In this morning’s batch of news I was catching up on in Google Reader, I came upon a piece on LifeHacker that Gina Trapani wrote yesterday.

Windows 7 Calculator

Wow, Microsoft’s finally going to do something cool & useful with one of the most often used (and maligned) pieces of software out there – Calculator.  Calculator’s been hanging since Windows 1.0, and while it’s grown slightly, including Scientific features, this is finally a useful piece of software.  New modes like Statistics and Programmer Modes for starters.  That’s a good start.

Where this thing actually shines is the “Templates” feature.  What’s a template?  Real-world calculations, brought to Calculator.  Things like unit conversions, mortgage calculators, calculating the amount of time between two dates, etc.  Things that would ordinarily require spreadsheet wizardry, or even a small program to compute.

Ok, this isn’t exactly game changing, right?  Right?  Well, I’d have to agree with that.  However, it does demonstrate that not everyone at Microsoft is completely out of touch with reality.  Apparently, they’re not all foul-mouthed, chair-chucking, monkey-dancing retards after all.