https://www.folklore.org/Signing_Party.html
So no "of course" about it.
Note also that Microsoft had a "no easter eggs" policy starting in the early 2000s. It's not really a Jobs thing.
There's a grain of truth to the grandparent comment but it is distorted by Occupy Wall Street ideology.
- the effects of it are clear
- there's basically no chance of unexpected side effects (I suppose in theory it could structurally weaken the case if the signatures were carved too deeply...)
- if a user stumbles upon it the intention is pretty clear and obviously harmless
- it's not something that might get snuck in without approval of senior management, because it's not hidden in that sense, so there is a limiter on how many of them accumulate and how complicated they might get
which help to explain why you might by policy forbid software easter eggs while still being an advocate for "signing your work".
What people will put up with in a hobbyist and small business environment is very different to what's acceptable in enterprise and beyond. It's all fun and games until someone has to sell to the US government...
Note that this was in the aftermath of a summer with multiple major XP security issues.
imagine your easter egg introduced a vulnerability. a blanket policy like that is literally the first document leadership signs and sends out.
It seems kinda harsh but it's important to remember the context: at the time, the security situation in Windows and Office was dire and it was (probably correctly) perceived as an existential threat to the company. I think "no Easter eggs" was as much for optics as for its actual effect on the codebase, a way to signal "we know about and stand behind every line of code that gets written; nothing is unaccounted for".
"... Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple ..."
It was probably driven by the same kind of pragmatic business drivers as the later Microsoft ban, i.e. the perception by the market of how "serious" Apple was as a company.
---
Edit: According to Gizmodo in 2012:
> He justified the credits ban as a way to avoid headhunters and other companies trying to poach Apple engineering talent. At a time when Apple was sinking rapidly, he said that it made no sense to make the life of the competition easier. He also argued that they were all responsible of the stuff they created in Cupertino. This was a complete change from the 1980s.
It's unlikely Jobs, having returned to an Apple in crisis, personally knew about some obscure ROM image, its location buried in secret assembly code. More likely, one of those "real people" removed it doing some cleanup.
Jobs routinely and publicly spoke about the amazing people who work for Apple. He spoke with Walt Mossberg about how important it is to build a great team and foster creativity.
“NewWorld” started with the iMac: only Open Firmware was in ROM and the classic Mac OS ROM was just a file on disk.
When a HW/SW team is shipping a new Mac and burning a ROM, that feels like an occasion to put in a picture of the team. When you’re not burning a ROM and the picture would take up space on everyone’s disk…not so much.
when it comes to meta salaries, the old Mad Men scene about getting personal recognition for work comes to mind: "that's what the money is for!"
If I sell a cake for $3 that cost me $2 in ingredients/electricity/etc. to make, how is my $1 profit the theft of unpaid labor?
Probably a good call. Whenever I see an Easter Egg in software, part of me thinks “cool! That’s fun and harmless!” And the other part of me, the professional part who is responsible for releasing working software on time and minimizing risks, gasps and thinks “what if it wasn’t harmless? What if it triggered a subtle bug that had to be patched and put an entire device’s shipping timeline at risk!” What are you going to write in that postmortem that justifies adding unnecessary code (risk) to the product, just so you could be cool and fun?
I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but there are great, appropriate places for fun and whimsy, like personal hobby projects, not your company’s multimillion dollar product.
People often really deify Steve Jobs, but I dunno. I really like the years the Mac spent wandering the desert. I read things like this and feel like - even if it was a net win - Apple's culture and identity really ended up losing something with his return.
However, there were many wonderful things about this era. Jean Louis Gassée fought for expandable Macs, and his influence helped lead to the Macintosh II, which started a long series of expandable Macs that went unbroken until the “trash can” 2013 Mac Pro was released. System 7 might not have been the most reliable OS, but it had a wonderful UI. Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini promoted solid UI/UX principles and guidelines. HyperCard is from this time period. Apple’s Advanced Technology Group with Larry Tesler, Alan Kay, and many others worked on very interesting projects such as the Dylan programming language and the SK8 environment. OpenDoc was an interesting attempt at making a component-based software platform.
There was also this cozy, whimsical feeling of the classic Mac OS that got lost during the transition to Mac OS X, though I’m greatly appreciative of Mac OS X.
I’m a fan of “interregnum” Apple and also 1997-2011 Apple when Steve Jobs returned, but I’m not much of a fan of Tim Cook’s Apple. This is when I felt Apple has changed dramatically from its roots. Apple is financially the most successful it’s ever been, but the Mac no longer has the same feeling it once had back in the 1990s or the 2000s. Apple has gone from the Mac company to the iPhone company now.
...now do the Black Monolith.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirren...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/12/amiga-history-part-5...
Now that I wonder where I could learn RE? Where do I even start? Got any recommendation of online tutorial or book or something?
Reversing more modern software is tricky. I wrote a couple articles a while back about hacking a Gamecube game that you might enjoy:
https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/01/17/hacking-super-monk...
https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/02/28/hacking-super-monk...
