs?
The fact that you can't find them doesn't mean they aren't there.
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