I was doing some integration and checking my results using Excel. Look what happens when x should be zero

I was using Excel yesterday for some simple probability work, and what I was calculating as the standard deviation wasn't the same as what STDEV() was giving me. What I was doing was calculating STDEVP().

Difference shown below

Free Office developer event in London

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-GB&eventid=1032301774

http://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/en/register.aspx

Several products available for download

I am going to download Office Professional Plus for my home laptop - There will come a point when I rebuild the machine on 2003 Server R2

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/default.mspx

but am not sure whether to wait until IE7 and Office 2007 are released. I also need to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005 and install SQL 2005 SP1. Or do I install Window Longhorn Server Beta 2 and treat the machine as a beta machine.

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3608386

I have commented on this previously

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,35888a0f-c06a-4e6c-a818-5d4871ed35b3.aspx

but came across a similar problem in Excel today. A trader is using the INT() function to remove decimal places. A number such as 23.59 will become 23. However, our solution (correctly I believe) interprets this as 24. It may be that the trader should've used ROUND().

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q196652/

http://officelive.microsoft.com/

Apparently only available for U.S. at the moment (yawn).

One interesting fact is that it would appear that you can register a domain name for free. A .com usually costs around £12/year  - I guess MS will attempt to encourage people to upgrade to the paid for service to subsidise this.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/officelive/default.mspx

I'm surprised by the lack of publicity surrounding this. Whenever a developer tool is released such as VS2005, I am inundated with information. I can't find much regarding Office Live.

http://news.com.com/Gates+Were+entering+live+era+of+software+-+page+2/2100-1016_3-5926237-2.html?tag=st.num

Tools like Outlook Web Access have been available for years (using AJAX before AJAX was invented). There will be 22 applications available - with one, "Mojo", allowing real time collaboration.

http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.co.uk/files/msft-live_mojo.wmv

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-16Office12Beta1PR.mspx

Only available to partners that pass the information worker competency

https://partner.microsoft.com/competency/iwsolutions/40021577

It's not yet available on MSDN download.

Microsoft announced this today

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-01PreviewSoftwareBasedPR.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/misc/11-01LiveSoftwareFS.mspx

I'm sure I've seen this in development - the following link looks familiar

http://www.live.com/

At the moment all that is on offer is a customizable homepage and a replacement for Hotmail. Seems a bit early to be launching  a beta - guess they are worried about Google and co getting too much publicity.

On its way is OneCare - I talked about this previously

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,8f69e4f8-de2c-4c2a-90d0-bf16932fa013.aspx

I wonder how much of this will be free - I reckon it will be a monthly pricing structure for apps such as OnceCare.

XBox Live arcade looks pretty interesting - I love the retro gaming

http://www.xbox.com/en-us/livearcade/default.htm

It's interesting to see Microsoft now starting to offer some of its services over the web. In the past Office was seen as too monolithic to be offered over the web - maybe Office 12 will be different.

Here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=57E27A97-2DB6-4654-9DB6-EC7D5B4DD867&displaylang=en