Is This the Death of the Easter Egg? 290
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC reports that more and more companies are cracking down on the practice of hiding harmless snippets of code in their products. Known as "Easter eggs," they can be anything from the names of the developers, to pictures, to games like pinball, to a flight simulator. Is this simply professionalism, or is it stifling programmers' quirky, playful side? (Have you created any Easter eggs yourself? If so, what did they do?)
NSA eggs (Score:2)
Easter eggs (Score:3)
I *always* squeeze out one or more easter eggs.
My latest: The application, which is free, is software defined radio. It's loaded with features, and everything is documented in detail. Radios have something called an "S Meter", which in a "real" radio is often an actual meter. I offer, and fully document, quite a few different s meter types you can switch by simply clicking on the currently displayed meter. Left click gets you the next model, right click the previous model. Some are classic looking meters, s
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My software is SdrDx. Details here: [fyngyrz.com] Very much a "radio person's" design.
As for the eggs, that's not all of em -- those are the easiest to find, too. And they're a thing that's been in there for a couple of years or so, I figure it's not much a secret. Also, there's not much overlap between slashdot and my users. If any. Lastly, I don't think of them as exclusive so much as I do something fun to find.
You might be the first, if it turns out to be something you can use. :)
Mamangement (Score:3)
Put yourself in a project manager's shoes. What would you say if one of your programmers was working on a cool Easter Egg instead of being productive and working on the actual product? I wouldn't want to be the project manager who had to tell higher management that the product will be late but have some cool Easter Eggs.
Re:Mamangement (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you could look at it as your employees doing self-training, stress management, staying "productive" while stepping back from a problem set of code, or trying to add value to a product by making small additions. Full blown flight sim is overboard I grant you, but simple things like in VLC every Christmas time the cone gets a Santa hat - it's a nice touch that shows they're thinking about the end user... not every easter egg adds value and some are unprofessional but there should always be room for some expression beyond the bare bones function.
Re:Mamangement (Score:5, Informative)
Ha ha. If you can get your work done and still have time to "goof off" like this then obviously you could do more work.
That's the mindset of most managers. It doesn't matter if that's good or bad; it's just a fact. And if you don't like it you can always go elsewhere because we're looking for H-1Bs, outsourcing, or "locating production in dynamic new markets" anyway.
I work in an industry that is competitively-bid large-scale systems sold to a handful of manufacturers to run their very-expensive low-volume product that requires government certification (which when said product fails or is intentionally caused to fail makes international news), not consumer-oriented programs. The only time the consumer sees anything about our products would be as background displays in a movie.
If someone managed to sneak an Easter Egg into this product then that means that the requirements-based and path-coverage testing was faulty, and there would be customer and government audits coming at us. The people who wrote and who reviewed the code would have a lot to answer for.
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If you can get your work done and still have time to "goof off" like this then obviously you could do more work.
That's how a small minded manager would see it for sure. Personally, I do Easter Eggs when a piece of code is just not working and it's starting to get me frustrated - I don't want to lose my momentum/coding mindset so I work on something fun for a bit then come back and work the problem. Better than losing the rest of the day being unproductive due to being frustrated. My favourite is adding a hidden to webpages that does something innocuous. Gotta love the hilarity that is "The Net" https://youtu.be/ [youtu.be]
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Re:Mamangement (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha ha. If you can get your work done and still have time to "goof off" like this then obviously you could do more work.
That's the mindset of most managers. It doesn't matter if that's good or bad; it's just a fact.
It does matter whether it's good or bad, and it seriously is a reason why many of these managers should be fired.
There are numerous scientific studies [nytimes.com] showing the benefits of breaks, downtime, doing leisure activities, naps, etc. during the workday -- resulting in greater productivity than if workers don't have such things. Managers who insist that workers be productive continuously are actually decreasing their productivity.
Same thing with forcing people to work 7 days per week. Same thing with vacation time. There are a number of studies [forbes.com] showing that if people take a few weeks or even a month off from work per year, they more than make up for it in increased productivity after the rest.
I realize that many managers are stupid, but this kind of stupidity is costing their company productivity and thus MONEY. It may be the norm, but it does matter that it's a stupid policy that not only harms workers but often harms the managers and their companies too.
Oh, and guess what -- added stress and fatigue causes injuries and health problems, often leading to more extended leaves due to sickness that end up costing a lot more. What's a big expense for most companies? Health coverage. Not only are you decreasing the effectiveness of your workers during work hours, but you're driving up one of your biggest costs in terms of additional healthcare.
