[Discuss] Keynotes announced! East coast LOPSA-PICC Sysadmin Conference, May 11-12, 2012, New Brunswick, NJ

[Tom Limoncelli]

[Note: "Early-bird" price ends in 3 days! Don't lose the discount!]

The PICC committee is excited to announce our closing keynote speaker:

Rebecca Mercuri on "The Black Swan and Information Security"

Dr. Mercuri is the lead forensic expert at Notable Software, Inc.
Her caseload has included matters from contraband, murder, viruses
and malware, and election recounts (most notably Bush vs. Gore).
She has testified on the federal, state, and local level as well
as to the U.K. Cabinet.

Talk abstract:
The economic theories proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book
"The Black Swan" have strong parallels in information security.
Indeed, the concepts of robustness and risk assessment mentioned
in Taleb's writing are also well known to those who design software
and systems intended to withstand attack. Such assaults on computers,
networks and data are now so commonplace that if these threats all
suddenly vanished, this would likely constitute a Black Swan Event.
But whether a successful and novel attack should also be considered
a Black Swan may be debatable. This talk will compare the shortcomings
of bell curve (Mediocristan) and power law (Extremistan) event
models. The idea that outlier occurrences should be considered more
"normal" will shed insight on new methods for recovery mitigation.
Attendees need no formal knowledge of statistics or economics in
order to appreciate the concepts discussed in this talk.


Register now and avoid the rush!   http://picconf.org   Space is limited!

------------------------

Conference summary:


Registration is open for the 2012 LOPSA PICC conference, May 11-12, 2012 at
the Hyatt Regency hotel in New Brunswick, NJ.  Sysadmins and IT workers
from Maine to Virginia are expected to attend the most talked about,
community-driven, sysadmin conference of 2012!  We're excited to announce
our slate of speakers and world-class tutorials for 2012.  Complete
details at http://picconf.org

FRIDAY is all about world-class training:

-- Daytime: Long-format tutorials by world-class instructors: PowerShell,
       Puppet, Amazon Web Services, WordPress, DNSSEC, IPv6 and much,
       much more!  http://www.picconf.org/picc12-training-classes
-- Dinner:  Dinner and reception for all attendees.
-- Evening: Opening keynote (Bill Cheswick, security and passwords)
-- Late: "Birds of a Feather" sessions.

SATURDAY adds invited speakers on a wide variety of topics:

-- Tutorials and invite talks such as:
-- Learn how Google does backups, how Etsy manages DevOps, and how
       Mozilla has radically revamped their software release process.
-- Windows users will love the talks on MS Small Business Server
       and tutorials on PowerShell (requested back for a 2nd year).
-- Linux users will love the talks about high performance computing,
       the Ganeti free virtualization project, and advanced
       monitoring techniques.
-- DevOps will be impressed by speakers from "the big three"
       configuration management vendors: CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet.
-- Cloud computing training from speakers with "from the trenches" experience.
   (Speaker list: http://www.picconf.org/picc-12-talkspapers )
-- CLOSING KEYNOTE: Rebecca Mercuri on "The Black Swan and Information Security"

LAST YEAR'S attendees said:

-- "The talks were all technical; no marketing hype, no sales people!"
-- "Small enough to have a community feeling, big enough to draw big name speakers."
-- "Next year I'm sending my entire team!"

REGISTER soon.  You're boss will approve!

Priced right!  Being a non-profit, community-based conference the
registration fee is what you'd pay just to travel to the big conferences.
We bring world-class speakers to you; saving you money and travel time.
Registration packages from $334 to $621 (with extreme discounts for
students and unemployed).  Save up to $125 by registering before Friday,
March 30, 2012!

For more information and to register visit http://picconf.org

-----
PICC (The Professional IT Community Conference) (http://picconf.org) is a production of The New Jersey chapter (http://lopsanj.org) of the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) (http://lopsa.org).  This is our 3rd annual conference and will be held May 11-12, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in New Brunswick, NJ.