The moment you throw in a few spaces to line something up on a non-tab boundary (say, to align a second line of arguments with the first argument), then you have a mess
It is trivial to avoid this problem by configuring tab-width to 1. Yet again,newbie configuration wins over decades of experience.
That only works if other editors of the code also used tab-width of 1, and hopefully used at least two tabs per indentation level. Which is, actually, a fantastic idea... and one best achieved by using spaces instead of tabs.
i think you missed the point.
you can customize the *display* of tabs.
Which only matters if all indentation, including alignment, is done with tabs. The moment you throw in a few spaces to line something up on a non-tab boundary (say, to align a second line of arguments with the first argument), then you have a mess, unless your tab width is set to exactly the value that whoever touched the code before you set it to.
In addition, terminal windows still display tabs as eight characters and likely will forever... and even if your terminal allows you to configure tab size to something other than eight, it'll just break the formatted output of other tools that assume that tabs are properly-sized.
Experienced developers prefer tabs not because they got used to them in "the bad old days". We had configurable editors 20 years ago too, you know... in fact all programmer's editors could configure tab size 20 years ago, and we had young punks like you arguing exactly the same thing. Actually, to tell the truth, I was very much a "tabs not spaces" punk in the 90s. Back then we also had benchmarks to show that using tabs rather than spaces resulted in faster compile times, measurably so, at least on sufficiently-large codebases. WordPerfect's style guide insisted on tabs for this reason.
But... configurable editors don't solve the problem. And today, of course, tabs vs spaces is utterly irrelevant to compile times. Plus we now have Python to contend with.
You, too, will one day get so frustrated when dealing with impossible-to-read code due to tabs, possibly with formatting that assumes multiple different tab sizes within a single file, that you'll be enlightened and learn to love spaces.
Hopefully when that day comes you'll have a good, configurable programmer's editor that can not only automatically manage indentation with spaces, but even highlight or automatically replace leading tabs with spaces. I recommend EMACS, which thoroughly handled these issues 30+ years ago.
About 20 years ago, I worked for a company which I shall not name, which used CVS as its source repository. All of the developers' home directories were NFS mounted from a central Network Appliance shared storage
...
One day, the NA disk crashed. I don't know if it was a RAID or what,
It was a NetApp box, so it used RAID 4 (and had more than one disk - the minimum was 2 disks). Perhaps the failure was something more than just a single-disk failure, as a single-disk failure shouldn't have lost the data.
Yeah, I never got any details on what happened, exactly. Based on other events, my suspicion is that it was probably user error by the sysadmin. He seemed competent when you talked to him, but repeated experience demonstrated otherwise.
I work directly in AOSP. The HAL API can be found in hardware/libhardware/include/hardware/keymaster1.h. The API will be implemented by various vendors in various TEEs and secure hardware solutions. My in-progress reference implementation, which is also what is used on Nexus 9, running in ARM TrustZone, can be found in system/keymaster.
Yes, one video card, an nVidia Quadro K2000 (what came in the machine). I use DVI for the 30 and DisplayPort for the two 24s. I used the DVI for the 30 mainly because the video card regards it as the "primary" output, the one used during boot. I'd have to crane my neck to read boot messages on the 24s.
The max resolution the DVI output can support is 2560x1600, same as my HP Z30i's native resolution. If the 30 had a higher resolution I'd have to use DisplayPort.
I don't use anything full-screen. The point of the big monitor is to fit lots of stuff, not to make a little bit of stuff really big. My 30" monitor normally contains nothing but terminal and editor windows, using a small font.
My desktop machine actually has three monitors connected. A 30" in the middle, in landscape orientation and 24" monitors on the side, in portrait orientation. I do have to move my head to look at all of this screen space, including to look at different areas of the 30". I will replace the 30" with a 40" sometime soon, and won't move further back from it, or increase the font size... I'll just be able to fit more windows.