It's inexcusable. Some high-powered companies in finance, law, as well as hospitals with doctors doing crazy shifts, etc. have started to recognize that it's really bad to have your workers coming in 7 days per week or working days at a time. It leads to inferior work and thus some corporations have started actively trying to get people to stay home on Sundays or whatever. (Think I'm kidding? Here's a story [nytimes.com] from the New York Times about financial firms adopting policies trying to get workers to stay home on the weekends.)
Managers who refuse to acknowledge good scientific studies showing how to make workers productive are bad managers.
(This is not to say that "Easter eggs" are always a good thing or a good use of time or resources. There are many reasons they can be problematic, as others have pointed out, like unintentionally creating problems in the code or whatever. But objections should be founded on reasons relevant to the project or security or whatever, not on bad managerial science.)
Re:Mamangement (Score:4, Insightful)
William Deming [wikipedia.org] would like to have a word with you.
If you measure someone's productivity by hours, and not solving problems, then it's clear you're not a market leader. You can't use people like robots. The human brain cannot be simplified to easy math. There's ramp up time, there's ramp down time, culture and more. If you attack people who are trying to keep their brains fresh, you're hurting both your employees AND your own business productivity. In otherwords: you're as stupid as the people who cut short-term corners thinking it'll save them money in the long run and then blame their line workers when productivity falls.
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I'm sure if you had access to all of the design files in any of those companies, you'd find more than a few that have goofy things added to them "just because."
The difference of course is that its a lot easier to overlook a small chunk of code in a million line program than it is to overlook your latest car design having bat wings.
There's a convergence though.. I would be totally unsurprised if it was discovered that some of these new digital devices in cars have Easter eggs in them. Because its software
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like in VLC every Christmas time the cone gets a Santa hat
Then when a subsequent maintainer comes along finds the Santa hat graphic, and since it is not in the specs, removes it causing the software to crash the next Xmas there is a problem.
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like in VLC every Christmas time the cone gets a Santa hat
Then when a subsequent maintainer comes along finds the Santa hat graphic, and since it is not in the specs, removes it causing the software to crash the next Xmas there is a problem.
Not if it's programmed properly. Easter Eggs are no excuse for sloppy coding.
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You miss the point. If the Easter Egg code is poorly programmed it could cause problems. Since the Easter egg code is neither tested or reviewed by anyone other than the programmer it is quite possible it is poorly writen.
Document your Easter eggs (Score:2)
This is why Emacs documents its Easter eggs in the manual, even the one that's a knockoff of a famous video game by some Russian guy [emacswiki.org].
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It breaks the definition of an Easter Egg if it is documented.
Re:Document your Easter eggs (Score:4, Funny)
I guess in today's security-conscious world, you have to break some definitions to make an omelet.
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Yes. The problem is that the idiot removed something, the purpose of which he didn't understand. Your premise that everything in the code is somehow in a spec somewhere is ridiculous. With such an idiot on the project, the least of your worries is that the hat graphic will be missing on Christmas morning.
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Your premise that everything in the code is somehow in a spec somewhere is ridiculous.
I guess you have never written mission critical software. Specs are very strict and all inclusive.
"It's a feature!" (Score:3)
Or you could look at it as your employees doing [long list]
Tell management it's a "watermark" to detect copied code. (It's obviously not an open-source project. B-) )
Seriously: Suppressing easter-egg hiding means the best programmers are likely to look for a happier shop and move on, leaving the anal manager with the cream skimmed off his pool of talent.
On the other hand, a professional programmer will not spend substantial time on such things.
(An easy way to do it without substantial cost is to build it
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> Tell management it's a "watermark" to detect copied code. (It's obviously not an open-source project. B-) )
Open source and free software need watermarks, too. Too much of it is being stolen and abused to create "independently invented" closed source projects. I've been asked,, and told, by clients and partners to use such code in violation of existing licenses.
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I implemented an easter egg triggered by the konami code in an application written for my previous employer. I didn't do it as a goof, but as a means to performance-test a helper function I had written (which does something that looks somewhat cool with done repeatedly on a loop). To this day, I think I'm the only person that actually knows about it (well, now anyone I used to work with who knows my
Re:Mamangement (Score:5, Interesting)
Painting the walls is an obvious change. Pretty much the opposite of an Easter Egg.
An Easter Egg, in the construction sense that you describe, would be more like the time a construction crew opened up the wall in my apartment to fix a leak in a pipe and found a lunchbox that someone left behind when the building was built in 1928 with a note inside reading "Hello."
