Advogato: “If one looks into the topic of streaming media standards, one quickly runs into confusion and hype. Lots of people will tout the virtues of one acronym or another. I personally make a living pelting people with acronyms and coming up with new ones. At the end of the day, though, the only standards that matter right now are HTTP and MP3.”

Posted at LinuxSecurity.com: “This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include “Avoiding security holes when developing an application,” “Secure Communications with OpenSSH,” and “Intrusion Detection Systems for the Uninitiated.””

Discussed on Slashdot: “Thawte.com, a South African Certificate Authority, in a move of astonishing wrong-headedness, has inexplicably changed it’s developer certificate policy. To quote from the site: ‘Due to current world circumstances developer certificates can no longer be issued to individuals.’Sucks to be working with crypto these days. Apparently I’ll get no help from Thawte to encrypt stuff, oh wait, I didn’t need it, the browsers did.”

Reported at AsiaBizTech: “LinuxWorld C&D/Tokyo 2001 was held in Shinjuku, Tokyo, on Oct. 24 and Oct. 25, as the sixth such event since March 1999.

The focus of this year’s expo tended more toward technology seminars than exhibitions, as signaled at the opening address by the sponsor, IDG Japan Inc., which promised “in-depth content geared primarily to developers.”

When Microsoft last week temporarily denied access to MSN from non-IE browsers, SiliconValley.com interviewed World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee on the matter. Microsoft claimed it had done so because those other browsers were not “W3C-compliant.” From the interview: “Amaya, the browser which W3C develops as a testbed for our technologies, and which arguably has the best W3C compliance, is blocked from www.msn.com.”

Gnumeric 0.72 aka ‘squish’ is now available. This is a bug fix release. All reproducible crashes and redraw errors have now been fixed. Please continue to test.

* New features

	* References to named expressions in other sheets/books (Jody)

* Bug fixes, Polishing & Optimisations

	* Improve latex exporter to support multiple pages and 	(Adrian 
Custer)
	  basic support for merges.
	* Much improved header/footer preview canvas.		(Wayne Schuller)
	* Improve UI for customising print header/footer. 	(Wayne Schuller)
	* More work on validation.				(Almer)
	* Allow analysis tool output to be directed onto a	(Andreas)
	  range on another sheet.
	* Allow analysis tool output ranges to be specified	(Andreas)
	  using defined names.
	* Change covariance, correlation, descriptive		(Andreas)
	  statistics and sampling tools to allow multiple
	  selections (and defined names as input.
	* Change covariance and correlation tools to handle	(Andreas)
	  missing observations.
	* Change sampling tool to permit multiple samples	(Andreas)
	  from the same or different data. 
	* Fix autosizing of indented content.			(Jody)
	* Fix jump to bound with end in hidden region.		(Jody)
	* Hide objects in hidden regions for display and print. (Jody)
	* LOG() is valid with base > 0 && base != 1		(Jody)
	* Fix redo of unmerge to handle redraw spans.		(Jody)
	* Fix Name Support and Dialog.				(Jody)
	* Improve data allocator for graphs.			(Jody)
	* Clean out some unused code.				(Jody)
	* Begin code audit.					(Jody)
	* Fix autofill of days with months visible.		(Jody)
	* Fix minor leaks.					(Jody)
	* Improve recognition of values vs expressions		(Jody)
	* Reset grid display cursor after editing an object.	(Jody)
	* Resize frozen panes after ins/del col/row. 		(Jody)
	* Make python version configurable. 			(Jody)
	* Improved MPS plugin.  				(Jukka)
	* Extended the data analysis tools and documentation.	(Jukka)
	* Improved COUPDAYS().					(Jukka)
	* Improve goal seek.					(Morten)
	* Fixed parsing of numbers in scientific, monetary,	(Morten)
	  and number contexts.
	* Find and fix leaks.					(Morten)
	* Fix dif plugin's use of alloca.			(Morten)
	* Improve View menu layout.				(Almer)

* Translations

	* ru (Valek Filippov), nl (Tino Meinen), sk (Stanislav Visnovsky),
	et (Ain Vagula)

* Availability

	http://download.gnome.org/GNOME/stable/sources/gnumeric

Anonymous Reader writes: “http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/1026.w hylinux.html – don’t forget the real reason as you count the ways.”

Barbara Alvarado writes: “The Open CASCADE Company today announced that Usinor, worldwide leader in the steel industry for net sales and third-ranked producer of crude steel, has placed its confidence in the Open CASCADE company for the development of a strategic application in the analysis domain. Usinor called on the Open CASCADE development team to execute preliminary studies, draw up the appropriate specifications and carry out development of the application. The application is based on the Open CASCADE 3D modeling components and is supported by a multi-year contract for development services.
According to Pascal Ravier, project manager for the Automotive Steel Solution Design Department of Research and Development of Usinor, “We are very impressed with the professionalism of the Open CASCADE team. They approached development in a way that allowed us to double our efficiency and save considerable time on the overall project, while preparing specifications that would ensure optimal application performance.”

With this new application, Usinor confirms its confidence in the benefits and reliability of the open-source development model as practiced by Open CASCADE. The Open CASCADE components are freely available to the worldwide developer community at http://www.opencascade.com and are an important open-source tool for the creation of technical and scientific applications for industry, software editors and research.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “Oracle brought up the registration page to log customer interest in Oracle 9i DB on Linux for S/390/z900. The data collected will validate even further their decision to make this product available.
http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=915044&Act=6.”

The Register: “Paul Stamatis, a trafficker in counterfeit Microsoft software over the Internet, was sentenced Thursday
to two years in jail, and was ordered to pay $500,000 in restitution to Microsoft.”