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Microsoft's OOXML Formulas Could Be Dangerous
hill101 writes "According to Rob Weir's blog, Microsoft's 325-page OOXML specification for spreadsheet formulas is deeply flawed. From basic trigonometric functions that forget to specify units, to statistical functions, to critical financial functions — the specification does not contain correct formulas that could possibly be implemented in an interoperable way. Quoting Mr. Weir: 'It has incorrect formulas that, if implemented according to the standard, may cause loss of life, property, and capital... Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it.'"
if implemented according to the standard, may cause loss of life, property, and capital...
Didn't you read your Office EULA?
Microsoft specifically disclaims any damage relating to loss of life, property, or capital.
Commenting without reading the background information?! Good god - not on /. Please say it ain't so!!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Pffft....as if this has ever been much concern to software manufacturers before.
Every EULA has boilerplate text denying all responsibility , and you'd be mad to trust any results from software implicitly. Double check it yourself , even if it's just a few corner cases.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
...the first to say:
Nothing newto see here, please move along.
Just another product that's supposed to mature after extensive paying-user-beta-testing.
And hey - see: This ist just the OPEN specification which is used to implement OOXML-support in third-party software. This does not in any way mean that MS itself implemented OOXML that way... hinthinthint...
That's crazy. According to the article someone implemented nCk as some sort of average deviation? wtf?
The trouble is that the politicians standardizing on this spec will look only at its length and declare it to be good. Maybe Microsoft made the specification long with that intent in mind.
Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it.
What percentage of those who praise ODF specifications actually read it? Or any other specification? I would imagine it is a small percentage.
I doubt anyone is surprised. How can you possibly fast track a 325 page document, giving the public only a time amount of time to check it, then expect it to be perfect.
Man, I really really get annoyed at Microsoft.
I wish it was that "good". :-(
The OOXML spec seems to be a dump of the MS Office data formats, so it should already be decades old. But sure, let us not assume malice when stupidity will suffice as explanation. I mean, we don't speak about condemned criminal here, do we? Oh, wait...
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Microsoft to prostitution in ten posts, is that a record?
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
I don't know about you, but I view this as being a very GOOD thing.
Because the format was an "open" standard, the serious flaws present in the format were quickly and correctly identified by third parties outside of Microsoft.
If it had been a trade secret, it could have been bundled into a product, and assumed to be reliable by its users. Instead, it's been exposed for what it is.
If anything, this proves that open formats are a good idea.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
>>How can you possibly fast track a 325 page document, giving the public only a time amount of time to check it, then expect it to be perfect.
Damned if we know.
Signed,
The US Congress
The trig functions take arguements in radians, and the arctrig functions return radians. This doesn't ever need to be said - it's goddamn assumed by anyone who knows what they are doing. Unless degrees are specifically mentioned, you always assume it's radians. ALWAYS. I might as well complain that when I press the pi button on my calculator it outputs a number but doesnt specify whether it's in base10 or something else...
If someone thinks that these functions even MIGHT work with degrees, than they should NOT be implementing them for anything that might cause the "loss of life, property, and capital". Leave the important stuff like that to professionals.
Now that MS are the only ones who are allowed to change the standard, we must
a) wait until MS change the standard
b) then progress it through the "approvals" procedure
c) find out again if there are any problems (and go back to a)
d) implement these changes
And when it comes to WordSpacingLikeWord95 or whatever, how has this being "open" helped? People have asked what it means and been told nothing useful.
Oh, and doesn't this show that if MS had opened up the standard for perusal BEFORE filing it (like ODF did), wouldn't we have avoided this problem?
Capital and property I can see, but until stories start popping up about people dying because of spreadsheet errors, let's tone down the hyperbole, alright?
Who is the author, Rob Weir?
So a guy working on a different document format, for a company who competes with Microsoft, has unkind words? Color me shocked.
Uh... ODF doesn't define spreadsheet formats. There's no standard for spreadsheets in ODF. How is that "parroting the party line?"
The Online Slang Dictionary
While I think that the "loss of life, etc." part is a bit overboard, since nobody builds a mission-critical system on top of Excel (or do they...), I do think that the criticism is appropriate.