Harmless. Amusing. And it generally makes the world a better and more interesting place to live and work.
Re:Mamangement (Score:5, Funny)
An Easter Egg, in the construction sense that you describe, would be more like the time a construction crew opened up the wall in my apartment to fix a leak in a pipe and found a lunchbox that someone left behind when the building was built in 1928 with a note inside reading "Hello."
Sometimes it's a singing frog.
Don't bother trying to put the frog on Broadway, though.
http://static.comicvine.com/up... [comicvine.com]
--
BMO
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I'm old enough to know exactly what you're talking about. Thanks for the memory!
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I'm old enough to know exactly what you're talking about. Thanks for the memory!
Helllooo my babyy....... Hello my honneeyyyyyyyyy......
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So long as it normally appears as the color I wanted, and only changes to his color when I open the draw, turn on 2 stove burners and twist the doorknob 3 times, I don't really see the problem.
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Re:Mamangement (Score:5, Insightful)
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. And I speak as someone who's actually managed programmers successfully.
Play and humor are essential feature of learning and advanced human cognition. We're more creative and effective when we give a our brains a little stimulation. When you treat programers as code generating machines you get less out of them than if you treat them as code generating animals.
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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.
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"You must be great fun at parties."
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Put yourself in the marketing directors shoes. Government agencies across the globe are becoming more and more ardent about computer security are watching computer company employees hiding code in programs. Hiding computer code in programs, code that is not a function of the program, code that does other stuff and, code the customer does not want. Harmless code fine, CIA and NSA and GHCQ and ASIO and CSIS and NZSIS, code not so much and of course not to forget organised crime, although I did technically m
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Put yourself in the marketing directors shoes.
No.
I am a highly-trained, creative, abstract, thinking individual. It's what makes my work superior to so many others in my field. If you want a robot who can't put together code fast enough or well enough to also include an Easter Egg, then the country code for India is +91. Happy dialing.
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This is usually the same management who feel it's okay to do 2x hours for same pay. (ie. gamedev crunch). When we worked late, management knew they couldn't complain about anything.
Blowing off steam with a few hours on an easter egg over 6 months was the least of their worries
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Put yourself in a project manager's shoes. What would you say if one of your programmers was working on a cool Easter Egg instead of being productive and working on the actual product? I wouldn't want to be the project manager who had to tell higher management that the product will be late but have some cool Easter Eggs.
I think it's more a case of quality.
The project manager has a plan and making stable easy to maintain code is hard. Now one of the programmers is going in, screwing around with the logic to support their Easter egg and if not introducing bugs at least introducing headaches for the next programmer who has to go in and make a change.
There's places where they're appropriate, particularly games where they add character and a bit of fun (which is the whole damn point afterall). But for more serious applications?
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Put yourself in a project manager's shoes. What would you say if one of your programmers was working on a cool Easter Egg instead of being productive and working on the actual product? I wouldn't want to be the project manager who had to tell higher management that the product will be late but have some cool Easter Eggs.
I put myself in the customer's shoes.
Over the years I've learned certain characteristics of software products.
One is that the more expensive the product is, the more likely it's crawling with bugs and the less likely I'll get good support on it.
Another is that the software that's full of "fun things" tends to be higher quality than the software that's "serious business". That's even been my experience with stodgy old IBM's product line. Yes, even IBM has had occasional breakouts of humanity and some of thei
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Another is that the software that's full of "fun things" tends to be higher quality than the software that's "serious business".
Do you have any reference to back this up?
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In management shoes (Score:3)
If I were a manager I would be ecstatic that a developer cared enough to attach something so personal to a project. It speaks to a higher level of effort across the whole system, over someone who is just implementing feature points.
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It could also be an indication of self centered attitude in that he would rather get his "mark" embedded in the system and leave the work to the other programmers. It could speak of an lower effort across the system if he expends all his energy on Easter eggs that he is interested in than the system that he is not interested in.
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It could also be an indication of self centered attitude in that he would rather get his "mark" embedded in the system and leave the work to the other programmers
Has it ever? Doesn't seem like it.
It could speak of an lower effort across the system if he expends all his energy on Easter eggs
Not if you understand how and when programmers think. All of the really good ideas for how to do something come when you are working on something different. Doing an easer egg is a fantastic idea for stretching progra
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A manager I worked last year went straight to our legal departments and our contracts when I put my name as author in certain software files. They even wanted the source control system to reflect only titles, not actual names. I was unable to determine if it was because the manager was taking credit for other people's work, or if they'd had horrible experiences with particular staff being considered the _only_ person a client would be willing to talk to, based on their name in the code.
