Yeah, it's a problem with KDE but they are working on it: "The best part of all this is that users won’t be exposed to the KCM very often, because connecting an already-known monitor will configure it and place it automatically depending on the last configuration. Connecting a previously unknown output should pop up a simple window/dialog..." http://www.progdan.cz/2012/09/display-management-in-kde/
Britain is officially metric but in reality is stuck in a weird limbo between metric and imperial.
So road signs are in miles and yards, but petrol is sold in litres and car fuel consumption often quoted in litres per 100km.
In all shops, whether a market stall in the street or a large supermarket, everything must by law be in metric. However they are allowed to still have the imperial size printed alongside the metric one and even to produce products in the old imperial sizes. E.g in the supermarket they still sell milk in pints, so instead of buying a 1 litre milk carton like you would in the rest of the world (except the USA) you get a 1.136 litre* milk carton or something like that.
It may not help in your case but people in the EU can send anything ordered online and delivered by post/courier ('distance selling') back without having to give a reason within 7 days (14 in some countries). So there's no reason you can't buy online and if something about the keyboard, screen, Linux driver support or anything else isn't to your liking just box it up and send it back.
I did this with a 1000 Euro ultrabook in Germany that when it arrived I realised had very poor wireless range, in both Windows and Linux. Something only a few of the reviews mentioned and obviously something I couldn't test until I had the thing in my house. I ran the recovery DVD, boxed it up and sent it back to Amazon. Money was refunded a couple of days later (cash in my account, not gift vouchers or any credit) and I bought a different Ultrabook.
Good to hear fastmail has an emergency plan, it's been very, very reliable for the last couple of years and I hope it stays that way:) I'm begginning to realise how reliant I am on email - today I got an invoice by email that if I hadn't seen it straight away would've costed over 100 pounds extra due to not cancelling something early enough.
Exactly, I had the same problem as the GP except that Windows update never found SP1, even after leaving it for around 24 hours. It's very frustrating that there's no way to get everything in one go - updates just seem to come from the ether at random times in Windows Update on an newly installed Win 7 box, meaning it could be days before you're truly up to date.
Downloading SP1 manually and installing it helps though.
+1 But KDE with Thunderbird as the email client is still a great combination. Still not sure what akonadi's really supposed to help with in practice (I've read the documents and blog posts describing the theoretical rationale behind it).
+1 I really don't understand all the effort going into resurrecting GNOME2 and fighting GNOME3 and Unity when KDE is right there, with tons of features and works today.
I've experienced the same, in the Ukraine in an old 'Soviet-style' hotel. But the price of less than 5 Euro/night including free-Wifi took the edge off any discomfort:) In any hotel in western Europe you should have your own bathroom, unless it's a really cheap place with prices comparable to a hostel.
Put simply a hostel is where you 'rent' a bed that may be in shared room for one or more nights as opposed to a hotel where you 'rent' a whole room for yourself for one or more nights.
You'll find that almost all hostels, in both western and eastern Europe, are very professionally run. Theft is very uncommon and really isn't something you need to worry about beyond putting valubles (passports, laptops, phones, cameras, credit cards and spare cash) in a locker.
A lot of hostels have female-only rooms but even where those aren't available no hostel (or the 99.99% of the guests who are decent people) are going to tolerate harrassment or assault.
Friends from here in Europe say the hostels in Australia are of similar standards to in Europe. The US is different altogether though, friends of mine who are used to staying in hostels in Europe had really bad experiences trying it in the US. Either the hostel was expensive and crap or it was actually more of a half-way house for homeless and criminals. We've avoided US hostels since then.
I'll second this as I've had this argument before with people. The ICE is supposed to be a high-speed train but only actually reaches it's 300km/h max speed on some sections of track such as bits in norther Bavaria near Nuremberg, so the total journey time is around the same as the car.
The price of the ICE tickets are the real problem though, basically I've worked out that the only time it's cheaper than a car is when you're going on your own. And since I don't have a car that's basing my calculations on the cost of rental cars!
It's not just Munich-Berlin, me and my girlfriend did Munich-Hamberg return in a rental car for cheaper (incl. fuel) than 2 ICE tickets for the same route would've been. I'd prefer to take the train as it avoids dealing with car rental companies and looking for parking at your destination, but the astronomical prices and overcrowding on some sections like BerlinLeipzig, are too much.
I'm not knocking the OBS, it's a very useful tool, but it really doesn't help much here since making a package that works cross-distribution would involve a lot of manual integration work.
