Volunteers keep this virtual egg hunt running from March until May, so wistful egg-hunt wannabes have plenty of time to join the chase.
For egg hunting of another sort, visit The Easter Egg Archive, www.eeggs.com . Software designers refer to any benign, intentional surprise in their code as an “Easter egg.”
An example can be found in Microsoft Word 97. If you follow a very specific sequence of steps, you should be able to get a virtual pinball machine game to appear on your computer. (You use the “Z” key for the left flipper and the “M” key for the right flipper.)
Just before Easter 2005, more than 7777 surprising and amusing bits of secret software had been detected and reported on the Easter Egg Archive.
Not all programmers, of course, are as innocent as those basket-toting kids. So isn’t it possible for a few rotten eggs to imbed a surprise in their code that turns nasty?
David and Annette Wolf, who have been maintaining the archive since 1995, write that Easter Eggs are, by definition, harmless.
“If someone hid some destructive code in a piece of software,” the couple writes, “that would be considered a ‘virus’ or a ‘trojan horse,’ and certainly would not be an Easter Egg.”
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