Gnumeric 1.2.0 aka "Emb-Ext" is now available.

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

Gnumeric 1.2.0 aka "Emb-Ext" is now available.

    The next generation of Gnumeric is ready for general use.  It has
    taken almost 20 months to make the jump to Gtk+-2.x without feature
    regressions.  We've put the time to good use.  This release is faster
    and lighter than 1.0.x, but boasts an impressive array of new and
    extended capabilities. Details here
	http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/new-features-1.2.html
   
    The breadth and stability of Gnumeric's analytics enabled us to
    receive a grant from Mitch Kapor (creator of Lotus 1-2-3) to develop
    an interoperability test suite with leading proprietary competitors.
    The money will be used as form of bounty to fund the expansion of our 
    existing tests for worksheet functions (eg =SUM, or =ODDFPRICE). Our
    goal is to ensure that a users data will produce the same results (or
    better :-) using Gnumeric. The test suite will be in xls format, and
    will be freely available to all other interested projects.
   
    Exact prices have not been decided as yet, but this is an excellent
    opportunity for non-coders to help open-source programs, and earn a
    bit of money too. Specifics to be announced on the mailing lists in
    the coming weeks.
   
    Official announcement here
	http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/gnumericgrant.html
	http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/function-info.shtml

  * User Quotes

    "Persons who wish to use a spreadsheet to perform statistical
    analyses, and who are concerned about the accuracy of their results,
    are advised to use Gnumeric rather than Excel."
   
        Dr. B. D. McCullough, associate professor of Decision Sciences at
        Drexel University and a noted authority on the accuracy of
        statistical software
   
    "... the many advantages of using open source software such as
    Gnumeric are quickly overtaking the one advantage of using Microsoft's
    proprietary Excel software, namely interoperability with other users
    of Excel."
   
        Morris Pearl, Columbia University. Ex-head of Fixed Income
        Quantitative Research at UBS Warburg
   
  * UC Berkley's Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

    In addition to the source tarball and packages from all of the
    standard distributions Ben Liblit of the Cooperative Bug Isolation
    Project has made some specially instrumented packages for Red Hat 9
    that can provide feedback to help us fix bugs in the unlikely event
    that something breaks.  Please consider trying these packages. 
    Hopefully, 1.2.x will be at least as  stable as 1.0.x, and will
    generate very little data :-)
	http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~liblit/sampler

  * The Next Step

    The 1.2.x branch is stable, and will receive bug fixes and
    translations updates only.  We follow the standard GNOME versioning
    conventions, and intend to branch 1.3.x branch within the next few
    weeks to begin the next phase of development. The next release is
    planned to coincide with GNOME-2.6 and the other GNOME Office
    components.

  * Thanks

        Team Gnumeric
        Jody : Maintainer
        Morten W : All round powerhouse
        Jon K Hellan : Widget Wizard
        Andreas Guelzow : Stats and so much more
        Jukka Pekka : Solvers
        Adrian Custer : Docs
        Hal Ashburner : Option pricers
        Emmanuel Pacaud : Widgets and Charts
        Nicolas Peninguy : Charts
        J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) : 1.0.x Maintainer
   
    Gnumeric relies heavily on other projects prce, R, glpk, lp_solve, and
    of course GNOME.
	http://pcre.org
	http://www.r-project.org
	http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/glpk.html
	http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lp_solve
	http://www.gnome.org
   
    Beyond the individuals listed explicitly in the credits thanks are
    owed to the many people who have contributed patches during Gnumeric's
    development.  Here is a list of those whose names showed up in our
    ChangeLogs.  If I missed you please accept my apology.
    : Almer S. Tigelaar, Ben Liblit, C. Scott Ananian, Chema Celorio,
    Christian Meyer, Christian Neumair, Christophe Merlet, Christopher
    Benedict, Danilo egan, Fernando Herrera, Gustavo Carneiro, Guntupalli
    Karunakar, Jakub Steiner, John Gill, Joseph Pingenot, Joshua R. Odom,
    Juan Pablo Mendoza, Kevin Breit, Lutz Müller, Martin Hoffmann, Metin
    Amiroff, Michael Meeks, Murray Cumming, Pablo Saratxaga, Peteris
    Krisjanis, Rodrigo Moya, Seth Nickell, Yanko Kaneti, Wayne Schuller,
    Zbigniew Chyla
   
    Many thanks to the translators too, these tireless folk have to deal
    with the tremendous volume of text in Gnumeric and deserve a lot of
    credit for wading through abstruse terms and jargon
    : Abel Cheung Andras Timar, Artur Flinta, Carlos Perells Marmn,
    Changwoo Ryu, Christian Rose, Christophe Fergeau, Dmitry G. Mastrukov,
    Duarte Loreto, Fatih Demir, German Poo-Caamanqo, Gil "Dolfin" Osher,
    Hasbullah Bin Pit, Jan Moren, Jarkko Ranta, Jordi Mallach, Kjartan
    Maraas, Kostas Papadimas, Metin Amiroff, Miloslav Trmac, Nikos
    Charonitaksi, Pablo Gonzalo del Campo, Pablo Saratxaga, Peteris
    Krisjanis, Roy-Magne Mo, Stanislav Visnovsky, Takeshi Aihana, Valek
    Filippov, Vincent van Adrighem, Wang Jian, Yanko Kaneti, Yukihiro
    Nakai, Zbigniew Chyla

  * Eye Candy

        http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/new-pics/power-example.png
   
  * Availability

        http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnumeric/1.2