The limit of visual perception is measured in pixels per angular distance. It doesn't depend on the number of pixels, but on their size and distance... at least until you get to the level where your entire field of view is covered by pixels that are small enough to be invisible at their given distance.
At the distance from my eyes to my desktop monitor (about 20 inches), I expect I can resolve pixels down do about 200 pixels per inch. My 30" monitor is about 26" wide by about 16" tall, which means that to reach the limit of my visual perception (assuming my estimate of 200 ppi is accurate; it may be a little low), I need 5200 horizontal pixels, about 5K. I'm hoping that within the next couple of years I can upgrade to a 40" monitor, though, and 8K would be about right for a display that size.
More pixels would be good if I sometimes want to lean closer to see fine details (and I do).
And, really, we absolutely do want sufficient resolution that pixels are indistinguishable, so we can have what appear to be perfectly smooth curves and arbitrarily fine lines. Smooth text, in particular, is much easier on the eyes. I have a MacBook Pro with a high-resolution display on my desk right next to my big monitor and it is sooo much more pleasant to look at.
I worked for used git for their SCM and I asked where the backups were I was told they didn't need backups because it was distributed and everyone had a copy of the repo
This is only tangentially-related, but a good story, and it's been a few years since I posted it.
About 20 years ago, I worked for a company which I shall not name, which used CVS as its source repository. All of the developers' home directories were NFS mounted from a central Network Appliance shared storage (Network Appliance was the manufacturer of the NAS device), so everyone worked in and built on that one central storage pool. The CVS repository also lived in that same pool. Surprisingly, this actually worked pretty well, performance-wise.
One of the big advantages touted for this approach was that it meant that there was a single storage system to back up. Backing up the NA device automatically got all of the devs' machines and a bunch more. Cool... as long as it gets done.
One day, the NA disk crashed. I don't know if it was a RAID or what, but whatever the case, it was gone. CVS repo gone. Every single one of 50+ developers' home directories, including their current checkouts of the codebase, gone. Probably 500 person-years of work, gone.
Backups to the rescue! Oops. It turns out that the sysadmin had never tested the backups. His backup script hadn't had permission to recurse into all of the developers' home directories, or into the CVS repo, and had simply skipped everything it couldn't read. 500 person-years of work, really gone.
Almost.
Luckily, we had a major client running an installation of our hardware and software that was an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than any other client. To support this big client, we constantly kept one or two developers on site at their facility on the other side of the country. So those developers could work and debug problems, they had one of our workstations on-site, and of course *that* workstation used local disk. The code on that machine was about a week old, and it was only the tip of the tree, since CVS doesn't keep a local copy of the history, only a single checked-out working tree.
But although we lost the entire history, including all previous tagged releases (there were snapshots of the releases of course... but they were all on the NA box), at least we had an only slightly outdated version of the current source code. The code was imported into a new CVS repo, and we got back to work.
In case you're wondering about the hapless sysadmin, no he wasn't fired. That week. He was given a couple of weeks to get the system back up and running, with good backups. He was called on the carpet and swore on his mother's grave to the CEO that the backups were working. The next day, my boss deleted a file from his home directory and then asked the sysadmin to recover it from backup. The sysadmin was escorted from the building two minutes after he reported that he was unable to recover the file.
I suppose. However, I'd say that if your life choices make this a question you find yourself asking regularly, you might want to think about why that is... Just sayin'
Lovely example of blaming the victim. People go to bars because they like to drink and socialize. Nothing wrong with that and people aren't making poor life choices because of it.
Do a lot of the bars you go to put roofies in your drinks? If so... you might want to consider frequenting a higher caliber of establishment. Note that this doesn't make the victim not a victim, or the perpetrator any less wrong. It just means that the victim should consider making safer choices.
You don't have to rely on society/technology to keep you safe.
The Internet Association -- which counts tech giants like Amazon, Etsy, Facebook, Google, Reddit, and Twitter among its members...
Because these companies have no interest in internet freedom as it pertains to their cattle but as it pertains to fourth quarter earnings.
