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Is Microsoft living in the past?
A letter from Microsoft arrived today, kindly reminding me that my “Open License”
of Visual Studio/MSDN Professional (or whatever its current name is) will expire soon. On page 2, it says (translation and underline by me):
“Upgrade assurance of the licenses: With Open Value, thanks to Software Assurance, you secure for you already today future product versions like those coming in 2006: Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft “Office 12”.
[…]
Extended Software Assurance Services: starting March 2006, you have also available…”
Maybe someone at Microsoft should occasionally read through these standard texts…
Oh, and their 01805 phone number costs no longer 12, but 14 cents – when will the first official warning letter arrive? 
Little calculation imprecision of 53%
Update: Im Excel-Team-Blog wurde eine kleine Erklärung veröffentlicht (englisch), es beträfe “nur” die Anzeige, nicht das zwischengespeicherte Ergebnis. Dumm also “nur” für die, die auch mal Werte anzeigen lassen und nicht nur damit rechnen…
Update 2: Ein Hotfix ist mittlerweile verfügbar.
Microsoft Excel 2007, a spreadsheet calculation program for which the correctness of calculations is not quite unimportant, messes up some multiplications that should result in 65,535, e.g.
850 * 77.1 = 100,000
How it gets the idea to turn a result that has the lowest 16 bits (integer representation) all set to 1 into 100,000 (decimal) – and only with some pairs of numbers, not all – I have no idea. Maybe they wanted to hide another bug or flaw this way… anyway, that’s become a complete flop. They want to release a patch as soon as possible…
Maybe it was just a test to see if people are actually using Excel 2007 already and not stick with older versions (which probably many companies do)…?
(via Golem.de)
Update: The Excel Team Blog published a little explanation, according to which “only” the display is affected, not the stored result. So it’s “only” bad for those who have results displayed and don’t just calculate…
Update 2: A hotfix is now available.