Anybody keeping a comprehensive and up-to-date list (or list of lists) of specific things that are wrong with OOXML? I see a bunch of scattered ones here and there. Of course, I've also wished there were a comprehensive list of specific "bad" things that MS has done; it would make demonstration of their unscrupulousness that much easier.
Yet, at any rate. IIRC it's a work in progress.
l a
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/About_OpenFormu
It may be open, but it is not free, i.e. the required changes can not be done by third parties or by a committee and then used by Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't do anything that would hurt its embrace and extend business model, and OOXML follows that logic as well(it's so huge and flawed that no one dares using it).
Billg: "That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft."
Seriously though: If this OOXML system has so many holes in it, why haven't they just adapted the already-written Excel software that they have? Microsoft doesn't have the best track record when it comes to writing new stuff: if anything, they're famous for keeping legacy code, no? I'm just wondering why this isn't the procedure they're applying here, is all.
*Disclaimer: I am not anti-Mac - I work as a Mac sysadmin. Just couldn't think of a better analogy.
http://xkcd.com/313/
Let MS do exactly what they want, they seem quite successful at it, if it bites them in the butt, so be it. I would just like our own software freedoms to be preserved. I have no intention on producing anything with their format, I'm sure I'll eventually have to read it, but the chances that the receiver of a document is liable for inaccurate content within that document seems very low.
What is the motivation, since I'm sure there must be a good one, to do this free work for MS?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
> ...in general:
_ 06.asp
l ity-Insurance.html
>
> * We trust all hand tools like wrenches and sockets to be exactly the size on the label
> * We trust all of our doctor's opinions whether or not a second opinion is recommended
> * We trust our math applications to do math properly
> * We trust our spell checkers to check properly
>
> In general, we trust the things we by to work as expected... as advertised.
http://www.oandp.com/edge/issues/articles/2006-08
http://www.brajeshwar.com/finance/insurance/Liabi
These links refer to the concept you're talking about. The second refers to the UK Consumer Protection Act, but the concept is general and fairly well accepted. From the first link:
"...any product that is sold comes with an implied warranty of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose; and, just by selling a product, a seller is implicitly promising that: (1) the product is merchantable, i.e., fit for the ordinary purposes for which such products are to be used, provided that the seller is in the business of selling products of that kind; and (2) the product is fit for a particular purpose, provided that the seller, at the time of sale, knew the particular purpose for which the product was required, and the buyer relied upon the seller's skill or judgment in selecting a suitable product for that purpose."
This hasn't been successfully applied to software cases like this, but the issue hasn't be ruled out either. But it's hardly a stretch to expect that software such as a spreadsheet comes with an implied warranty that ordinary financial and statistical calculations are properly performed.
> From basic trigonometric functions that forget to specify units
Amazing. That's the sort of mistake you'd expect from a First Year Computer Science Major, but not from a Second Year. This isn't the first time Microsoft have done this. Even for the Windows API, the code trumped the documentation. The best way to find out what a feature did was to write test programs to poke at it. Heck. Until recently DirectX needed three pages of goobleydo-gook to start up. These people just don't get APIs, period.
In Microsoft Visual Studio when you press F1 Help it comes up with a list that includes "How to Write Good Code". Yes, by Microsoft. Even in the early hours of the morning, it gets a smirk if not a gufaw or a laugh. Microsoft are not good programmers. Haven't been for a long time. Anyone worth their salt will launch a Start Up, or at least join a company offering reasonable growth and prospects. Microsoft is like a Pyramid Scheme. The people that joined at the start did very well. As for the people that joined late... not a chance. Which makes you wonder about the ones that joined anyway. Read the Book "Microserfs".
> Ecma
Why didn't Ecma pick it up? These Standard Bodies are in-name only. When a "Member" wants to push something through, it gets pushed through. Then the Member's sales reps can go to the Government body and say "Look! We have an Ecma approved Standard" and t he Government worker ticks the "Uses Industry Standards" box on the tender.
One of the funnier "standards" was a simulation standard called HLA. It was approved before anyone had built a proof of concept. People bet their careers on it and the whole government was ordered to embrace it. The only problem: When they finally built it, it didn't work. *OUCH!*
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
From basic trigonometric functions that forget to specify units/i?
Trignometric functions are unitless to begin with. They are ratios.