That makes a nice slashdot karma-generating soundbite, but it really doesn't answer the question. The companies in question stand to benefit from net neutrality, and aren't likely to be rewarding an opponent unless they felt like there was some other reason to do it.
Luckily, if you RTFA (I know, I know), you find "Theran pointed to the role McCarthy played in advancing a key tech-industry priority: patent reform. Under McCarthy's floor leadership, the House passed the Innovation Act 325-91 in December 2013. Tech companies hope that the bill, which is designed to cut back on frivolous lawsuits from so-called "patent trolls," will soon pass the Senate."
So there's the answer to the headline: Because he helped with patent reform, which the Internet Association also cares about. They're probably also hoping that by giving him the award they can build some goodwill which may allow them to influence his future opposition to neutrality -- or they may figure that with the Title II change, neutrality is no longer a concern, so they can butter him up for other battles where he might be on their side.
Knowing if a drink is roofied would be nice... Just sayin'.
I suppose. However, I'd say that if your life choices make this a question you find yourself asking regularly, you might want to think about why that is... Just sayin'
Apple's SecureVault achieves it reasonably well, I think, as will the Trusted Execution Environment-based solution I'm building for Android. Perfect security is, in general, impossible, and it's particularly difficult on mass-produced consumer hardware, but useful levels are achievable.
Gaming at its worst is no worse than the same unmotivated person reading a book
Heavy reading of non-graphic material is strongly correlated with lots of positive cognitive ability development, and it's almost independent of the type of book, though a variety is best. There can also be a great deal of value in gaming, but it depends heavily on the nature of the game. Most of the games people play for 14 hours per day are highly repetitive electronic Skinner boxes, and as far as I've seen there is no evidence of significant benefit from their play. Other than enjoyment, of course, which is well and good in moderation.
Sure it can. There's no practical upper bound on the amount of functionality that can be packed into a single instruction. CISC instruction sets with incredibly powerful instructions have been developed and used. The VAX instruction set is perhaps the best example. It enabled an assembler language that was darned near a high-level language, with single instructions that took up to a half dozen arguments and implemented sophisticated looping and searching operations in single instructions. Some of my favorite were the linked list management instructions. A common introductory programming assignment is to write a function to insert an element into a linked list. When writing in VAX assembler there's no need for such a function because there's an instruction that does it.
A more modern -- and highly relevant to this article -- example is the AES-NI instructions, which exist on essentially all modern desktop and laptop CPUs, and many of the newest mobile CPUs as well. They implement a full round of AES encryption or decryption in a single instruction.
If the key is as long as the message, XOR is not that weak.
As long as the key is as long as the message, and all of the key is unpredictable, and is never reused, then you have a provably unbreakable encryption system called a one-time pad. However, if you ever reuse the key someone can XOR the two ciphertexts together and the result will be the XOR of the two plaintexts, which can often be disentangled. Also, if the key is somewhat predictable, plaintext can be recovered. The US actually managed to decrypt some texts encrypted with a Russian one-time pad system, because the keys were produced by humans pounding "randomly" on typewriters... except humans aren't very good at generating random keystreams.
I think Slashdot should take down this article. Under the DMCA it's illegal to bypass flimsy methods intended to enforce security.
To be precise, it's illegal to bypass flimsy methods intended to enforce copyright. Since this tool isn't marketed as a DRM system, the DMCA doesn't apply.
Meh. I've got 25 years in the industry, I think I know reality quite well, thank you.
I would say something.
Even if your company has a strict prohibition against them?
Why would I want to work for a foolish company like that?
I'd give him a pat on the back and maybe a small bonus, as long as it's suitably hidden and well done... playful,
So you've the ability to give away money at work for such non-work related things? Do please share where you work.
Google.
And, yes, people absolutely do get bonuses for writing easter eggs at Google. And April Fool's jokes, and much more.
Prior to Google, I worked for IBM, where I also saw people get bonuses for doing whimsical things. And before that, Philips, and Unisys, and... I did mention I've been in the industry for 25 years, right?
not obnoxious,
By whose/what standard? It's always fun discovering in a widely localized product what seems benign to one culture is horrible to another.