Accompanying HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26315368
So you can see that "The Team" is indeed a single string, starting with the length of 8 (encoded as 0x08), followed by the string "Break at Event Match - Native" with length of 29 (encoded as 0x1D)
0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25068903/what-are-pascal...
I doubt there will be anyone digging through the EFI or whatever of a MacBook Air in 30 years. If there’s even something there to be found.
But that's the thing right there. We won't know until someone does the search.
But they’d rather you not really see through the product abstraction layer anymore. The Product People want to control the full image of the product and it’s just safest to de-humanize it in case that list is too big or people on that list become undesirables or whatnot.
I’m thinking about what this might look like today. Maybe a neat Easter egg in my iPhone that every time I activate it, it shows me a few people at random who played a role in development. I’d love it, but I imagine this would offend the high tastes of the Product People.
I think it's what I pick up on when I feel annoyed at the emulated soul they try to instil with their design/branding/commercials.
I think another example, sibling to easter eggs, would be April Fools. Mind you I hate April Fools, but the soul was sterilized as they Risk Managed their way to jokes/pranks that were guaranteed to be safe.
I don’t know if the message was edited, but GP addressed this with “Maybe… it shows me a few people at random who played a role in development.” Anyway, you could also show thousands of names/faces rapidly but still meaningfully, or let the user explore them slowly. Feels like the other responses are more accurate than it simply being about the quantity of people.
Oh, and you would get a red mark on your "HR P&D record" for the 'Secure Software Policy' violation.
(Shit.. I hated myself writing the above, but it's true)
In 2001 though, we would all laugh if we would have 'caught' the devs doing something cool like this!
ryeguy_24•8h ago
Cthulhu_•7h ago
But I suppose also there's less fun allowed, the article mentions this easter egg was removed in 1997 when Jobs returned.
classichasclass•7h ago
grishka•7h ago
- modern screens are higher resolution, and so require much larger image resources.
- modern OSes contain all translations in them. In the 90s it was common to have language-specific versions that only contain that language and maybe English.
In the specific case of macOS, it also contains double the code it needs because it runs on both x86 and ARM.
BenjiWiebe•7h ago
On Windows, you typically have to install language packs to get more languages.
Also, how many image resources does Windows-the-OS have, and how large are they? There are some, but the largest I can think of right off are the device icons in the hardware & printers screen. And most of those get installed later since they are part of the driver.
philistine•6h ago
mschuster91•6h ago
I just did a "ncdu -x --exclude Volumes --exclude Users /" on my 15.5 (side rant: why the hell is the exclusion necessary to prevent ncdu going into an infinite recursion loop? -x should keep it on the same filesystem, no crossing mountpoints)... and well.
800 MB in printer drivers (/Library/Printers), 425 MB in audio loops (/Library/Audio/Apple Loops), probably 500 MB in various AI models in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks (/MediaAnalysis.framework, /CoreSceneUnderstanding.framework, /CVNLP.framework, /TextRecognition.framework, /CoreHandwriting.framework), around 2 GB of other AI models in /System/Library/AssetsV2 (/com_apple_MobileAsset_LinguisticData, /com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_Siri_Understanding, /com_apple_MobileAsset_Trial_Siri_SiriTextToSpeech), 800 MB in /System/Library/LinguisticData, a whopping 550 MB in fonts in /System/Library/Fonts (of which Apple Color Emoji.ttc alone consumes 180 MB of data?!).
So it's at least 2.5 GB of AI models alone. Crazy. I mean, props to Apple for offering local models that work without internet, that's far from a given these days (sad enough). But the lowest-spec MBA clocks in at 256 GB disk space... having to waste 1% on AI alone and more on all the other stuff? That's ridiculous.
Someone•6h ago
I don’t think 2.5 GB is a lot nowadays. Xcode is over 12 GB, iMovie over 4 GB, MS Word 2 over GB
> having to waste 1% on AI alone
Is that ‘having to’? I thought those models only get downloaded after you give permission to do so.
Same for some other stuff, I think. /Library/Printers is 12 MB on my system, for example and /Library/Audio 584 kB.
mschuster91•5h ago
Word is ridiculous, agreed. Xcode isn't mandatory (although I'd LOVE to have it ship without tons of mandatory SDKs, emulators and god knows what else makes up the 12 GB) and I'm not sure if iMovie is.
> Is that ‘having to’? I thought those models only get downloaded after you give permission to do so.
I can't remember having ever given macOS the permission to install Siri and the likes.
> /Library/Printers is 12 MB on my system, for example and /Library/Audio 584 kB.
Indeed, tried on another machine, no printer drivers there. Probably the culprit is HP, their drivers suck balls. /Library/Audio however, that's just the same size on my M2 MBA as it is on my 2019 MBP.
noisy_boy•6h ago
These people are Computing Archeologists - I don't know if that is a formal category but that is how I think of them. They go deeper into software and hardware of the past and bring back such gems before those are lost forever to the tides of e-waste.
johnklos•6h ago