For example I could easily use the OBS to take my Opensuse package for foo and build it on Fedora and ensure it at least builds and is installable. However the real work, integrating it into the Fedora distro and ensuring it works well with and is the right version for the other packages in that distro, is not done by the OBS and isn't easily automated.
If you look in the mailing list thread on this article you'll see it's exactly that kind of integration work and the difficulties with it (even within one distro) that's causing the problems. Probably the most realistic model is the Debian one where several distros (Mint, Ubuntu etc.) feed off and (hopefully) contribute back to a central packaging effort. IMHO the number of packages in a modern Linux distro is getting too much, and the integration work too complex, for smaller projects like Opensuse.
No, RPM-based doesn't mean it's repackaging Redhat, you're confusing it with Centos and Scientific Linux. Mandriva is actually one of a small number of distros that does a unique packaging effort - ie. the developers package most things themselves rather than basing it off another distro such as Ubuntu does with Debian.
In the past, i.e. early 2000's, Mandrake/Mandriva had some of the nicer desktop-focused features such as: - automatic resizing of the Windows partition in the installer- - GUI partitioning program available not just in the installer but in the Control Centre after installation - decent package manager with dependency resolution and large repos (almost on a par with Debian's) - decent default settings for KDE and GNOME - working USB and CD/DVD automounting (the Mandrake/driva developers went to great pains to get this working long before HAL and udev came and made it a comodity feature)
But that was the past and all major distro's have those things now. So you're probably right, currently there's no standout feature that Mandriva has over other distros, probably just personal preference for those that use it.
+1 if I couldn't remove the DRM from Amazon ebooks easily I wouldn't buy them. FWIW here are the steps (all based on software from that apprenticealf.wordpress.com blog): http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/
***Amazon Kindle*** - Download and install the Kindle for PC application and ensure all ebooks you want to remove DRM from are downloaded in Kindle for PC
- Download & install Activestate Python Community Edition
- Download the 'combined tools package' from apprenticealf's blog (http://tinyurl.com/6asq47f)
- Double-click KindleBooks/Kindlebooks.pyw from the 'combined tools package', it should pop-up a GUI dialog with window title 'Kindle/Mobi/... eBook Encryption Removal'
- Click the... to give it the path to the eBook input file. It'll be a.azw file in My Documents\My Kindle Content. Then select the directory where the unencrypted output file should go
- For the 'Alternative Kindle.info file' line do a Windows Search for *.kinf, this will find your kindle.info (in later versions.kinf) file. Eg. on Windows 7 it might be in c:\Users\myuser\AppData\Local\Amazon\Kindle\storage. On Windows XP it's C:\Documents and Settings\myuser\Local Settings\Application Data\Amazon\Kindle\storage
- Click Start!
Note: 'Directory for Unencrypted Output File(s)' should be something simple like c:\ or C:\Documents and Settings\myuser\Desktop. Kindlebooks.pyw has a problem with either the path length or particular characters in the path.
Indeed, I'm a big KDE fan but also a big fan of certain GTK applications that are better than anything QT-based - Firefox, GIMP etc.
If you don't like the way GTK apps look in KDE just go to KDE System Settings->Application Appearance->GTK+ Appearance and choose another widget-style. oxygen-gtk or qtcurve (Ubuntu package kde-style-qtcurve) are particularly good.
The neat world clock/weather applet (anybody know of a good one for KDE?)
For a decent weather applet install CWP (package plasma-widget-cwp in Ubuntu). Put the widget on your desktop and in its settings set 'Layout 1' to be 5 Days - Horizontal. That has it show the current temp and weather as well as the predictions for the next 5 days.
The built-in KDE clock functions as a world clock: Right click on it and go into Digital Clock Settings. Under Timezones tick the checkbox next to all the cities you're interested in seeing the time for. Now when you just mouse over the clock (don't click) it'll show you the time in all the cities you selected.
I've had reasonably good experiences with vpntunnel.se so far using BBC iPlayer from Germany and torrent downloads (there's a plague of speculative invoicing currently in Germany so if you download from TPB et al you need a VPN). It's 5 Euro/month or less if you sign up for longer, you can pay by paypal and a few other methods.
They have had some reliability issues in the past though so I'd only sign up for a month and try it.
The point is that having the source code open would reduce the time it takes hackers (in the good sense of that word) to close the latest gap in the DRM arms race to almost zero, a few days at most. By necessity they're implemented in a very different and very technically flawed way, unlike proper encryption schemes, whichmeans that source-code scrutiny would immediately give the obfuscation game they play away.
