Re: Gnumeric -vs- Excel re: Statisticsl problem solving

Rather interesting!
Shows what people with interest and integrety can do.
A good comparison of Catheral vs Bazzar mentality.

Even the random nuberber generator problem is being worked on for gnummeric2.
Even then it is only a problem for special cases.

Thanks Stanley.

           Bob Pelz

On Saturday 04 September 2004 09:12 pm, Stanley Long wrote:
> Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software:
> The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel
>
> B. D. McCullough - Dept. of Decision Sciences
> LeBow College of Business, Drexel University, Philadelphia
> http://www.csdassn.org/software_reports/gnumeric.pdf
>
> "The open source spreadsheet package "Gnumeric" was such a good clone
> of Microsoft Excell that it even had errors in its statistical
> functions similar to those in Excel's statistical functions. ...
> Gnumeric v1.1.2 has largely fixed its flaws, while Microsoft has not
> fixed its errors through many successive versions.
> ... use Gnumeric rather than Excel."
>
> [ tests & charts clipped ]
>
> "One might have wondered whether there is something inherehently
> difficult a fixing statistical bugs in spreadsheet package. It is
> reasonable for the developer of a spreadsheet package not to fix errors
> in a timely fashion? The answer to this question is seen to be, No. A
> related question is whether amateurs working on a volunteer basis, with
> no budget for R&D, could do a better job than professionals who work for
> pay and have an R&D budget) when it comes to fixing statistical error in
> a spreadsheet. The answer to this question is, Yes."
>
> --------------------------
>
> -- The above paper is referenced in discussions of Proprietory
> Software-vs-OSS at http://cgi.linuxfocus.org/cgi-bin/lftalkback?anum=345
>
> It followed a Linux Focus article "Linux in Science - Or How a Useful
> Neural Network Utility Was Developed" at:
> http://tldp.org/linuxfocus/English/September2004/article345.shtml
>
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Received on Sat Sep 4 22:54:02 2004