by Jane-Ellen Long

Managing Editor

<jel@usenix.org>



There are issues and then there are ISSUES. Right off the bat, and across from this column, one of the latter is raised in a letter regarding the SAGE certification, uh, issue.

Further along, Peter Salus takes a slightly dyspeptic view of the recent Workshop on Embedded Systems: do you really want your tomatoes to talk back to you? And then there is the small matter of security: Mark Burgess starts a series of pieces on cfengine; John Sellens deals with anti-spam features in sendmail; and Chris Calabrese takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Dario Forte in the April ;login: and suggests that biometrics spells trouble.

Want more? How about Linux? Both Rik Farrow and Bob Gray try to install Red Hat Linux 6.0, with some interesting results.

We love it! One of our dirty little secrets is the hope of seeing a few sparks fly when someone opens ;login:. The tradition at USENIX events is to speak your mind, mercilessly question speakers, argue until the small hours in some BOF or other. Think of ;login: that way: it's a forum where members can grind their axe, argue with their friends, and point out the errors of their ways.

All very politely, of course.

For those of you with more sedate tastes, allow me to point you in the direction of another of Peter Salus's Bookworm columns where he argues for shorter books followed by Glenn Vanderburg's review of Salus's own magnum opus — and I do mean magnum.

And for the truly serious policy wonks, we offer our annual pie charts demonstrating once again that we spend your dues money wisely.

Have a cool summer.