With a closed off ecosystem, obfuscation and contiual software updates you can keep ahead and build a DRM system that's crack-resistant enough to at least be functional, see Apple's iTunes DRM or the Blue-Ray DRM schemes for example. Neither of these systems would be possible if they were open sourced.
Correct me if I'm wrong here but DRM schemes, even if they use proper encryption, are basically obfuscation schemes because at some point the user (or more accurately the program that they run) has to have the key(s) to decrypt the content. So seeing the source code for implementation of a DRM scheme would probably be enough to crack it.
Every business is a vendor. Your interpretation of "vendor" gives it no substantive meaning within the sentence. Therefore your interpretation must be wrong and you need to look for another one.
This is the sort of thought process you should go through during primary school reading comprehension exercises. I don't know what country you're from, but your tenuous grasp of language wouldn't get you through high school here."
The word 'vendor' has a perfectly substantive meaning in that sentence, a software tool that's supported by an actual vendor - someone you can buy support and services off. Very different to some random tool you can download off the internet that's effectively supported by no one (or yourself/own IT staff with access to the source code). I.e. Puppet is vendor supported but your self-written sysadmin scripts are not, even if they use software from the OS distributor.
I could point out again how ambiguous and broad your original phrasing was, but it's pointless as your comprehension level of language is obviously too far behind to see your mistake.
"Yes, you dolt. The example given was one more flexible alternative to an application of puppet. That's the Unix philosophy: lots of little tools doing one or two things well, working together."
And here's where your reading comprehension fails again. I was pointing out that puppet is much *more flexible than debian config packages* as you can do everything you can do in a deb package (or directly on the command line) plus lots more with Puppet. For god sakes why don't you actually try it - you obviously have no clue as your only argument so far against it is that it's for 'lazy admins'.
"No, they weren't. Perhaps you recall a specific example of inefficiency and are assuming something about it, or maybe you just read a passing remark on some sophomoric political web site and are regurgitating it."
No I'm actually recalling the real world example of what happened in East Germany in particular, and the USSR in general, after the Iron Curtain came down. Most industries, particularly those in East Germany which were directly exposed to the West, failed because they were desperately inefficient and out-of-date.
"Where the context here for "vendor" is the guy selling the platform, not "anyone who sells stuff". Do admins still have that BOFH "Human language is beneath me!" mentality?"
You said "a vendor/distributor-provided toolkit". How is puppet not 'a vendor-provided toolkit'? If you meant only using tools provided by the *OS distributor* then actually write that, but don't write something ambiguous and then jump on people when they didn't get the exact same meaning as you. In short try expressing yourself properly next time.
"Your reading comprehension is atrocious. The point is that automation packages designed for individual systems are almost invariably more efficient and complete than generic systems designed for lazy sysadmins."
Leaving aside that nowhere in your previous posts did you say that you obviously know nothing about puppet. It can do far more things far more flexibly than building debian config packages. And when the built-in types don't meet your needs you can use it to make your own out of commands and the "OS distributor-provided toolkit" directly.
As for the Soviets I was referring to sticking to older, less efficient, ways of doing things just so everyone has a job, something which they were well known for and which arguably brought their economy down in the end. Nothing to do with centralisation, but again your poor reading comprehensive comes through.
So automating the stuff that can be automated with Puppet and devoting my time to the difficult stuff that really does need my attention somehow shows I can't cope? BTW Puppet *is* a 'vendor-provided toolkit', Puppetlabs is a software vendor selling support and services just like Red Hat and others.
I could do with a laugh this morning so perhaps you can share some more insights from the quasi-Soviet time warp you live in where everything has to be done in as manual and inefficient way as possible to justify your job.
Exactly, I'm so sick of the condescending bullshit posted on sites like slashdot from sysadmins who think that because they do everything manually or with custom scripts they are somehow better. As a sysadmin you're hired by a business to administer the systems efficiently and in a way that someone else could take over without too much trouble if you got hit by a bus or decided to leave.
Systems like puppet can usually cover 90%+ of the configurations in an organisation, leaving you the time to properly focus on the inevitable corner-cases and learn to use their 'toolsets' or whatever else properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's a problem with KDE but they are working on it:
"The best part of all this is that users won’t be exposed to the KCM very often, because connecting an already-known monitor will configure it and place it automatically depending on the last configuration. Connecting a previously unknown output should pop up a simple window/dialog..."
http://www.progdan.cz/2012/09/display-management-in-kde/
Britain is officially metric but in reality is stuck in a weird limbo between metric and imperial.