Someone failed the math class where they explained that an angle is a "dimensionless derived unit" . Explaining, short version for the clicky-impaired: angles are the ratio between two measurements of length -- the length of an arc and the radius of said arc.
It got off to a bad start. For the rest of it, it moans about bad revision and wrong formulas, with some reason, but without a lot of substance.
I am pro-ODF, but this article is worthless.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I don't think that you can apply a EULA to a standard. The product (MS-Office) yes, but the standard (OOXML) no.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The BBC have published an article by FSFE also explaining the general problems of MS's non-open OOXML format (and proprietary formats in general).
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
As a developer I occasionally find myself questioning my tools.
A compiler/linker may contain errors, the IDE may do funny things etc.
Admittedly most of the time it's because I've missed something somewhere, but there have been occasions where the tools have been at fault.
The software is ultimately written by humans and will as such necessarily contain errors, and should therefore not be implicitly trusted.
Concerning the Pentium bug: there are plenty of bugs in processors. Ask NASA. They refuse to use anything but old, thoroughly tested hardware that won't suddenly show unexpected behavior, ruining an expensive mission. The shuttles stopped using magnetic core memory in 1990. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
-Nikolaj
Uh, oh. Microsoft's specification is flawed? To whom good sir is this news?
Slashdot's slogan "News for nerds" would imply that anything posted on Slashdot is 'news', which usually is characterised by 'information'. Shannon's information theory dictates that in order for something to contain information, the probability of you not knowing the value of the message being passed is high. The probability of MS's specification being flawed and dangerous: approaching 1. Ergo, this is not news!
Oh and don't get me even started on the "Stuff that matters" part here..
"Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it."
Reminds me of something I once heard a congressman rationalize in reference to a bill he just voted for containing several lame provisions (many with which he did not even agree): "Do you have any idea what reading a bill like that would entail?" I do. It would entail you doing your fucking job.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Why is it "rotate 90degrees clockwise" then? Why not "pi/2"?
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 48 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
Assuming Rob Weir is right, I certainly hope that ISO insists on fixing OOXML, and rejects it as ISO standard if it is not fixed.
But that remains to be seem, maybe Microsoft has enough clout to get it approved anyway. It seems that ECMA did not care much about quality when accepting OOXML, lets hope ISO does better.
C - the footgun of programming languages
A warning from the guys who brought us Executable Code via Outlook Express and infected web pages via ActiveX controls?
Talk about hypocrisy . . .
Type in =SIN(30 degrees) if you want degrees. I'm sorry, Excel doesn't pander to high school students. In the real world, when the sine of an angle is mentioned, it is SUPPOSED to be radians. Every programming language I know accepts arguments for trig functions as radians.
The article, or at least this part, is FUD.
By default, the calculator in Windows 2000 uses degrees. Enter "30", press "sin" and you get 0.5. To be fair, at least it displays the argument format via a set of radio buttons (where it can be altered as well). ;-)
From this, I infer that it is not always assumed at Microsoft that trig functions take arguments in radians. So if the same corporation presents a "standards" document where the argument format is undefined, I'd also ask for clarification
C - the footgun of programming languages
After all, they did not BUY this from someone else. They came up with it on their own. We all know, Microsoft's best products were purchased from someone else. Excel for example.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Okay. Nice rant. However, let me capitalize this for the mentally impaired: DO NOT ASSUME ANYTHING IN A STANDARD DEFINITION.
That's the whole idea. A standard is meant to *AVOID* the pitfalls of assumption (which tend to be different for different people)
So uhm. Get real.
And if you're the professional you say you might possibly be, then your calculator example is even more retarded, since any sort of professional scientific calculator *will* actually tell you what baseX it's currently working in. (Mine sure as hell does). Most even have default buttons to switch it to Base2, Base8, Base10 and Base16.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Seems pretty obvious its PR stunt to drag the term 'OO' down. Come on, microsoft coming out with an Open Source project.... give me a break. That would scare the hell out of their corporate consumers.
Even if its not a PR stunt, it will probably bring some negative connotations on the term 'OO'.
Aha. You very nicely forgot the whole incident of NASA losing a Mars probe due to someone 'forgetting' whether it was centimeters or inches as their base unit...
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Other measurement systems use different units for angles, for example degrees.
