Publisher's Forum
A few points about some special features of this issue--and
a "Thank You" . . .
Those of you reading this in the United States and Canada
will probably have noticed some differences in the
way your magazine was delivered--no envelope and a
somewhat earlier delivery time. The differences are
the result of a change in Sys Admin's mailing status,
from 3rd class to 2nd class. We hope that the change
will mean better service for our readers.
All of you will notice (we hope) a significantly extended
New Messages section, where we publish the mail we
receive from you. It's too often the case that we
have only one or two pages available for this section,
so a number of interesting messages go unpublished.
For this issue, we set aside several extra pages so
that we could catch you up on what's been coming in
to saletter@rdpub.com, our email account. All of the
messages we selected include a tip, or suggested revisions
to code published in an earlier issue, or a new tool
that doesn't warrant an article in itself but could
be useful to many of you. You could look at this issue's
New Messages as sort of potpourri column--it's got
lots of nice little things you wouldn't find elsewhere.
You'll also see that there is another "revisited"
article, in this case, Matt Ganis's revisiting of Larry
Reznick's killidle (also the subject of a letter in
the New Messages section). The first article that
prompted such a series was Eric Horne's "newping:
Remote Host Downtime Detection," in the July/August
'93 issue. Several readers responded to the article,
with corrections to newping and embellishments on it.
While obviously we would not want to cover the same
material over and over, we do welcome work that takes
off from something we've already published and does
new things with it.
And now the "Thank You"--to all of you who
made it a point to find us (no easy task) and stop
by our booth at UniForum '94. We handed out somewhere
in the neighborhood of 2,000 copies of the magazine,
but were even happier about the number of people who
walked up to us and said they already subscribed (for
more about UniForum itself, take a look at Bjorn Satdeva's
column in this issue). Face-to-face contact with readers
doesn't happen very often (email is a good but not
exact approximation); it's a particular pleasure when
it does.
Robert Ward
saletter@rdpub.com (". . . !uunet!rdpub!saletter")
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