So road signs are in miles and yards, but petrol is sold in litres and car fuel consumption often quoted in litres per 100km.
In all shops, whether a market stall in the street or a large supermarket, everything must by law be in metric. However they are allowed to still have the imperial size printed alongside the metric one and even to produce products in the old imperial sizes. E.g in the supermarket they still sell milk in pints, so instead of buying a 1 litre milk carton like you would in the rest of the world (except the USA) you get a 1.136 litre* milk carton or something like that.
*UK pints are different from US pints
It may not help in your case but people in the EU can send anything ordered online and delivered by post/courier ('distance selling') back without having to give a reason within 7 days (14 in some countries). So there's no reason you can't buy online and if something about the keyboard, screen, Linux driver support or anything else isn't to your liking just box it up and send it back.
I did this with a 1000 Euro ultrabook in Germany that when it arrived I realised had very poor wireless range, in both Windows and Linux. Something only a few of the reviews mentioned and obviously something I couldn't test until I had the thing in my house. I ran the recovery DVD, boxed it up and sent it back to Amazon. Money was refunded a couple of days later (cash in my account, not gift vouchers or any credit) and I bought a different Ultrabook.
http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/cons_int/safe_shop/dist_sell/index_en.htm
"Consumer's right to cancel the contract within a minimum of 7 working days without giving any reason and without penalty, except the cost of returning the goods (right of withdrawal);"
Good to hear fastmail has an emergency plan, it's been very, very reliable for the last couple of years and I hope it stays that way :)
I'm begginning to realise how reliant I am on email - today I got an invoice by email that if I hadn't seen it straight away would've costed over 100 pounds extra due to not cancelling something early enough.
BTW the new Fastmail interface is great!
Exactly, I had the same problem as the GP except that Windows update never found SP1, even after leaving it for around 24 hours. It's very frustrating that there's no way to get everything in one go - updates just seem to come from the ether at random times in Windows Update on an newly installed Win 7 box, meaning it could be days before you're truly up to date.
Downloading SP1 manually and installing it helps though.
+1 But KDE with Thunderbird as the email client is still a great combination. Still not sure what akonadi's really supposed to help with in practice (I've read the documents and blog posts describing the theoretical rationale behind it).
+1 I really don't understand all the effort going into resurrecting GNOME2 and fighting GNOME3 and Unity when KDE is right there, with tons of features and works today.
London is +0000 (i.e right on GMT) for approx half the year and +0100 for the other half (roughly) because of daylight savings time.
I've experienced the same, in the Ukraine in an old 'Soviet-style' hotel. But the price of less than 5 Euro/night including free-Wifi took the edge off any discomfort :) In any hotel in western Europe you should have your own bathroom, unless it's a really cheap place with prices comparable to a hostel.
Put simply a hostel is where you 'rent' a bed that may be in shared room for one or more nights as opposed to a hotel where you 'rent' a whole room for yourself for one or more nights.
You'll find that almost all hostels, in both western and eastern Europe, are very professionally run. Theft is very uncommon and really isn't something you need to worry about beyond putting valubles (passports, laptops, phones, cameras, credit cards and spare cash) in a locker.
A lot of hostels have female-only rooms but even where those aren't available no hostel (or the 99.99% of the guests who are decent people) are going to tolerate harrassment or assault.
Friends from here in Europe say the hostels in Australia are of similar standards to in Europe. The US is different altogether though, friends of mine who are used to staying in hostels in Europe had really bad experiences trying it in the US. Either the hostel was expensive and crap or it was actually more of a half-way house for homeless and criminals. We've avoided US hostels since then.
I'll second this as I've had this argument before with people. The ICE is supposed to be a high-speed train but only actually reaches it's 300km/h max speed on some sections of track such as bits in norther Bavaria near Nuremberg, so the total journey time is around the same as the car.
The price of the ICE tickets are the real problem though, basically I've worked out that the only time it's cheaper than a car is when you're going on your own. And since I don't have a car that's basing my calculations on the cost of rental cars!
It's not just Munich-Berlin, me and my girlfriend did Munich-Hamberg return in a rental car for cheaper (incl. fuel) than 2 ICE tickets for the same route would've been. I'd prefer to take the train as it avoids dealing with car rental companies and looking for parking at your destination, but the astronomical prices and overcrowding on some sections like BerlinLeipzig, are too much.
You're one of many I think.
It's vastly improved since the 4.0-4.2 releases which were alpha or beta quality.