In short, a thing being dimensionless does not mean no units are used to measure it.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
I agree with the general point that the spec. should be more carefully defined.
However, in practise does MS office not act as a reference implementation to clear
up ambiguities?
Amen. Radians are used for number crunching, but Geographic Information Systems lean towards degrees, military systems measure depression in mils and the steepness of roads is measured as a gradient. And as you say, textbooks use degrees and that's what most people learn. Many people won't even know what a radian is. Given that and the target audience of Excel, I would have guessed Excel's trig functions to be in degrees. (They're actually radians).
A spec is supposed to call this stuff all out clearly. It's not supposed to be left as guesswork for the reader.
And the spec is going to include it. Maybe that is why ODF doesn't supply it.
So, rather than get it WRONG, they are leaving it out.
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 54 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
Sounds good to me... Sounds like I, for the most part, would have voted the same ways... and #26 is definitely a plus! almost always a persons real feelings on true civil liberties is inverse of what the bigoted and unbalanced socialist aclu would "rate" them. and by all means drill in ANWR!!!! Please!
Absolutely not. A standards specification should stand on its own, or reference other standards. "MS office" is an implementation, not a standard. It can't be used to define a standard any more than the wheelbase of your car can define what a roadway should be.
Further, if ooxml is as "free" as MS would have politicians believe, then referring back to a proprietary product destroys that "freedom". (It's really not free, anyway, but just for the sake of discussion...)
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Again i agree that in an ideal world it should stand on it own. But absolutely defined specs are hard (see spec for kilogram for example) hence the need for reference implementations.
I guess my real point is pragmatically with the spec + office(to clear up a few ambiguities ) it should be able to create compatible programs.
Is it is ideal? No. Is it workable? probably?
How can a 'pro-life' government be such a killing machine? It was elected by hypocrits and is run by hypocrits.
Just goes to show you:
hypocritical citizens + democracy = hypocritical government
garbage in, garbage out.
You have to memorize the results again even when using degrees, because tan(90 degrees) is not 1. It is undefined.
And of course, the results are the same, no matter whether using radians or degrees as units. For example, 180 degrees = pi radians, so sin(180 degrees) = sin(pi) = 0.
"Hi everybody!"
"Hi Doctor Nick!"
Oh,
0 3171033.aspx
And you can't use Office in a medical device or nuclar recator, either:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA1021
When other people claim a standard is fully defined, it means that all the standard use cases are defined* - units, expected parameters, optional parameters, etc. In the real world, nobody uses radians. Radians are used by engineers & scientists. Pilots, backyard builders, school children, and the occasional office worker use degrees.
To be honest, nobody cares if OOXML defines SIN(x) to take radians, degrees, gradians, or hyperbian-arc-vectors. What we care about is that someplace in the fully defined standard, OOXML needs to say:
DEFINE: SIN(x[,unit])
- D: Degree - unit of angle defined as 1/360th of a full circle
- R: Radian - defined as the angle at which the length of an arc is the same as the radius of the arc. 1/2Pi of a full circle ~ 57.3 degrees
- G: Gradian - unit of angle defined as 1/400th of a full cicle.
Missing unit parameters are defaulted to Radians. Unknown unit parameters will result in a type error.That's how a proper standard useable for international work in multiple fields is defined. You do not just dump your US help file into the standard & call it done. I have had to deal with a lot of standards, both Military and Industrial, the OOXML standard is well below the grade of the average Mil or Ind standard.
That's before you get to the point of inclusions in the standard like "Must Replicate Office 98 Behaviour for this feature". Now, if there was a reference to another standard that defined Office 98 behaviour, then it's not a problem. However, I don't see a reference included in the OOXML standard. Worse, for dates, OOXML defines the proper behaviour as their broken implimentation of the Gregorian Calendar - a direct conflict to the existing ISO standards.
I don't care who sponsored this standard, it's not a properly writen standard. It has huge holes & it's contradictory to several existing standards. Either one should get it rejected. If MS cleans it up so it meets the actual requirements of a "STANDARD" then they should get approved. If they leave it as the crap heap it is, it should be rejected.
*- if passing sqr(-6) as a unit works in the implimentation, that's not the standards problem. However, if the standard fails to mention the default unit type & the existance of the unit parameter, then there's an issue.
