draft release announcement

[John W. Eaton]

I plan to post the following message to announce the release.
Comments or suggestions?



  The Octave developers are pleased to announce the release of GNU
  Octave 3.4.0.  This is a major new release containing many new
  features, performance enhancements, and bug fixes.

  Please see http://octave.org/NEWS-3.4.html for a list of significant
  user-visible changes in this release.

  Octave 3.4.1, with corrections for any critical defects reported in
  Octave 3.4.0, is expected in April 2011.

  As always, many people contributed to this Octave release.  A complete
  list of contributors may be found in the Octave manual.

  GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended
  for numerical computations.  It provides a convenient command line
  interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and
  for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is
  mostly compatible with Matlab.  It may also be used as a
  batch-oriented language.

  -- 
  John W. Eaton
  address@hidden