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Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion
danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Konami_code_websites goes all the way back to July 2009
After all, it isn't like their subscriber list is expanding a lot lately.
Wait, maybe this is part of a business strategy to appeal to the burgeoning zombie market!
Let me tell you how this happened.
Newspapers and magazines are not development oriented. Here's what I face, and I suspect you will find similar stories at every newspaper and some magazines.
Understaffed - I am the sole developer supporting a dozen sites written in four different languages. (I do have 3 graphic designers who know html, but couldn't even tell you what source control is)
Project duration - Any project that takes more than a week is considered a blasphemy. You're expected to work on a "news cycle" schedule. If you can't roll it out quickly or chunk into into tiny pieces, you probably aren't going to do it.
Project thrashing - Its not uncommon to work on a project for two or three days, get pulled off of it in favor of another project, and then get pulled off of that for yet another project. You can guess at the trail of unfinished projects that die from being ignored due to the whims of an editor or publisher.
Hostile IT departments - setup around servicing journalists, IT departments are extremely hostile towards development needs. I'm not allowed to install browsers or virtual machines for testing, not allowed to have a development server, source control is a security risk, I don't have local admin on my desktop,
and I need to summon an IT guy every time I need to test a deployment package. This leads to a lot of development on production systems because you literally have no other choice. Yes, this has been run up to executive level management.
Not caring - No one really cares what you do until it breaks or until it wins them a press award.
Not understanding - Graphic designers are frequently given root access to linux boxes and superuser access to sql server. They believe anyone can write a windows service, manage a database, or write quality html. This includes graphic designers because "They can do it for print, how is the web different"
No resources - In conjunction with not caring and not having money, you aren't given resources. I use gimp for image manipulation, purchased my own copies of Visual Studio and Zend, and have the bare minimum to do my job.
External politics - Being owned by a larger corporate entity, we often fall victim to running foul of sweetheart deals at the corporate level and random kingdom building. We're not even allowed to submit a proper sitemap to Google, the roll out version has been broken for three years, so I rolled our own which works wonderfully, but it was shutdown because it was "out of step with the larger company-wide sitemap rollout scheduled for Q3 2012."
So, you've got this great combination of no resources, business-wide apathy, developing on production, no communication, politics, and no QA/testing process...it really is as simple as uploading the script. Chances are no one would care that it was there, and I promise you that no one one notice until a reader discovered it and it hit the internet at large.
If you're wondering why I stay, I work with some very good people and I don't ever work overtime. Its pretty decent for anyone that can put up with the nonsense.
The zombies at the IT department's brains. And then the servers became self aware, and destroyed the news article in an attempt to increase the effectiveness of the zombie apocalypse. Really not a good day for humanity so far.
The story is ostensibly about Newsweek.com putting an Easter egg on their website. Then why is there no link to said website in the fine summary?
I used to hate kdawson only for his idiotic political posts during the final days of the Bush administration. Now I hate him for posting godawful story after godawful story. Leave this one to samzenpus to put on Idle, it at least belongs there.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I would have to say that my favorite part of this conversion is the unaltered ad that shows a recent cover of Newsweek featuring Michelle Obama and the caption "FEED YOUR CHILDREN WELL".
That green slime had it coming.
Jeez man. There's no "START" key on your keyboard. "Enter" is the best approximation you could have. Why do people have to be spoon-fed?
You leave him alone, he's old skool and everybody should know it. He is one of the few around here who have any idea how an original NES gamepad is laid out. Now get off his lawn!
Can you stop doing that? Every time you try, it sends a copy of all your mail to all of your friends, and their friends, and their friends. I'm getting tired of reading your personal stuff. Your best friends girlfriend? Man, bros before hos. Didn't you read the guy's handbook. I get it, she's hot, but we have rules. You start breaking the rules, and it all becomes chaos. That was a really hot picture she sent you though. I didn't know anyone could get into that position. Is she a contortionist or something?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It was working, but it's dead now. Oh well.
i just checked it, it doesn't work
He is one of the few around here who have any idea how an original NES gamepad is laid out.
The NES gamepad isn't laid out, it's thrown. Now, if you swing it around by the cord and hit someone in the head, they will be laid out.
Seriously, when I was pissed off at a game I used to swing the controller by about two feet of cord and bounce it off the floor as fast/hard as I could. I never managed to break one. Sure it was vinyl over plywood and not concrete or something, but that's damned impressive. Try that with your Wiimote :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"