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Posted - August 18 2010 : 06:17:08
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Question: Pam asks, "Where did the idea of ‘Easter eggs’ in programs come from?"
Answer: Great question Pam. Regular listeners to the program will remember that we talked about the concept of Easter eggs back in April, but we didn't go into it much more than that. No one's really certain when Easter eggs began to appear in software, but we have seen them going back as far as 1971. Sometimes these can get elaborate. I've seen the "Hall of Tortured Souls" game in Excel 95. In Excel 97, this game gave way to a flight simulator. Try this one: Start a game of Solitaire. Hold down the Alt and Shift buttons, then press the number 2. You win! One of the things Easter eggs used to be used for is detecting copyright infringement. If someone were to copy your software and just change the names of things, then when you get in court, all you have to do is to activate the Easter egg to prove they did it. The name itself is said to be a reference to an Atari game from 1979 called "Adventure", where a secret message was left by the game's programmer.
Cool Site: America Speaking Out: Lately it seems, nobody in Washington is listening to us and nothing we do matters. Well there's a website that will at least give you a way to sound off. That site is America-speaking-out.com. The site was set up by House Republicans to give the average citizen a place to share ideas. Ideas about how to fix the things that are broken in the country. You can sign up for an account, or sign in using your Facebook account. You get points for sharing ideas, for voting thumbs up or thumbs down for the ideas of others, or for posting a response to others' ideas. You might be surprised what other people think. I don't know what the points can be used for, but maybe they'll come up with something soon.
Cool Gadget: Thought-Controlled Prosthetic Arm: SyFi's DVICE is the source of this week's gadget. Not really a gadget per se, it's a prosthetic arm. But whereas the best prosthetic arms we have now are controlled with your feet, this one is controlled by your thoughts. Surgeons will implant sensors on the patient's brain. The arm will read those signals and move accordingly. It's also supposed to be able to send signals back to the patient as well. Quadriplegics will be the first candidates for this new arm because they don't have the option of using their feet. If it works as advertised, it should begin to change everything.
It's All "Geek" To Me: Kludge: This week's term is kludge. It refers to a means of solving a problem that's functional, but not terribly well-designed or thought out. It's similar to the term hack, in that both terms refer to nonstandard ways of solving problems. The difference is that whereas a hack can be considered elegant, a kludge is not. Kludges are generally temporary and tend to become unwieldy over time.
Links
Easter Eggs on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(virtual)
America Speaking Out:
http://www.americaspeakingout.com/
Thought Controlled Prosthetic Arm:
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/08/tought-controll.php
Kludge on Webopedia:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/K/kludge.html
Kludge on PC Magazine:
http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,,t=&i=45831,00.asp |
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