I'm not knocking the OBS, it's a very useful tool, but it really doesn't help much here since making a package that works cross-distribution would involve a lot of manual integration work.
For example I could easily use the OBS to take my Opensuse package for foo and build it on Fedora and ensure it at least builds and is installable. However the real work, integrating it into the Fedora distro and ensuring it works well with and is the right version for the other packages in that distro, is not done by the OBS and isn't easily automated.
If you look in the mailing list thread on this article you'll see it's exactly that kind of integration work and the difficulties with it (even within one distro) that's causing the problems. Probably the most realistic model is the Debian one where several distros (Mint, Ubuntu etc.) feed off and (hopefully) contribute back to a central packaging effort. IMHO the number of packages in a modern Linux distro is getting too much, and the integration work too complex, for smaller projects like Opensuse.
Actually Ubuntu LTS releases draw from testing[1], only non-LTS releases draw from unstable.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS
4) RPM based. OK so its repackaged redhat.
No, RPM-based doesn't mean it's repackaging Redhat, you're confusing it with Centos and Scientific Linux. Mandriva is actually one of a small number of distros that does a unique packaging effort - ie. the developers package most things themselves rather than basing it off another distro such as Ubuntu does with Debian.
In the past, i.e. early 2000's, Mandrake/Mandriva had some of the nicer desktop-focused features such as:
- automatic resizing of the Windows partition in the installer-
- GUI partitioning program available not just in the installer but in the Control Centre after installation
- decent package manager with dependency resolution and large repos (almost on a par with Debian's)
- decent default settings for KDE and GNOME
- working USB and CD/DVD automounting (the Mandrake/driva developers went to great pains to get this working long before HAL and udev came and made it a comodity feature)
But that was the past and all major distro's have those things now. So you're probably right, currently there's no standout feature that Mandriva has over other distros, probably just personal preference for those that use it.
+1 if I couldn't remove the DRM from Amazon ebooks easily I wouldn't buy them. FWIW here are the steps (all based on software from that apprenticealf.wordpress.com blog):
http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/
***Amazon Kindle***
- Download and install the Kindle for PC application and ensure all ebooks you want to remove DRM from are downloaded in Kindle for PC
- Download & install Activestate Python Community Edition
- Download the 'combined tools package' from apprenticealf's blog (http://tinyurl.com/6asq47f)
- Double-click KindleBooks/Kindlebooks.pyw from the 'combined tools package', it should pop-up a GUI dialog with window title 'Kindle/Mobi/... eBook Encryption Removal'
- Click the ... to give it the path to the eBook input file. It'll be a .azw file in My Documents\My Kindle Content. Then select the directory where the unencrypted output file should go
- For the 'Alternative Kindle.info file' line do a Windows Search for *.kinf, this will find your kindle.info (in later versions .kinf) file. Eg. on Windows 7 it might be in c:\Users\myuser\AppData\Local\Amazon\Kindle\storage. On Windows XP it's C:\Documents and Settings\myuser\Local Settings\Application Data\Amazon\Kindle\storage
- Click Start!
Note: 'Directory for Unencrypted Output File(s)' should be something simple like c:\ or C:\Documents and Settings\myuser\Desktop. Kindlebooks.pyw has a problem with either the path length or particular characters in the path.
Indeed, I'm a big KDE fan but also a big fan of certain GTK applications that are better than anything QT-based - Firefox, GIMP etc.
If you don't like the way GTK apps look in KDE just go to KDE System Settings->Application Appearance->GTK+ Appearance and choose another widget-style. oxygen-gtk or qtcurve (Ubuntu package kde-style-qtcurve) are particularly good.
The neat world clock/weather applet (anybody know of a good one for KDE?)
For a decent weather applet install CWP (package plasma-widget-cwp in Ubuntu). Put the widget on your desktop and in its settings set 'Layout 1' to be 5 Days - Horizontal. That has it show the current temp and weather as well as the predictions for the next 5 days.
The built-in KDE clock functions as a world clock: Right click on it and go into Digital Clock Settings. Under Timezones tick the checkbox next to all the cities you're interested in seeing the time for. Now when you just mouse over the clock (don't click) it'll show you the time in all the cities you selected.
I've had reasonably good experiences with vpntunnel.se so far using BBC iPlayer from Germany and torrent downloads (there's a plague of speculative invoicing currently in Germany so if you download from TPB et al you need a VPN). It's 5 Euro/month or less if you sign up for longer, you can pay by paypal and a few other methods.
