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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 22 2017, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the ABBA++ dept.

Spotted at Lobsters is a thread about a stackoverflow question on man; why does running "man -w" report "gimme gimme gimme" when run at 00:30?

This gets this response:

Pretty much the whole story is in the commit. The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print "gimme gimme gimme", because of the Abba song called "Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight":

Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today.

The commit in question, and more commentary over at HackerNews.

Anyone know of other good easter eggs that have cropped up unexpectedly and caught users out?


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday November 22 2017, @08:15PM (2 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday November 22 2017, @08:15PM (#600322) Homepage Journal

    It was in the 2Market home shopping CD. This was about the last of the multimedia CDROMs, just before the dot-com boom took off.

    It had catalogs for such merchants as land's end, and absolutely positively had to be delivered to end users by Black Friday.

    My coworker said "Hey Mike, look at this!" then clicked on his name in the credits. It displayed a picture of him holding his newborn son. "Do you want to put anything in it?"

    When you clicked on my name, you got a recording of me saying "Hi Mom!".

    This was a contract job. Medior - my employer - was a multimedia developer who mostly did sales presentation CDs for big businesses. 2Market was a new... market... for us. Medior pressed 250,000 CDs, then delivered them to the customer.

    Who discovered our Easter egg.

    The customer wanted the CDs repressed. Barry Schuler, the president of medior, got down on his knees and begged not to have to do that. The customer relented.

    The company celebrated by renting out a pool hall. During the party one of the execs asked me why I that that Easter egg was a good idea. Oopsy.

    I think apologized to Barry Schuler, who assigned me the special task of ensuring that no one ever did that again.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
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    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday November 23 2017, @12:19AM

    by edIII (791) on Thursday November 23 2017, @12:19AM (#600440)

    Dear lord, what was the problem? It's CREDITS. A man holding his baby, and you say some apple-pie Leave-It-To-Beaver message to your own mother? Yeah, Thank God they caught it right? Customers would've been trying to find you to kill you, death threats sent to corporate, and the Pope issues a formal condemnation.

    You know, that ISN'T an Easter Egg. Sorry, don't think it qualifies after thinking about it. Sounds like a novel and interesting way to show credits for work that *shouldn't* be controversial.

    That customer didn't need a sense of humor, but the jaws of life on their backside to remove their head.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @09:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @09:36AM (#600588)
    It wasn't actually a bad idea. Unless it somehow caused people's machines to crash or hang.

    And I don't consider it an easter egg at all, just fancier and more interesting credits (which many other software have). Look at the credits for movies nowadays too. More people actually stay back to watch them.

    Stuff like the sony CD rootkit on the other hand deserves sending people to jail for.