The Watley Review reports on what people are finding in the Win 2000 and Win NT source code leaked from Microsoft:
“The profanity which pervades the code was the first thing to leap out at you,” said Paul Mayberry, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. “But people have been finding all kinds of strange things in that code.”
The code appears to have been used as a storage file of sorts where Microsoft employees parked other documents they were working on, including personal letters, salary records and disciplinary actions, and, most strikingly, a nearly complete romance novel in 13 chapters distributed among the code.
“There are several remarkable features about this text,” said Mayberry. “In the first place, it does not inspire confidence in the integrity and efficiency of Microsoft's coding to know that someone was able to insert a 30,000 word document with no apparent effects.”
The novel, entitled “Forbidden Love in the Evil Empire,” describes a torrid affair between improbably attractive coders working for a megacorporation similar to Microsoft. Several of the characters appear to be adaptations of Star Trek characters, and at least one, inexplicably, is covered in fur.
What a pity that the Whatley Review describes itself as “dedicated to the production of articles completely without journalistic merit or factual basis, as this would entail leaving our chairs or actually working.” Because I would have loved this to be true.
