With CES and MacWorld behind us, I’ve noticed something: people who last month were saying, “don’t buy one now, they’re announcing new models soon” are now saying, “don’t buy one now, let them shake out the bugs first”.

Suppose announcements were more frequent than they are now. Is there a point at which product announcements would become so frequent that such people would never buy one? Maybe they’d start buying models as soon as they’re announced. Or would they buy the current (soon-to-be prior) model only once they hear an announcement is coming?
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Yea, I continue to ingnore all of my blogs

I saw a bit recently on TMZ about Hillary Clinton complaining about her TiVo deleting shows she wanted to watch while saving things she’s not interested in. I don’t know if it’s a true story or apocryphal, but it illustrates something I’ve been thinking about for awhile: what makes someone a “techie”? It seems to…

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Something—I’m honestly not sure what—has changed in Mac OS X Leopard in a subtle way that has totally derailed my workflow for making presentations involving code samples. I give a lot of Keynote talks that are very heavy on code samples. For years, I’ve had a workflow for creating code-sample slides that’s worked pretty well…

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Dear System Administrator, My name is Nicole Velasquez, and I am a researcher at the University of Arizona. My colleagues and I are conducting a study to examine the factors and qualities that motivate system administrators to use or not use software applications, and we would really appreciate your help. You are being invited to…

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I’m trying to put together some of my technology roadmap for 2008 at my current job. Until I get an update from Sun under our NDA, here’s what I’ve found on the web about the next Solaris 10 update: * Due Spring/Summer (sometime between April and June) * CPU capping of zones through means other…

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System administrators are busy people, and folks who volunteer for LOPSA tend to be busier than most.

This causes problems when we try to manage projects with volunteer help, because sometimes people get snowed under with more important things. It’s unreasonable for us to expect LOPSA volunteer work to come before work and family commitments. But yet, the projects still need to get handled in a timely manner.

I’ve decided I’m going to start putting a “pong-by” date at the bottom of email requests to volunteers. What that means is, if I don’t get a response by that date, I’m going to assume that the answer is “no” and move onto someone else. No hard feelings—I don’t know whether you’ve fallen into a hole, you thought you’d have time and now don’t, you’re on vacation and not reading email, or what—I’m just going to find someone else.

So if you’ve gotten an email from me and see “Pong by January 1”, now you know what that means. 🙂

Feel free to use this yourself. http://lopsa.org/pong redirects here.

—
Trey Harris is President of LOPSA. His blog entries do not represent the views of LOPSA, its Board, or its membership.
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I’ve been thinking recently about what the term “mentoring” means for professional sysadmins. I’ve usually said that I’m “self-taught” in system administration. Most sysadmins I know say the same thing. I say this because I didn’t take any classes on sysadmin, and in the technical aspects, at least, I was self-directed in my first few…

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Dear Lazyweb: I’m looking for something like Together (http://reinventedsoftware.com/together/) that runs on Linux. Evidently my Google-Fu is weak this morning because I can’t seem to find anything that comes close. Anyone use something like this? -n

The AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop 2008 announces the 2008 Call For Participation. Come talk to your peers about: * Completed projects * Work in progress * Theories * Best practices * Related research * Updates on previous talks or anything else of note involving AFS and/or Kerberos. The AFS & Kerberos Best Practices…

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