You mean like supporting the iraq war then not supporting it? Yea, who would support idiots like that...
than no car at all?
No, it is safer to have no car.
Is it better to have false security or no security? No security is generally held to be better.
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 41 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
Um, no, the subject was the fact that he's basically admitted to visiting a prostitute at the exact same time he was ranting and raving about how gay marriage would destroy straight marriage.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Degrees? Great choice. It's not subjective: it neatly fits the 360 days in a year.
* We trust our spell checkers to check properly
I did and thats why I go a C in English, because, ironically, my English teacher wouldn't accept the English spellings of words that my cheap o spell checker changed the USA spellings to ( color to colour, tire to tyre, meter to metre, ect).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
At least the guy got laid, unlike you, a hairy-palmed, masturbating little troll who sits around waiting to post crap on here, while stroking your tiny dick with rusty tweezers.
What an effing head case.
OK, OK, after further reading NOW I understand the argument, that a spec shouldn't leave anything to doubt.
:)
The AVEDEV function is implemented correctly in Excel 2007. I just checked.
Yes, yes, Microsoft and ECMA rushed it.
Someone failed the math class where they explained that an angle is a "dimensionless derived unit"
When you give the user the choice of commonly used alternatives, your program should remember what they chose. Overloading functions has been around for a very long time and it's shocking that M$ could screw something so fundamental.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
As a part of M$ ECMA fast track process ISO/IEC JTC1, Bureau of Indian Standards(BIS) a P-member of ISO has to vote on OOXML. The Discussions for this is going on now. You can see the Documents at http://www.odfalliance.in/OOXML.html
Here (Page 4, item 9b) M$ repeats again the same affirmation: "Ecma 376 contains full documentation for spreadsheet formulas"
Full documentation for Microsoft and ECMA = copy and paste of Excel formula Online Help
From Minutes of Meeting of BIS working group on wordprocessing ML held on May 07, 2007, with comments
Two beautiful points in MS response:
OOXML does not have a large number of features but is "feature rich".
"The statement was not that the size is due to the large number of features but "feature rich". The size of the document is also due to the fact that it is a fully defined specification." (note, OOXML is incomplete, inconsistent, and lacks semantic, ie, it is a street directory without a map)6000+4000 pages of OOXML specifications are needed because MS couldn't be bothered to ask Oasis to define spreadsheet formula's
"As an example, which was cited in the meeting but has not been captured in the minutes, is the specification for implementing formulas in Spreadsheets which is not present in ODF. In this case what would spreadsheet formula specifications be considered as if not a point of standardization."Some of those errors are quite stupid other are probably less of a problem, following is a demonstration on one function (ceiling) http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematic ally-.html
It's not like Microsoft is well known to the accuracy of the calculations in Excel to begin with, let alone how they translate to other formats. Here is a link to an (old) article discussing the suitability of excel for statistical calculations. If you search for references to the accuracy of calculations in excel, it becomes clear that this is not excel's stong point.
http://gcrc.ucsd.edu/biostatistics/Excel.pdf
The functions are consistent, they use the same units. YOU, as a programmer, AS YOU SHOULD, should not imply conversions in units that are not implied in the functions, or otherwise.
They are neither defined nor consistent and God help you if you try using the OOXML conversion function because it too is ill defined and wrong. They got it wrong BECAUSE they assumed so much and did not document any of it. Rob Weir documents the mistakes he found in painstaking detail. There will surely be more.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> Someone failed the math class where they explained that an angle is a "dimensionless derived unit". Explaining, short version for the clicky-impaired: angles are the ratio between two measurements of length -- the length of an arc and the radius of said arc.
Yeah, but what does that mean, exactly? Sure, they're not measured in m/s or something, but riddle me this: how many of 'em are in a circle?
2*pi? 360? 400? (radians, degrees & gradians, if you're wondering)
Oh, does that make just a tiny bit of difference? Might that just be the tiniest bit important? I mean, do you really think that sin(90) is the same in radians as it is in degrees? Next you'll tell me that you don't know that arcsin isn't even a function unless you take a branch cut of it and that it matters which one you take. Unless you like getting all your calculations wrong and making mathematicians tear their hair out.
