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Maximilien wrote: A kill switch is stupid
It's awesome and fun. And yes, probably illegal. 
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As long as it's in the contract that the software will stop working if you don't pay then it's legal.
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I disagree. If you have well-behaved customers they are entirely unnecessary. I had some friends who formed a company that made a ticketing system for ski resorts and their lifts. It had an automatic kill switch that tripped if they did not disable it and they were going to disable it when they were paid. They weren't paid and it tripped. It brought the lifts to a screeching halt for a few hours until the owner decided to pay the bill. One could call that ransom-ware. I and they consider it to be subscription-ware and that resort's subscription had expired after the trial period had elapsed.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Rick York wrote: subscription-ware
That's going to be my go-to term for any service that removes the products that you've previously paid for if you stop paying - And used extremely negatively 
-= Reelix =-
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I don't know where you got the idea that products previously paid for were removed. That is NOT subscription-ware at all. In my friend's case, their software just stopped working and that was because it wasn't paid for. Nothing was removed.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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SeanChupas wrote: Has anyone ever made an easter egg in one of their programs?
Yes. One is sitting under your nose.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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...no, that is my moustache!
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Just the same for me like Rusty.
Nothing under my nose except for a moustache.
Please reveal thy eggs for us.
It is Easter Eve after all.
"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Frank Zappa 1980
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Thanks for this. Even I left a message there 4 years back(Which I don't even remember)
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This is way before your time, but some friends and I at General Dynamics wrote test software for missile systems. One of the programs had a hardware platform that included a programmable voltage source with multiple independent outputs. When a part failed the testing, the program connected the oscilloscope to the PVS in X-Y mode, causing the scope to show a pig running across the screen. It also used the onboard speaker (remember those?) to make a squealing noise. QA was not amused.
Will Rogers never met me.
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At the place I worked between 2004 and 2009, one of my colleagues dared me to put a TicTacToe game in the software -- given that I had already written a TicTacToe game in an internal system. Fortunately, I didn't have the time to do it.
What I did do (and I may have mentioned before) was to write a Westminster Chimes Windows Service which ran on the database server -- until the admin was nearly pulling his hair out trying to determine which system as failing, apparently the server room was too noisy to recognize the tune. 
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Yes. Support incidents are rated at which P level they're at. P1 being the most urgent. Someone started calling it a Pineapple 1. So the Easter egg I put in is that when the program is an an error state it shows a little pineapple as part of the message.
Previously someone at another company put in a 'AE-35' error for network issues.
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SeanChupas wrote: Has anyone ever made an easter egg in one of their programs?
Yes, I put a bee in a MFC application, many years ago.
The application became unresposive while showing such a bee moving randomly.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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Ages ago we have changed close account confirmation for April Fools Day adding third option 'Yes', 'No' and 'I don't know', the latter working as no but with message 'Come back when you know it'. First user who hit that was thinking for good 5 minutes before coming to us to ask.
Funny, people liked it and this thing stayed as feature till program end-of-life.
Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies. T.Jefferson
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Certainly.
Around 2000 I was working on Point-of-Sale software that ran on NEC v25 boards. For output we had a tiny monochrome monitor and input was via the cashier keyboard. A large chain-store had commissioned my employer to provide a full PoS system, including the EMV card-terminal.
The easter egg (which I removed after a successful pilot implementation) was pacman, with one ghost, a simpler maze and no fruit, colour, scores or live-count. It was written in assembly and added about 6k to the final application. It was triggered by a byzantine combination of total price and supervisor reversals.
A second one (which was never removed) was in an embedded application (around the same time-frame). We have no diagnostic output for that device so we could never log errors. To solve a particularly difficult issue that only occurred in the field, I added a function (5 lines of C code) to beep morse code, so at startup the device will beep the last stored message and then wipe it.
With the large amounts of storage and RAM we have now, If I ever put in an easter egg in another embedded application, it'll be the full version of nethack.
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I made a business program for my company, and included in it, for many years, a game named Picas y Fijas (Logic game for guessing numbers) in which you guess the computer's number and vice versa. It used to run from the menu, pressing CTRL + SHIFT + F3 at the same time. Nobody ever found this, so I told to one of my colleagues and she spread the news. At this time it has been removed, people spent a too much time playing with it, because it was easy to hide the screen and the boss never noticed.
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I’ve done a few, both in personal projects and (in a much more limited way) things I’ve done at work. The art in the latter case is getting it past code review without being called out.
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I've put in a couple over the years. The one I liked best was every 17th time the mouse hovered over a certain small icon, the icon image would briefly change from the finger pointer to a middle finger pointer. QA saw it on the first day but couldn't reproduce it. He came laughing to my office and asked if he saw what he thought he did. I believe we took it out.
I spent a lot of time making that image!
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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I've always tried to embed a small game or something in each of desktop and web apps. I doubt most anyone has found them. sometimes it's a pixel on the screen that looks off or a search bar.
one of the last ones was an embedded Tetris game on one of the web apps that would popup if someone typed "Tetris" into the site's search bar. the game was very fun to build in JS + Canvas.
another one was the Cruel card game that you could find by clicking on an image in the about screen.
I'm building a little tile scroller like the old Legend of Zelda games were, but I'm not sure what project to drop it into yet.
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At one time I had it so that if you clicked on a certain area of our app's ABOUT dialog, the dialog changed to the Penn State logo. No one ever found it so I took it out. The only thing we have now is that, for about a week before Christmas, our app's "mascot" - an octopus - gets a Santa hat added to it. I've debated adding tweaks for other holidays but haven't had time to actually add them.
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I added a version of "duck hunt" into a web app once. IT WAS EPIC! It maintained scores in the backend database and would show high scores at the end of the game. The site wouldn't load the code/content until you performed the special action to start the game.
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Yes. A long time ago, when I was developing for 3270 green screen terminals, I made a hotspot that brought up a picture of a bug walking across the bottom of the screen. It was squashed at the end.
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Most people I know in the industry hate them.
They think that anyone who does it is immature, childish and is not behaving in a professional manner.
They say it puts an extra risk into the project.
I always put them in my work.
There are usually a few in everything that I have ever done.
Some are obvious as they are part of the design others lurk to humour and entertain.
Some are never enjoyed.
"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Frank Zappa 1980
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I once worked on the design of video surveillance equipment, back in the days of dial-up modems.
I put several Easter eggs into the code over the years.
One was an insect that ran up the screen after 1 hour of complete inactivity by the operator.
To test it I could trigger it by pressing one of the buttons 8 times in a row. When sales finally found out about it, they integrated it into their demos by saying that there was "one known bug in the system".
Another was a screen saver that I added to the device. It was called "Rapid Vision" and an R would continuously morph into a V and back in different parts of the screen. Every 1000th morph, it would turn into the word "Hello"
The last was when I left the company. I left an image of myself with mad animated eyes, that could be triggered by pressing a very particular (and highly unlikely) sequence of buttons on the keypad.
I haven't done anything like since, apart from a simulated flashing LED indicator, on a GUI, that showed me that the timer interrupt was still functioning.
It was labelled "GFL" (Gratuitous Flashing Light)
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