Microsoft re-releases Office for Mac 2011 upgrade after fixing bugs
Microsoft yesterday re-released Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 2 (SP2) after fixing a bug that wormed into the original update.
Last Friday, three days after it first issued Office for Mac 2011 SP2, Microsoft yanked the upgrade from its automatic update service when it acknowledged a bug had corrupted the Outlook database on some machines.
In a post on the Office for Mac blog yesterday, Microsoft said the revised SP2 "fixes a number of issues," including the database corruption problem. Read more...
Finance software bug causes $217m in investor losses
A developer of financial software has agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle charges stemming from his concealment of a bug that caused about $217 million in investment losses.
Barr M. Rosenberg, 68, of Sea Ranch, California, developed the quantitative investment modeling software and put it into production in 2007 to help clients make investment decisions. The program captured and processed huge amounts of data contained in financial reports and other publicly available information to balance publicly traded company's earnings and valuation against common risk factors.
After pioneering the field and serving as the original developer, he went on to oversee code improvements over the next few years. Read more...
Moth in the machine: Debugging the origins of ‘bug’
It's an oft-repeated tale that the grand dame of military computing, computer scientist and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, coined the terms bug and debug after an incident involving Harvard University's Mark II calculator.
The story goes like this:
On September 9, 1945, a Harvard technical team looked at Panel F and found something unusual between points in Relay 70. It was a moth, which they promptly removed and taped in the log book. Grace Hopper added the caption "First actual case of bug being found," and that's the first time anyone used the word bug to describe a computer glitch. Naturally, the term debugging followed.
Yes, it's an oft-repeated tale, but it's got more bugs in it than Relay 70 probably ever had. Read more...