But who am I kidding? You can pull quotes off of Wikipedia without understanding them at all! Me? Well, I cheated in some of my classes, so I probably don't even deserve this Bachelor of Science degree I have in mathematics. And I clearly don't know anything about them.
But you will have learned 90 degrees WAAAAY before the number "pi" turns up, never mind "pi by 2".
What are latitudes measured in? Degrees.
What are trajectories measured in? Degrees.
When you were introduced to the trig functions YOU WILL have concerned yourself with "degrees" used as the argument. Advanced maths people who are using taylor expansion (or maybe physicists who are advanced enough to do "rough approximation" and this really is degree level stuff nowadays) will use radians because NOW it makes sense. When you start with integrals of cyclic functions, you'll again use radians because it makes the maths easier.
But it WILL NOT be ALL MATHS BOOKS using radians. IT will be degrees and LATER ON when you're going in to advanced maths you will do radians because rather than using rote memory (or calculators), you'll be having to express equations and transform them, when the movement to units of radians removes a lot of redundant constant multipliers.
shut the fuck up
(just kidding, and besides, Iraq doesn't seem to currently be a member of JTC1/SC34)
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
my point (if it didn't come all clear like I thought it would) is that when nothing else is said angles are measured in m/m, i.e., radians; not in (pi/180 m/m == degree) or in (pi/200 m/m == grad).
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
What the crap? Killing machine? Are you referring to the couple of elk that would be inconvenienced by drilling AMWR? Cause last I checked, people were pretty upset about gas prices...and I'm sorry, but inconveniencing (and, yes, perhaps even killing) a few animals that I consider meat (note the part about them being animals...you know, the things we eat?) doesn't bother me too much when the result is oil from our own soil, and reducing our dependency on oil from the Middle East.
/. for having a bias towards tech/geeky news. It's stupid.
And the ACLU hates him? Good, cause I hate the ACLU. Stopping some crazy, expensive governmental plans for oil reduction that is doomed to failure? Sounds good to me.
Somehow, berating a REPUBLICAN senator for voting very...umm...REPUBLICAN seems kind of idiotic. Kind of like criticizing
Oh, and GP: in case you hadn't made the connection, the sin he was talking about was...prostitution. Not voting to kill elk. Just wanted to make that clear.
Oh, and by the way, I'm a grammar nazi - and it's hypocrite. And yes, I do think less of you and your comment because you can't spell right, or at least put forth the effort use a spell checker (Google Toolbar? FF2.0?).
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
They can't change the standard anymore. It's on fast-track, and the correction time has passed. Microsoft simply ignored all contradictions reported, making no correction.
Nobody can change it now, it will be accepted or rejected as is.
Rethinking email
...if they didn't drink the beer, and refrained from intimate contact with your women, they wouldn't get sick and need healthcare? ;)
Just that should be enough to deny it ISO certification.
I keep thinking about that Microsoftie who told the guy who was leaving 'my Dad died and it didn't affect my productivity'. He probably produced shit like OOXML instead of visiting his dying Dad.
That was the funniest thing I've read in a long time, and it can't be modded up. Sad.
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
Since you can't even figure out simple arithmetic rounding.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Kilogram: good example. The spec is "hard" because it is constantly refined to real-world acheivable precision, adding a few more decimal places every few years. This sometimes requires re-defining it as some real-world item that can be exactly reproduced anywhere. Precise laboratory definition provides more than a standard measure of weight, it also provides a standard measure of the quality of the laboratories that work to the standard. The whole purpose of any standard is (should be) to remove ambiguity.
Real standards are NOT hostage to the whim of a single company, but instead are guided by the whole industry. By referencing Office, MS can change the "standard" without going thru a standards process or industry body. And MS can do it without notice, since many of MS' licenses allow unnotified software updates.
Saying that the standard will "reference MS office" is no different than saying that MS Office IS the standard.
1."Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice." --Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Oh yes, and we also favor free crack for elementary school kids. It helps promote the homosexual agenda.
Back in the day, when I worked for an IC maker, we got a bunch of TSOP parts (with very fine lead spacing) back from the packaging house. They were unusable because whoever did the drawing didn't carry enough precision when translating from inches to millimeters, so the pins were not spaced correctly. Rounding matters.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Loss of Mariner 1 in 1962. Loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. Mistakes in the control software design led to situations where these spacecraft were lost.