Meh. Did it offend you when you did a Google search for "barrel roll", and your browser window's contents rotated? There's no doubt that the situation you're describing can happen, but it's not hard to stay far, far away from that line.
not going to get in anyone's way, etc.
So you can guarantee that for all users and use cases?
If the easter egg is done well, yes.
Customers like easter eggs.
Which customers are these? Those buying your 99 cent mobile app? Those buying a 50 dollar shrink wrapped or downloaded desktop app? Or those buying multi-thousand dollar enterprise systems?
All of the above, and the customers buying real enterprise systems, which cost tens of millions of dollars, not piddly thousands.
Assuming the software is generally high quality, they're amusing, minor diversions that add a little fun for the users as well as the programmers.
Again, that depends on who your customer is and what their attitude is to unknown things being discovered in the software that was not documented and was not part of the RFP or compliance documentation.
Dude, lighten up. I've worked on many massive projects with tightly-spec'd RFPs and outside of systems where slight errors may result in death (e.g. aerospace, some medical systems), real people are much less uptight than you seem to expect.
What you see as a cute dancing frog or "Hello from the developers", some customers see as a sign of shoddy quality control and the possibility of backdoors.
If the programmer in question was at least as good as average at meeting his targets, and the Easter Egg was suitably hidden, I probably wouldn't say anything.
I would say something. I'd give him a pat on the back and maybe a small bonus, as long as it's suitably hidden and well done... playful, not obnoxious, not going to get in anyone's way, etc.
Customers like easter eggs. Assuming the software is generally high quality, they're amusing, minor diversions that add a little fun for the users as well as the programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
It is trivial to avoid this problem by configuring tab-width to 1. Yet again,newbie configuration wins over decades of experience.
That only works if other editors of the code also used tab-width of 1, and hopefully used at least two tabs per indentation level. Which is, actually, a fantastic idea... and one best achieved by using spaces instead of tabs.
People who work for me configure their editors to replace tabs with spaces.
+1
i think you missed the point. you can customize the *display* of tabs.
Which only matters if all indentation, including alignment, is done with tabs. The moment you throw in a few spaces to line something up on a non-tab boundary (say, to align a second line of arguments with the first argument), then you have a mess, unless your tab width is set to exactly the value that whoever touched the code before you set it to.
In addition, terminal windows still display tabs as eight characters and likely will forever... and even if your terminal allows you to configure tab size to something other than eight, it'll just break the formatted output of other tools that assume that tabs are properly-sized.
Experienced developers prefer tabs not because they got used to them in "the bad old days". We had configurable editors 20 years ago too, you know... in fact all programmer's editors could configure tab size 20 years ago, and we had young punks like you arguing exactly the same thing. Actually, to tell the truth, I was very much a "tabs not spaces" punk in the 90s. Back then we also had benchmarks to show that using tabs rather than spaces resulted in faster compile times, measurably so, at least on sufficiently-large codebases. WordPerfect's style guide insisted on tabs for this reason.
But... configurable editors don't solve the problem. And today, of course, tabs vs spaces is utterly irrelevant to compile times. Plus we now have Python to contend with.
You, too, will one day get so frustrated when dealing with impossible-to-read code due to tabs, possibly with formatting that assumes multiple different tab sizes within a single file, that you'll be enlightened and learn to love spaces.
Hopefully when that day comes you'll have a good, configurable programmer's editor that can not only automatically manage indentation with spaces, but even highlight or automatically replace leading tabs with spaces. I recommend EMACS, which thoroughly handled these issues 30+ years ago.
Now get off my lawn! Tabs are NOT welcome here.
About 20 years ago, I worked for a company which I shall not name, which used CVS as its source repository. All of the developers' home directories were NFS mounted from a central Network Appliance shared storage
...
