Spugee wrote,
>Yes Yes .. it'd have to be more obvious to be a MS programatically
>planned thing. .. there are MS programmers who hate MS - Like I think it
>was Word 97 or maybe it was Word 2000 .. youd open a new doc put in "I
>hate Bill Gates" and then highlight and select Theusarus .. and youd
>get, "I'll drink to that" as an answer. I dont thinnk this is that type
>of easter egg either ...
This sounds a lot like an incident I experienced at the U of O with
Microsoft Word for the Macintosh (I think it was the last version before
Office 97 came out).
I arrived at my job at Services for Student Athletes one day to find several
students up in arms and ready to start a crusade--it seems that one of
them had discovered that when you type a certain violent racist wish into
Word for Mac, the thesaurus suggests "I'll drink to that" as a
replacement.
It seemed strange to me that Microsoft would have let something that
severe escape their product testing, but this was shortly after Microsoft got
into big trouble when the Korean edition of Encarta was found to contain
disparaging remarks about Korea. So I went down the hall to the Mac lab
and tried it myself.
Sure enough, Word's thesaurus behaved exactly as alleged.
So I tried some experiments, changing first one word and then another. No
change...it still suggested "I'll drink to that" as a replacement.
Eventually it turned out that it would suggest "I'll drink to that" as a
replacement for ANY sentence beginning with "I'd like".
The students were considerably mollified when I showed them that, and
quickly lost interest in their crusade. I don't recall if I ever found out
why they had tried the thesaurus on such an offensive sentence in the
first place.
Suggesting "I'll drink to that" as a replacement for "I'd like (insert any
text here)" wasn't the wisest thing that programmer ever did, but it
hardly counts as evidence of MS-hatred or racism.
- Neil Parker
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