The work was complete
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Would you rather that programmer be on Reddit or Slashdot? The last thing you want to do is associate doing additional work with negativity. Unless that programmer is spending a large portion of his time not working on the project, it doesn't matter WHAT he's doing. If he relaxes by programming interesting pieces of code to make up for all of the bullshit boiler
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One medical product I had worked on had a picture of all the original developers hidden away, to be revealed with certain key presses. Over a decade later and with new grumpy owners, someone discovered this and management insisted it be removed. So the software people poured through the code and inspected things in the debugger but could not find how this was done. And the new owners were not happy about this, especially to see proof of the incompetence and rebellion coming from the acquired staff, and t
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Comment removed (Score:3)
Yep (Score:4, Interesting)
I once worked on a government project codenamed "Bullfrog" back when I worked at Rockwell-Collins. I won't go into too much details (we were told that it was "sensitive" but not classified), but I'll just mention that part of the project involved a radio turner that could scan through frequencies. One of my tasks was to implement the frequency sweeper, which was supposed to have a dot that would show what frequency was currently being scanned. I also as part of a different task had to implement a subwindow that could be opened or closed, which showed snapshots of the past several sweeps. The easter egg would occur if you clicked on the open/close button for the snapshot window precisely 42 times: the dot would change into a hopping frog animation ;)
Nothing huge, but nothing evil either, and something that was easy to implement and easy to sneak into the code unnoticed.
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I was working for a defense contractor in the late 80's. I had developed a prototype test driver for our system, that talked to the target system over an RS-232 interface.
This was back in the days of serial terminals, so no graphics.
I had put in an easter egg, that if you ran the program with my name as the sole argument, it displayed a little ASCII animation intro. The funny thing was that I had actually made a mistake on the first cut, and it scrolled in upside down. So I kept it, added "Oops, start
Early days of PHP (Score:5, Funny)
I once managed a department website - back in the mid 90s - and anytime you added someone named Fred to the administrative directory, it set their photo to Fred Sanford and started playing the theme to Sanford & Son.
Mid 90s PHP was fun...
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Haha, love it ;)
Yup, added an easter egg in an old PS1 game. (Score:5, Interesting)
Easter eggs were "par for the course" back in the day. It was a way for us to blow off some steam for the very long crunch. i.e. Our physics guy added a machine easter egg.
Context: The high score screen only allowed N characters. My last name of course had N+1 characters so I made the code detect it and append the last character. :-)
Harmless, but fun.
Years later, the younger brother of my best friend was doing QA for the company and was testing a port. He came across this easter egg and told his older brother that "I had hacked the game!"
He didn't realize I had worked on the original game and _wrote_ that easter egg. :-)
Easter Eggs, when they are small cosmetic things, are harmless.
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This! We were making 3D games in early 2000's and whenever the engine had some new features we played with it. (we ALWAYS added a goldeneye-style big head mode to all our games :)
We also added plenty of "cheats" which were runtime dev-tools, publishers usually demanded we removed them, but often we just made obscure cheat codes to enable them... though we made the fun harmless ones a bit more easy to stumble upon...
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A couple of little easter eggs in bespoke software;
Hold a couple of modifier keys and click on the icon in the about dialog, "The developers [names] would like to present you with a complimentary cup holder" followed by opening the CD ROM tray. Every new developer checked in a change with their own name once they'd passed their probationary period.
Leave the about dialog open for 5 minutes, the dialog goes black and the developers names start floating around like the game asteroids. Click on a letter and i
History of the Egg (Score:2)
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How about the Easter Egg currently inside the millions (billions?) of 555 timer chips in use around the world?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Microsoft flight simulator (in excel?) (Score:2)
While it was a real pain to get to (in Excel I think), and I never tried it, I thought it was a cool Idea and a break from the stick up the rear attitude they showed at the time.
http://www.gamesfaq.com/ [gamesfaq.com] has a large list of eggs one can find located with the game itself.
Splash screen easter egg (Score:2)
ASIC ROM (Score:2)
Does hiding some ASCII art and the names of the developers in the ROM of a communication ASIC count?
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Does hiding some ASCII art and the names of the developers in the ROM of a communication ASIC count?
I'd say yes because there is a lot of art on chips that only can be seen with a microscope. I've seen a lot of good stuff etched into boards and chips. Best I can do quickly is this teaser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Android, not quite an Egg but close. (Score:2)
If you enter "about device" and click on one of the listings 7 times you will then have a developers mode as an option in the settings. - at about the third click it does start a count down of how many clicks are left.