They have had some reliability issues in the past though so I'd only sign up for a month and try it.
The point is that having the source code open would reduce the time it takes hackers (in the good sense of that word) to close the latest gap in the DRM arms race to almost zero, a few days at most. By necessity they're implemented in a very different and very technically flawed way, unlike proper encryption schemes, whichmeans that source-code scrutiny would immediately give the obfuscation game they play away.
With a closed off ecosystem, obfuscation and contiual software updates you can keep ahead and build a DRM system that's crack-resistant enough to at least be functional, see Apple's iTunes DRM or the Blue-Ray DRM schemes for example. Neither of these systems would be possible if they were open sourced.
Correct me if I'm wrong here but DRM schemes, even if they use proper encryption, are basically obfuscation schemes because at some point the user (or more accurately the program that they run) has to have the key(s) to decrypt the content. So seeing the source code for implementation of a DRM scheme would probably be enough to crack it.
"Words have context.
Every business is a vendor. Your interpretation of "vendor" gives it no substantive meaning within the sentence. Therefore your interpretation must be wrong and you need to look for another one.
This is the sort of thought process you should go through during primary school reading comprehension exercises. I don't know what country you're from, but your tenuous grasp of language wouldn't get you through high school here."
The word 'vendor' has a perfectly substantive meaning in that sentence, a software tool that's supported by an actual vendor - someone you can buy support and services off. Very different to some random tool you can download off the internet that's effectively supported by no one (or yourself/own IT staff with access to the source code). I.e. Puppet is vendor supported but your self-written sysadmin scripts are not, even if they use software from the OS distributor.
I could point out again how ambiguous and broad your original phrasing was, but it's pointless as your comprehension level of language is obviously too far behind to see your mistake.
"Yes, you dolt. The example given was one more flexible alternative to an application of puppet. That's the Unix philosophy: lots of little tools doing one or two things well, working together."
And here's where your reading comprehension fails again. I was pointing out that puppet is much *more flexible than debian config packages* as you can do everything you can do in a deb package (or directly on the command line) plus lots more with Puppet. For god sakes why don't you actually try it - you obviously have no clue as your only argument so far against it is that it's for 'lazy admins'.
"No, they weren't. Perhaps you recall a specific example of inefficiency and are assuming something about it, or maybe you just read a passing remark on some sophomoric political web site and are regurgitating it."
No I'm actually recalling the real world example of what happened in East Germany in particular, and the USSR in general, after the Iron Curtain came down. Most industries, particularly those in East Germany which were directly exposed to the West, failed because they were desperately inefficient and out-of-date.
"Where the context here for "vendor" is the guy selling the platform, not "anyone who sells stuff". Do admins still have that BOFH "Human language is beneath me!" mentality?"
You said "a vendor/distributor-provided toolkit". How is puppet not 'a vendor-provided toolkit'? If you meant only using tools provided by the *OS distributor* then actually write that, but don't write something ambiguous and then jump on people when they didn't get the exact same meaning as you. In short try expressing yourself properly next time.
"Your reading comprehension is atrocious. The point is that automation packages designed for individual systems are almost invariably more efficient and complete than generic systems designed for lazy sysadmins."
Leaving aside that nowhere in your previous posts did you say that you obviously know nothing about puppet. It can do far more things far more flexibly than building debian config packages. And when the built-in types don't meet your needs you can use it to make your own out of commands and the "OS distributor-provided toolkit" directly.
As for the Soviets I was referring to sticking to older, less efficient, ways of doing things just so everyone has a job, something which they were well known for and which arguably brought their economy down in the end. Nothing to do with centralisation, but again your poor reading comprehensive comes through.
So automating the stuff that can be automated with Puppet and devoting my time to the difficult stuff that really does need my attention somehow shows I can't cope? BTW Puppet *is* a 'vendor-provided toolkit', Puppetlabs is a software vendor selling support and services just like Red Hat and others.
I could do with a laugh this morning so perhaps you can share some more insights from the quasi-Soviet time warp you live in where everything has to be done in as manual and inefficient way as possible to justify your job.
Exactly, I'm so sick of the condescending bullshit posted on sites like slashdot from sysadmins who think that because they do everything manually or with custom scripts they are somehow better. As a sysadmin you're hired by a business to administer the systems efficiently and in a way that someone else could take over without too much trouble if you got hit by a bus or decided to leave.
Systems like puppet can usually cover 90%+ of the configurations in an organisation, leaving you the time to properly focus on the inevitable corner-cases and learn to use their 'toolsets' or whatever else properly.