Hidden features you never knew about

I dunno how long this has been around for, but I just found out (via Ryan) about some funky hidden emoticons in Skype. Seems the guys over @ Skype have a sense of humor. With the new versions of Skype (2+), there’s 8 new emoticons, and thankfully they’re a little more ‘new age’, than the old dreary smiley faces.

Unfortunately these aren’t available on the standard drop down emoticon menu - you’ll have to manually type in the codes for now.

(bandit)
(mooning)
(toivo)
(rock)
(headbang)
(drunk)
(finger)
(smoking)

This one, I know, has been around for quite a bit. Open up Microsoft Word, type in

=rand(200,99)

and push enter. It spits out 189 pages of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” It’s clearly a hardcoded entry in MS Word, because if you change the parameters, ie change 200 to 50, it decreases the amount of generated pages.

I looked around for a bit for other ‘hidden features’ and I discovered something pretty cool. Did you know that the ‘97 version of Microsoft Excel came out with a hidden version of Flight Simulator?… and the ‘97 Microsoft Word with a version of Pinball? Rocking :)

Easter eggs are messages, graphics, sound effects, or an unusual change in program behavior, that mainly occur in a software program in response to some undocumented set of commands, mouse clicks, keystrokes or other stimuli intended as a joke or to display program credits. An early use of the term Easter egg was to describe a message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code.

Two well-known early Easter eggs found in some Unix operating systems caused them to respond to the command “make love” with “not war?” and “why” with “why not”

All these anomalies are known as ‘Easter Eggs‘. There’s easter eggs to be found on DVD’s, on PC Chips, in games… everywhere.

I like the fact that within places where you’d least expect it, there’s a nifty little hidden feature… Keeps things interesting eh?