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If you enter "about device" and click on one of the listings 7 times you will then have a developers mode as an option in the settings. - at about the third click it does start a count down of how many clicks are left.
This I should add showed up for 4.0 and above.
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it is actually pretty well officially documented by google these days. making something "hard to accidentally trigger by someone who doesn't read documentation and who we think is too stupid to know what it will do" is not quite an easter egg...though close. :)
Closest I came to an Easter Egg (Score:2)
The closest I came to an Easter Egg was putting the string "EREIAMJH" in code some place. I don't recall exactly. Perhaps it was off the end of the simple help text in a CLI app or something. There were a few times I'd stick that in code. It'd only be visible to somebody running strings on the code or something. It's very few bytes. No additional execution is involved. It's a Brazil reference in case you're wondering.
If your boss knows about it... (Score:2)
... then you haven't hidden it well enough.
Real Programmers' Easter eggs can undergo code inspections without being noticed by any of the other developers. (Do it well enough and you might get talent-scouted by the NSA! ;))
Best easter egg of all time (Score:5, Funny)
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Ha ha wow I just watched that movie for the first time a few days ago.
It's "The Net" if anyone doesn't get it.
another career highlight being targeted (Score:2)
It's called taking pride in what you do and having the passion to do it. When dumb shits in management crack down on these kinds of things it's time to find another company to work for.
Martian easter egg (Score:2)
If you feed it a -m command line switch, one of my applications informs you that Martian Mode is not yet implemented.
Lame, huh?
...laura
Bill the Galactic Hero. (Score:2)
A multispectral data processing program I wrote back in my college days: Part of launching it was giving it the date the data was collected. This was sanity checked against the system clock. Dates like before the construction of the scanners we usually used had a reasonable error message, asking if you were sure and giving a chance to reenter.
The message for a data collection date later than the data processing date was: "WONKITY! [name of institute] processes TOMORROW'S data TODAY!"
This was a referenc
No longer code, now comments ... (Score:2)
Dev's are even putting ASCII art easter eggs in HTML. This is the easter egg hidden in the free-to-play pay-to-win Warframe MMO website.
Posting as a pic: http://i.imgur.com/eJz6qbd.png [imgur.com]
Since /.'s ecode completely broken. e.g.
Tetris to an Oracle product (Score:2)
That product had a few Easter eggs, a picture of the dev team in a dinner party that could be access by typing a correct sequence in the about box, also in a couple of releases, on
My Easter Eggs (Score:2)
The second Easter Egg was in a very quick Visual Basic progra
Easter eggs as useless, or Easter eggs as 'alpha'? (Score:3)
My new music player (SubFire - a player for Subsonic servers) has an easter egg in it, but only because i don't have time to give it the care it would need to actually make it a "useful" feature to anybody but me. Triple-clicking in the copyright footer will bring up a search box, and that can only happen on the Chrome version.
Basically, I needed a quick search to get to song titles, for my own purposes, but if I were to properly implement search, it would need to be very different...I know what it should be, and I don't have time to build that. So I now have one undocumented feature that does what I want the way I want for the purpose I need it for.
Of Course (Score:2)
The "John Knoll" Button (Score:2)
Way back in the golden age of CGI software development, those of us on the cutting edge always marveled at the amazing work John Knoll (of Photoshop and ILM fame) did and we all wanted a button in our 3D programs that made everything look as good as his work. Never happened, of course, because you can't code real talent. But, in one of my plugins, I put in an Easter egg which was a giant button that said "Create award-winning animation"
When they threaten to fire programmers... (Score:2)
Hardware easter eggs are still common (Score:2)
We just finished a chip that has a coworker's picture cut into the top three metal layers, because he died suddenly and we wanted some sort of commemoration. Since it's a flipchip, if you have an unmounted chip you can actually see it without having to decap it. We regularly put stuff in the gutters that our voltage rules require for insulation between the chip and the leadframe. Why not? It takes ten minutes to put into the artwork, at the very end of tapeout, and it costs nothing since it's on useless
Free Car (Score:2)
So once I did the accounting system for a car dealership..... in short:
if ((firstname == EASTER_FIRST) && (lastname == EASTER_LAST))
discount = EASTER_DISCOUNT;
and hey presto, if I bought a car there, instant 15% discount.
Bad news: It was a GM dealership. In other words.... it was *still* better to buy a Honda.
