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Excel 2007, 65,535 displays as 100,000 and testing

From Risks:

According to a *NY Times* blog (Pogue’s Posts), Excel 2007 for Windows doesn’t cope properly when multiplying two numbers that should yield 65535 (http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/a-big-excel-boo-boo/).
Instead, it gets 100,000.

For a very nice explanation and discussion of its relevance, see Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software blog http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/26b.html

Have a look at Joel’s blog, and pay especial attention to the talk about testing – the fact that the bug appears to be in the presentation layer, and the testing is probably going to take results from before the presentation layer kicks in.

One more thing occurs to me. If there is this sort of bug that happens on 12 out of 18446744073709551616 possible cases, and it has only just been found, how many more are out there?

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Chocolate!

Wow! Morrisons Petrol station in Aber is selling Lindt Excellence 85%. I went in there for 4 pints of milk, and spotted this on the impulse buy rack, and just had to have some – it’s been too long since I had some real chocolate.
I must say it will not be to everyone’s taste, and you can only eat a very little at a sitting – one square (quite large) is enough for me, but it’s *real* chocolate, with an interesting flavour texture.
Oh, and it cost a few pence more than 4 pints of milk.

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Stop telling me about bum_tnoo7@hotmail.com

Please people, stop telling me that bum_tnoo7@hotmail.com (or bu_tnoo7) is a hacker and I shouldn’t add him to my facebook account.

It’s already wasted far too much bandwidth, the message itself that is forwarded is technically rubbish, and you yourself are being used by the “virus” as the propagation mechanism.

Oh, and before I get a load of comments on “how do you know”, “what makes you an expert” – I teach a course on hacking to the Masters courses, and if you don’t believe me, then do some research yourself – http://www.sophos.com/security/hoaxes/facebook_hacker.html

Important

If you receive this or a similar message, please do not forward it to your friends and colleagues. Forwarding unsolicited chain letters wastes time and bandwidth.