One day, the NA disk crashed. I don't know if it was a RAID or what,
It was a NetApp box, so it used RAID 4 (and had more than one disk - the minimum was 2 disks). Perhaps the failure was something more than just a single-disk failure, as a single-disk failure shouldn't have lost the data.
Yeah, I never got any details on what happened, exactly. Based on other events, my suspicion is that it was probably user error by the sysadmin. He seemed competent when you talked to him, but repeated experience demonstrated otherwise.
I work directly in AOSP. The HAL API can be found in hardware/libhardware/include/hardware/keymaster1.h. The API will be implemented by various vendors in various TEEs and secure hardware solutions. My in-progress reference implementation, which is also what is used on Nexus 9, running in ARM TrustZone, can be found in system/keymaster.
Yes, one video card, an nVidia Quadro K2000 (what came in the machine). I use DVI for the 30 and DisplayPort for the two 24s. I used the DVI for the 30 mainly because the video card regards it as the "primary" output, the one used during boot. I'd have to crane my neck to read boot messages on the 24s.
The max resolution the DVI output can support is 2560x1600, same as my HP Z30i's native resolution. If the 30 had a higher resolution I'd have to use DisplayPort.
Another option is to build TrueCrypt with a different compiler. There is ongoing work to do that.
proscribed
FYI, you mean "prescribed". Proscribed is pretty much the exact opposite.
Productive activity and retirement are not mutually exclusive.
Really? I guess I should just throw my FOSS projects into the garbage bin then.
I think you missed the "not" in my sentence.
I don't use anything full-screen. The point of the big monitor is to fit lots of stuff, not to make a little bit of stuff really big. My 30" monitor normally contains nothing but terminal and editor windows, using a small font.
My desktop machine actually has three monitors connected. A 30" in the middle, in landscape orientation and 24" monitors on the side, in portrait orientation. I do have to move my head to look at all of this screen space, including to look at different areas of the 30". I will replace the 30" with a 40" sometime soon, and won't move further back from it, or increase the font size... I'll just be able to fit more windows.
4K is the limit of human visual perception.
The limit of visual perception is measured in pixels per angular distance. It doesn't depend on the number of pixels, but on their size and distance... at least until you get to the level where your entire field of view is covered by pixels that are small enough to be invisible at their given distance.
At the distance from my eyes to my desktop monitor (about 20 inches), I expect I can resolve pixels down do about 200 pixels per inch. My 30" monitor is about 26" wide by about 16" tall, which means that to reach the limit of my visual perception (assuming my estimate of 200 ppi is accurate; it may be a little low), I need 5200 horizontal pixels, about 5K. I'm hoping that within the next couple of years I can upgrade to a 40" monitor, though, and 8K would be about right for a display that size.
More pixels would be good if I sometimes want to lean closer to see fine details (and I do).
And, really, we absolutely do want sufficient resolution that pixels are indistinguishable, so we can have what appear to be perfectly smooth curves and arbitrarily fine lines. Smooth text, in particular, is much easier on the eyes. I have a MacBook Pro with a high-resolution display on my desk right next to my big monitor and it is sooo much more pleasant to look at.
Yup - I always have a RCS folder in /etc for example.
These days I use git for that, too.
I worked for used git for their SCM and I asked where the backups were I was told they didn't need backups because it was distributed and everyone had a copy of the repo
This is only tangentially-related, but a good story, and it's been a few years since I posted it.
About 20 years ago, I worked for a company which I shall not name, which used CVS as its source repository. All of the developers' home directories were NFS mounted from a central Network Appliance shared storage (Network Appliance was the manufacturer of the NAS device), so everyone worked in and built on that one central storage pool. The CVS repository also lived in that same pool. Surprisingly, this actually worked pretty well, performance-wise.
One of the big advantages touted for this approach was that it meant that there was a single storage system to back up. Backing up the NA device automatically got all of the devs' machines and a bunch more. Cool... as long as it gets done.
