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It's not a bug! It's unintended irony!
Published on May 18, 2006 By Zoomba In Windows Software
Here's a really funny way to break Notepad that a coworker showed me this morning. I bet this is one of those jokes that's been around for ages, but this was the first I ever heard of it, so it's new to me.

This actually works. It will not crash your computer, it just breaks Notepad in that it causes it to display very oddly. No perm damage comes of the following steps.

Here's how to do it:
1. Open up Notepad (not Wordpad, not Word or any other word processor)
2. Type in this sentence exactly (without quotes): "this app can break"
3. Save the file to your hard drive.
4. Close Notepad
5. Open the saved file by double clicking it.

Instead of seeing your sentence, you should see a series of squares. For whatever reason, Notepad can't figure out what to do with that series of characters and breaks

Again, it doesn't crash the app or anything, it's just a funny little twise of fate/unintended feature

Comments (Page 1)
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on May 18, 2006
Must be another easter egg.  But it works.  You guys have too much time on your hands.
on May 18, 2006
We're IT security, we're supposed to break things in interesting ways!
on May 18, 2006

We're IT security, we're supposed to break things in interesting ways!

I thought that was the IT network engineers.

on May 18, 2006
lol, thats odd indeed. On my computer, it showed up as symbols (chinese or Japanese, not sure which one).

So I took it to babble fish and got the following:

Simp Chinese: 桴 □the worried thoughts ash 挠 □□knocks □
Trad Chinese: 桴 獩 □the ash □湡戠 knocks happy
Japanese: 桴? ? Ash? ? ? 敲 歡

Quite interesting
on May 18, 2006
same
i think it's chinese
on May 18, 2006
googles translator said this
"After 獩 indignant grey harassment 湡 personal sounded Fun"
i translated it from simplified chinese
on May 18, 2006
You should submit this to eeggs.com <---A sweet site full of easter eggs
on May 18, 2006
this is really cool ! i tried it and it actully works, it is chinese but its only a bunch of random characters
on May 18, 2006
You don't even have to create the file with notepad!

It breaks on those characters when created by another editor or via the console!


Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
on May 18, 2006
Weird. It worked for me too.
on May 20, 2006
it works but for some reason when you open it and delete all the weird squares and type the same over, save, and open it dosn't do it. Weird.
on May 21, 2006
Yeah, I found the same thing... and after you do that, the next few times you try to create a new file with the same string, it won't work either.
on May 21, 2006
You don't have the asian fonts installed little-whip . It is Chinese
on May 21, 2006
It is Chinese


I see that on this computer. And you are right, on the work one, I did not have them installed, so they got squares. Mystery solved! Microsoft is selling out to the Chinese!
on May 21, 2006
No wonder why Microsoft delays their OSes.
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