A usefull Easter Egg. (Score:2)
At one place I worked every new file would contain a constant variable with the value "RCS_filename_rev_no".
filename and rev_no were generated by RCS on a checkout.
That way whenever we looked at old executables we could generate them from source by looking in the executable and getting the right version of everything.
742 Evergreen Terrace (Score:2)
subtle easter egg in Caveman (Lemmings clone) (Score:2)
I put an easter egg in Caveman (http://mobile1up.com/caveman/) where every day there is a unique unlock code that actually lets you play the first seven levels of Lemmings - complete with music, artwork and sound effects.. it changes on a daily basis - i used to post the unlock codes occasionally on twitter ... if anyone ever reported it to SCEE; they would have a hard time reproducing it, the code wouldn't work by the time they tried it.
Google Maps (Score:4, Informative)
If you think the Easter egg is dead, go and play with Google Maps today.
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I don't think that counts... that's almost like a humorous comment, and who hasn't written one of those? :)
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Of course, there's Arnold Schwarzenegger's letter [wired.com] to the California State Assembly.
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Everyone knows that the value of Flavor should have been "Flav"
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I couldn't agree more. I'd so much rather deal with a company with a sense of humor and personality than some monolithic blob of an entity that's all business all the time.
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Actually a friend of mine used to have just such a car. This was back in the 1990s, so I don't remember the exact make and model. We never realized that until we had to remove one of the interior door panels one day, and on the inside of the door panel was written "Last XYZ built 1988" (I may be off on the year) and then there were a whole bunch of signatures, presumably the guys who built it. Very cool.
If you're designing security critical stuff, then yes, by all means either avoid the eggs or make sur
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I wouldn't want my car to have the initials of its makers written all over the car body. And I doubt anybody buying software products wants it to have unnecessary security risks.
In the same vein - every page you print has your name on it, and I bet you've never noticed it.
Actually a code that can be traced to your printer, and a real good reason not to register a printer after you've purchased it with cash.
A link I've had a long time now, but it's been edited in 2015 (so updated ?).
https://www.eff.org/pages/list... [eff.org] list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots
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I wouldn't want my car to have the initials of its makers written all over the car body.
How about the dealership's name? License plate brackets can be removed. But some of the decals they use can take paint with them if you try to remove them.
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I'm guessing they are referring unauthorized Easter eggs?
Since it was my understanding that the original Easter eggs used purposefully to sidestep the code registration process. Since software patents only required the first X number of lines of code to be submitted...
I doubt that. Easter eggs have existed long before software patents which didn't exist in bulk until 1994.
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Yes, PLEASE.
Re:Cracking down? (Score:5, Insightful)
They can try all they want.
It all depends on who they happen to be, and how you define an Easter Egg.
I worked in games for many years and we included quite a few Easter Eggs. But they were not hidden from the studio. They were approved by management, tested by QA, and documented internally. We tried to keep them quiet to see how long it took for them to be found.
The article is right -- large corporations that are risk averse tend to crack down hard on undocumented Easter Eggs. I think that is correct for a business, to crack down hard on undocumented, unapproved, untested features.
The key detail is who knows about it, and how appropriate it is for the product.
Critically: Did it get approved and tested, and is it okay for the user? An Easter Egg that has been approved by designers and product managers, tested by QA, and is a happy surprise to the user is a good thing. If it was not approved, but the programmer intentionally threw in the feature without testing and without documentation, yes, the business should crack down.
The trickier ones are the ones that are approved and tested, but not quite what the customer expects. Microsoft's bouncing text screensaver used to have an Easter Egg that typing "volcano" for the text caused a cycle of volcano names. Fun, for sure, but if your screen savers were used for the machine name, and the machine name happened to be "volcano", then it is an unexpected negative behavior.
Someone working on Excel, a product used inside government agencies and nearly every major business, including secret unapproved features? Yeah, that's absolutely a fire-able offense.
Someone working in a smaller company, with management approval, adding in a small feature to change the color scheme to red and green on Christmas day? Potentially a fun little Easter egg... unless the user is making a major presentation on that day to group that doesn't respect the Christmas holiday, then better make sure there is a way to turn it off.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Time based ones, especially for religious holidays are touchy. For some, they're friendly. For others, they're anything but.
Easter Eggs should generally be non-intrusive. They should take very intentional actions to make it happen.
Entering the Knomi code is a good example of that.
Just a randomizer that switches all your text to comic sans on presentations, with 8-bit game music in the background, not so much.