Awesome job

[Paul Iadonisi]

  Just a quick note to say 'thanks' to everyone who has contributed to
the testing of FC3 and contributed to great ideas for releases moving
forward.  Like a lot of others, I've aired my share of complaints
(though I don't think I've been *too* ornery), but overall I'm almost
happy enough with even the current FC3T3+updates to upgrade my main
desktop to it.  Almost -- I'm not crazy enough to actually do it.  With
my luck, a deep, lurking ext3/selinux related filesystem corruption
problem will rear its ugly head *just* after I do the upgrade.  If there
is a problem like that, I just hope it's found and squashed before
release.
  I'm *really* looking forward to seeing how the scaled back selinux
policy helps to get it deployed far and wide.  I haven't read through
the whole paper yet, but "The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed
Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments"
(http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/papers/inevit-abs.cfm) co-authored by
Stephen Smalley and others at the NSA had me nodding my head in violent
agreement through the first few sections.  The IT world *needs*
*something* at the OS level to improve security, and I'm anxious to see
how Fedora Core 3 users react to selinux as a possible answer to some
security problems.  I'd love to hear stories of thwarted attacks thanks
to selinux.  Or even where it failed needs improvement -- but let's hope
for not-so-serious problems.
  And there are most definitely some improvements in Gnome 2.8 that make
me think that maybe, just maybe we've finally caught up, or at least
almost caught up to the to the Windows/MAC world in the area of
usability.  (I'm primarily talking about areas we've *needed* to catch
up, of course.  There are definitely some gross things we need to leave
behind.)
  So great job, everybody, and I'll race you all to be the first to
install FC3 when it's released.  Doubt I'll win, though, with all you
folks at universities with uber-fast connections.
-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets