Jordan Hubbard, founder of the FreeBSD project, has asked me to post here to inform you all that he is indeed the original poster, and that he will no longer be using the "jkh" account. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at our @freebsd.org addresses.
I recently purchased a PS2 mod chip (with DVD+RW support!) from tacoinspector.com. They seemed to have a very nice selection of PS1 and PS2 hacking devices, and their prices were reasonable. They shipped via UPS Ground and filled my order promptly. I would recommend them to anyone who is interested in buying the Linux kit from a vendor who isn't Sony.
This is not the sort of thing on which taxpayer dollars need to be spent.
Why do I call the airlines' money "taxpayer dollars"? Well, the airlines
are funded almost exclusively by the government in this country. Consider
the following facts:
Just recently, after September 11th, Congress gave the major
airlines a gift for $20 million to compensate them for their lack of
profitability - a streak that started around the middle of 2000.
The FAA has only one enforcement action against the airlines: the
removal of government subsidies. That's right - an airline can opt
out of the FAA's air traffic control system, refuse to insure luggage, and
allow smoking in domestic flights. But the consequences they would suffer
- a termination of government funding - would keep them from competing with
their socialized rivals.
When airlines are forced to make changes (safety/security improvements,
etc.) the government automatically pays for 75% of the cost, minimum. No
act of Congress or approval of any sort is needed before our tax money is
put to this use.
Airline employees are technically classified as government workers and
are subject to Federal hiring and retention procedures (read: affirmative
action). That is why minority pilots and flight attendants are so
commonplace, despite the fact that 96% of flight school graduates are
Caucasian.
I have studied the travel industry for over 13 years and have come to the
conclusion that it is the most crooked, corrupt industry in America. They
should be returning the money to the taxpayers' pockets, not buying 802.11b
repeaters for passengers' web surfing amusement. As somebody who rarely
flies, I am offended that my money is being wasted in this fashion.
LWP support for both user and kernel threads. This is similar to
the implementation in Solaris, which has an extraordinarily well-written
scheduler.
More progress has been made toward a fully pre-emptable kernel, which
will be very useful on large SMP systems.
Real-time scheduling (as in QNX and RTOS) will be supported, which
should greatly improve performance on native video recording and playback
software as well as games.
FIFO support will be added, as well as a more fine-grained way to set
priorities.
Since the NetBSD/OpenBSD split became final several years back, the FreeBSD
developers have been in constant competition with the OpenBSD developers
with regard to providing a secure, yet usable system. Appointing Mr.
Vidrine, a personable yet strict taskmaster, is the latest of many steps
that have been taken to continue to improve the security of FreeBSD users'
systems. Here is a short list of other security-related projects:
TrustedBSD. Though it has taken some time (and who
could write a B1 system overnight?), it now supports MLS extensions,
ACLs on files, SAE privilege isolation, and process segmentation spacing to
provide a system on which users at different levels cannot interfere with
more privileged users.
Improvements in the -CURRENT branch. Many security
improvements, some independent and some from TrustedBSD, are destined to be
included in FreeBSD 5.0.
jail(2). Jail provides process isolation superior to anything
found in another UNIX or in Linux. We like to call it "chroot with teeth,"
and continue to wonder why existing chroot(5) implementations are so
hopelessly broken in other lessor unices.
Protocol support. FreeBSD currently ships without a telnet
daemon installed, to keep people from using daemons that have known
weaknesses (such as the environment variable handling design flaw) and that
allow plaintext passwords to leak onto the network.
Strong NIS authentication. We've combined the versatility of
NIS and the simplicity of Kerberos, and produced an armoured version of NIS
that withstands network and host based attacks.
These are only a few of the many improvements that the FreeBSD team has
been working on, to make your computing experience more stable and secure.
FreeBSD 5.0 will be a landmark release and will far surpass anything that
Microsoft and Linus has to offer.
Slashdot Mirror
--rwatson
--rwatson
- Just recently, after September 11th, Congress gave the major
airlines a gift for $20 million to compensate them for their lack of
profitability - a streak that started around the middle of 2000.
- The FAA has only one enforcement action against the airlines: the
removal of government subsidies. That's right - an airline can opt
out of the FAA's air traffic control system, refuse to insure luggage, and
allow smoking in domestic flights. But the consequences they would suffer
- a termination of government funding - would keep them from competing with
their socialized rivals.
- When airlines are forced to make changes (safety/security improvements,
etc.) the government automatically pays for 75% of the cost, minimum. No
act of Congress or approval of any sort is needed before our tax money is
put to this use.
- Airline employees are technically classified as government workers and
are subject to Federal hiring and retention procedures (read: affirmative
action). That is why minority pilots and flight attendants are so
commonplace, despite the fact that 96% of flight school graduates are
Caucasian.
I have studied the travel industry for over 13 years and have come to the conclusion that it is the most crooked, corrupt industry in America. They should be returning the money to the taxpayers' pockets, not buying 802.11b repeaters for passengers' web surfing amusement. As somebody who rarely flies, I am offended that my money is being wasted in this fashion.--rwatson
There's a bit of background here: currently FreeBSD has a much-maligned userland thread scheduler, typically used to handle pthreads and other rightful divisions of a process. It also uses a simple round-robin kernel scheduler to handle "heavy" processes. KSE 3, OTOH, will support many new features:
- LWP support for both user and kernel threads. This is similar to
the implementation in Solaris, which has an extraordinarily well-written
scheduler.
- More progress has been made toward a fully pre-emptable kernel, which
will be very useful on large SMP systems.
- Real-time scheduling (as in QNX and RTOS) will be supported, which
should greatly improve performance on native video recording and playback
software as well as games.
- FIFO support will be added, as well as a more fine-grained way to set
priorities.
--rwatson- TrustedBSD. Though it has taken some time (and who
could write a B1 system overnight?), it now supports MLS extensions,
ACLs on files, SAE privilege isolation, and process segmentation spacing to
provide a system on which users at different levels cannot interfere with
more privileged users.
- Improvements in the -CURRENT branch. Many security
improvements, some independent and some from TrustedBSD, are destined to be
included in FreeBSD 5.0.
- jail(2). Jail provides process isolation superior to anything
found in another UNIX or in Linux. We like to call it "chroot with teeth,"
and continue to wonder why existing chroot(5) implementations are so
hopelessly broken in other lessor unices.
- Protocol support. FreeBSD currently ships without a telnet
daemon installed, to keep people from using daemons that have known
weaknesses (such as the environment variable handling design flaw) and that
allow plaintext passwords to leak onto the network.
- Strong NIS authentication. We've combined the versatility of
NIS and the simplicity of Kerberos, and produced an armoured version of NIS
that withstands network and host based attacks.
These are only a few of the many improvements that the FreeBSD team has been working on, to make your computing experience more stable and secure. FreeBSD 5.0 will be a landmark release and will far surpass anything that Microsoft and Linus has to offer.--rwatson