One day, the NA disk crashed. I don't know if it was a RAID or what, but whatever the case, it was gone. CVS repo gone. Every single one of 50+ developers' home directories, including their current checkouts of the codebase, gone. Probably 500 person-years of work, gone.
Backups to the rescue! Oops. It turns out that the sysadmin had never tested the backups. His backup script hadn't had permission to recurse into all of the developers' home directories, or into the CVS repo, and had simply skipped everything it couldn't read. 500 person-years of work, really gone.
Almost.
Luckily, we had a major client running an installation of our hardware and software that was an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than any other client. To support this big client, we constantly kept one or two developers on site at their facility on the other side of the country. So those developers could work and debug problems, they had one of our workstations on-site, and of course *that* workstation used local disk. The code on that machine was about a week old, and it was only the tip of the tree, since CVS doesn't keep a local copy of the history, only a single checked-out working tree.
But although we lost the entire history, including all previous tagged releases (there were snapshots of the releases of course... but they were all on the NA box), at least we had an only slightly outdated version of the current source code. The code was imported into a new CVS repo, and we got back to work.
In case you're wondering about the hapless sysadmin, no he wasn't fired. That week. He was given a couple of weeks to get the system back up and running, with good backups. He was called on the carpet and swore on his mother's grave to the CEO that the backups were working. The next day, my boss deleted a file from his home directory and then asked the sysadmin to recover it from backup. The sysadmin was escorted from the building two minutes after he reported that he was unable to recover the file.
I suppose. However, I'd say that if your life choices make this a question you find yourself asking regularly, you might want to think about why that is... Just sayin'
Lovely example of blaming the victim. People go to bars because they like to drink and socialize. Nothing wrong with that and people aren't making poor life choices because of it.
Do a lot of the bars you go to put roofies in your drinks? If so... you might want to consider frequenting a higher caliber of establishment. Note that this doesn't make the victim not a victim, or the perpetrator any less wrong. It just means that the victim should consider making safer choices.
You don't have to rely on society/technology to keep you safe.
The Internet Association -- which counts tech giants like Amazon, Etsy, Facebook, Google, Reddit, and Twitter among its members...
Because these companies have no interest in internet freedom as it pertains to their cattle but as it pertains to fourth quarter earnings.
That makes a nice slashdot karma-generating soundbite, but it really doesn't answer the question. The companies in question stand to benefit from net neutrality, and aren't likely to be rewarding an opponent unless they felt like there was some other reason to do it.
Luckily, if you RTFA (I know, I know), you find "Theran pointed to the role McCarthy played in advancing a key tech-industry priority: patent reform. Under McCarthy's floor leadership, the House passed the Innovation Act 325-91 in December 2013. Tech companies hope that the bill, which is designed to cut back on frivolous lawsuits from so-called "patent trolls," will soon pass the Senate."
So there's the answer to the headline: Because he helped with patent reform, which the Internet Association also cares about. They're probably also hoping that by giving him the award they can build some goodwill which may allow them to influence his future opposition to neutrality -- or they may figure that with the Title II change, neutrality is no longer a concern, so they can butter him up for other battles where he might be on their side.
Knowing if a drink is roofied would be nice... Just sayin'.
I suppose. However, I'd say that if your life choices make this a question you find yourself asking regularly, you might want to think about why that is... Just sayin'
Apple's SecureVault achieves it reasonably well, I think, as will the Trusted Execution Environment-based solution I'm building for Android. Perfect security is, in general, impossible, and it's particularly difficult on mass-produced consumer hardware, but useful levels are achievable.
Do you spend every waking minute playing, to the exclusion of all productive activity?
That would imply I work, and am not retired already. There's a difference right?
Productive activity and retirement are not mutually exclusive.
Do you spend every waking minute playing, to the exclusion of all productive activity?
Gaming at its worst is no worse than the same unmotivated person reading a book
Heavy reading of non-graphic material is strongly correlated with lots of positive cognitive ability development, and it's almost independent of the type of book, though a variety is best. There can also be a great deal of value in gaming, but it depends heavily on the nature of the game. Most of the games people play for 14 hours per day are highly repetitive electronic Skinner boxes, and as far as I've seen there is no evidence of significant benefit from their play. Other than enjoyment, of course, which is well and good in moderation.
Not in a single CPU instruction it can't.
Sure it can. There's no practical upper bound on the amount of functionality that can be packed into a single instruction. CISC instruction sets with incredibly powerful instructions have been developed and used. The VAX instruction set is perhaps the best example. It enabled an assembler language that was darned near a high-level language, with single instructions that took up to a half dozen arguments and implemented sophisticated looping and searching operations in single instructions. Some of my favorite were the linked list management instructions. A common introductory programming assignment is to write a function to insert an element into a linked list. When writing in VAX assembler there's no need for such a function because there's an instruction that does it.
A more modern -- and highly relevant to this article -- example is the AES-NI instructions, which exist on essentially all modern desktop and laptop CPUs, and many of the newest mobile CPUs as well. They implement a full round of AES encryption or decryption in a single instruction.
If the key is as long as the message, XOR is not that weak.
As long as the key is as long as the message, and all of the key is unpredictable, and is never reused, then you have a provably unbreakable encryption system called a one-time pad. However, if you ever reuse the key someone can XOR the two ciphertexts together and the result will be the XOR of the two plaintexts, which can often be disentangled. Also, if the key is somewhat predictable, plaintext can be recovered. The US actually managed to decrypt some texts encrypted with a Russian one-time pad system, because the keys were produced by humans pounding "randomly" on typewriters... except humans aren't very good at generating random keystreams.
I think Slashdot should take down this article. Under the DMCA it's illegal to bypass flimsy methods intended to enforce security.
To be precise, it's illegal to bypass flimsy methods intended to enforce copyright. Since this tool isn't marketed as a DRM system, the DMCA doesn't apply.
So many assumptions, so little reality.
Meh. I've got 25 years in the industry, I think I know reality quite well, thank you.
Even if your company has a strict prohibition against them?
Why would I want to work for a foolish company like that?
So you've the ability to give away money at work for such non-work related things? Do please share where you work.
Google.
And, yes, people absolutely do get bonuses for writing easter eggs at Google. And April Fool's jokes, and much more.
Prior to Google, I worked for IBM, where I also saw people get bonuses for doing whimsical things. And before that, Philips, and Unisys, and... I did mention I've been in the industry for 25 years, right?
By whose/what standard? It's always fun discovering in a widely localized product what seems benign to one culture is horrible to another.
Meh. Did it offend you when you did a Google search for "barrel roll", and your browser window's contents rotated? There's no doubt that the situation you're describing can happen, but it's not hard to stay far, far away from that line.
So you can guarantee that for all users and use cases?
If the easter egg is done well, yes.
Which customers are these? Those buying your 99 cent mobile app? Those buying a 50 dollar shrink wrapped or downloaded desktop app? Or those buying multi-thousand dollar enterprise systems?
All of the above, and the customers buying real enterprise systems, which cost tens of millions of dollars, not piddly thousands.
Again, that depends on who your customer is and what their attitude is to unknown things being discovered in the software that was not documented and was not part of the RFP or compliance documentation.
Dude, lighten up. I've worked on many massive projects with tightly-spec'd RFPs and outside of systems where slight errors may result in death (e.g. aerospace, some medical systems), real people are much less uptight than you seem to expect.
What you see as a cute dancing frog or "Hello from the developers", some customers see as a sign of shoddy quality control and the possibility of backdoors.
Cite?
If the programmer in question was at least as good as average at meeting his targets, and the Easter Egg was suitably hidden, I probably wouldn't say anything.
I would say something. I'd give him a pat on the back and maybe a small bonus, as long as it's suitably hidden and well done... playful, not obnoxious, not going to get in anyone's way, etc.
Customers like easter eggs. Assuming the software is generally high quality, they're amusing, minor diversions that add a little fun for the users as well as the programmers.