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Publisher's Forum

In the spirit of the season, we're asking our readers to give a little gift to one of our writers--in the form of a free trip to the SANS IV conference in Washington, DC, this April! Alan Paller, the guiding spirit of the SANS (System Administration, Networking, and Security) conferences, had the bright idea that we at Sys Admin choose the best article published in the magazine in 1994; the SANS sponsors would then bring the author to the conference to present that article at a conference session. We felt that the people best suited to the task of selecting the article of the year would be you, our readers. Accordingly, you'll find a ballot on page 106 of this issue, consisting of a listing of the contents of the six 1994 issues. Please join in--copy the ballot, vote, and fax or mail the ballot to us. If you prefer, vote via email: address your message to saletter@rdpub.com, enter "Best Article" in the Subject field, then give us the author and article title in the body of the message.

When we say best article, we're not talking flowing prose, elegant transitions, world-class metaphors: we mean the article that helped you the most when you needed help. Or the article that reshaped your understanding of some aspect of the work you do. Or maybe the article that you found yourself passing along to your co-workers. In short, from our perspective "best" is "most useful," and useful is what Sys Admin is all about. So give it a little thought and then give us your vote.

And that's not all we want from you. As you'll see in the New Messages section, Dale Panattoni has been inundated with responses to his UNIX/Windows for Workgroups article in the November/December issue. We've also received mail about the article here at Sys Admin. That this article attracted so much attention strongly suggests that UNIX/Windows connectivity is an issue that's moved to the front-burner for a lot of us (as constant readers may know, we're wrestling with this ourselves--see the March/April Publisher's Forum). If you have had experience in this area (you're probably a pioneer if you have), please consider writing about how you did what you did.

Finally, as we begin our fourth year of publication, we thank all of our authors and all of our readers (the former being chiefly a subset of the latter) for their contribution to Sys Admin's success. And we wish you all a happy and productive 1995.

Sincerely yours,
Robert Ward
saletter@rdpub.com (" . . . !uunet!rdpub!saletter")