[ale] OFFTOPIC: M$ Easter Eggs.

hirsch at mathcs.emory.edu hirsch at mathcs.emory.edu
Fri Jul 30 14:52:59 EDT 1999


Nomad the Wanderer <nomad at orci.com> wrote:
> 
> ok,
>   I'm arguing with some M$ drones again.  They seem to SWEAR that
> all MS products are mean and lean, no bloat. (brainwashing is great).
> At any rate, I'm trying to find an egg I've seen once.  There's a M$
> product that installs a 65Meg .dll file.  It's actually a .avi of the
> credits for the product.

Heh heh.  Check back issues of comp.RISKS for a great explanation of MS bloat. 
Some guy ran MS code through a kind of "reverse linker" to find out what was
inside.  In particular, he know of functionally equivalent programs of around
100K and the MS program was over 500K.  It turned out they had a ton of junk in
there.  Stubs for functions that were never called.  Every error message in the
win API, even though they are not necessary.  It was a joy to read.

Sorry I don't have the exact reference, but I think it was in the last year.

Some other issues of comp.RISKS discuss blaot and easter eggs.

--Michael






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