A 1% deviation per container, even if it is always in the same direction, cannot mean a deviation higher than 1% on the whole cargo, no matter if that's 1kg or 1000 tons. Any ship can withstand a 1% overload over nominal full displacement. You don't need any kind of fancy device to know when a cargo ship is overloaded, just your eyes. Don't they teach about Mr Archimede in school anymore?
" they want the Government to be the single payer so the bureaucratic army of paper-pushing micro-managers can verify everyone is being treated equitably. Which costs more, not less,"
Then please explain how is it that the whole of first world with the notable exception of USA has government-as-single-payer, less expenditure per citizen, better coverage and better life indexes than USA.
After all your reasonements on why unions are so bad you still has to explain why on the whole first world with the notable exception of USA, they have strong unions and it seems they manage not to go so bad. In fact, you can see that the countries with best rents and best life indexes, say Northern Europe, have the strongest unions.
Future generations' textbooks will be electronic DRM'ed devices that will say what their lords wants them to say. They won't say anything about Snowden and, thus, Snowden won't exist.
Ironically is in today's world of information that the Greek's revenge on Herostratus can work out.
"why would it? thinking about it pragmatically, what would such a powerful species want with us?"
Of course eating our brains. Everybody knows that's the hidden link between aliens and zombies!
"It's like you or I looking at an ant hill for all of a 1/10th of a second before forgetting it."
Before stepping on it and killing the ants by thousands without even noticing, you mean.
Such a civilization wouldn't doubt a second to clean the planet out of the way of its new Interstellar highway, heck, they probably wouldn't even notice. Our only chance to survive is demonstrate that the 187 form is not properly managed -there're only two copies and it requires to be presented by triplicate! out of that, resistance is futile.
"How well does puppet really help in heterogeneous, custom environments? I have Windows and Linux servers."
Quite fine. Of the tens of different systems you can support, there's only one -you see, one among tens, with poor support. That one is Windows.
But that doesn't come for a surprise: we all know Windows is impossible to be properly managed (and I say that from the standpoint of somebody that supports about 2000 windows servers, so I might know something about the issue).
"How much work will it reduce?"
It really depends. And then, tools like puppet are not only about how much work they can reduce, but how much assurance they can offer to your employer -even in a single server scenario. Properly used, puppet means that any server can be rebuilt at any time, and that's something that all your effort can't asure (if only, by the time you are in the company no more).
"An optimisation in configuration management shouldn't be causing such a large impact"
I remember that when Windows 95 came to the party I was using whatever window manager used HP-Ux back then, VUE, or something like that -and it was far from a fair comparation (and that's out of my generosity of not trying to remember when it was not Windows 95 but Windows 3.x the one to compare against). But Windows 95 brought that kind of interfaces to the masses and *that* made a big difference.
Puppet, Chef and the likes are bringing CM to the masses (and making obvious some inherent limitations of Microsoft Windows when compared to unix-like systems) and you can bet that *is* quite a large impact too.
"What I've come to suspect, is that the advocates of these tools have never learned how to do disciplined system administration."
It's quite like Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is rubish, so you can bet 90% of those advocates are...
But don't fool yourself: infrastructure.org has been up, how much? 10/15 years? and the concepts are already there, so it's nothing fancy new.
"unless a system has been subjected to Puppet, then it's some mysterious black box full of scorpions and sharp glass."
I've been roughly 20 years in the field and well, the plural of anecdote is not statistics and all that, but yes, basically if they are not under CM, they usually are "mysterious black boxes full of scorpions and sharp glass". That I'm kindof an Indy Jones of system administration quite capable of managing mysterious black boxes full of scorpions and sharp glass doesn't change that reality.
"If that's been your experience, then you've been doing it wrong."
There are in the world about seven billions souls, so they outnumber me: most of my experience doesn't come from what I do, but what I see others do.
Using a strategy that depends on the people around you being well above average is usually a bad strategy. It happens that tools like puppet not only don't require people above average beyond the starting steep curve but even they tend to educate people on the proper way of doing these kinds of things -so eventually and ironically they end up being professionals above the average.
"But you bet your ass we use automation."
Of course you do. Now, your next step is doing automation without reinventing the wheel. Those days are already in the past.
It is overkill for you but, if your boss has any professional acumen (I know, most don't) it wouldn't be overkill for him. A commonly understated value of automated configuration management is that it allows the company to own the knowledge it paid to acquire instead of letting it live only in some employee's memories.
"Nowadays any sheep meat that isn't classified as lamb due to its age is usually called mutton. [...] Offhand, I can't think of any words from French or Romance languages."
Then, you will be surprised that mutton in French is... mouton.
And it comes from the ancient French moton. In Italian, montoni.
It heavily depends on the voting system. But in the cases I know of, no, not voting is not a vote, it's not voting.
And usually the effect of your non-voting is usually quite against your expectations. So, please, study the voting system your vote (or non vote) is metered against before reaching any conclusion.
"What you're saying is that this company has an automatic "monopoly" over something they built and paid for."
No. What he said is that there are some markets where the entry of one party inhibits the ability of other parties to enter into competition. That's a natural monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is BSD licensed so your point is, again?
Can anyone really be so, ahem, not so brilliant?
A 1% deviation per container, even if it is always in the same direction, cannot mean a deviation higher than 1% on the whole cargo, no matter if that's 1kg or 1000 tons. Any ship can withstand a 1% overload over nominal full displacement.
You don't need any kind of fancy device to know when a cargo ship is overloaded, just your eyes. Don't they teach about Mr Archimede in school anymore?
So, that's your answer? Unions don't work in USA because it's bigger and ethnically heterogeneus?
" they want the Government to be the single payer so the bureaucratic army of paper-pushing micro-managers can verify everyone is being treated equitably. Which costs more, not less,"
Then please explain how is it that the whole of first world with the notable exception of USA has government-as-single-payer, less expenditure per citizen, better coverage and better life indexes than USA.
"Workers rights, good. Unions? Not so much."
Good reasons, but still reality is harder.
After all your reasonements on why unions are so bad you still has to explain why on the whole first world with the notable exception of USA, they have strong unions and it seems they manage not to go so bad. In fact, you can see that the countries with best rents and best life indexes, say Northern Europe, have the strongest unions.
Food for mind, don't you think so?
Future generations' textbooks will be electronic DRM'ed devices that will say what their lords wants them to say. They won't say anything about Snowden and, thus, Snowden won't exist.
Ironically is in today's world of information that the Greek's revenge on Herostratus can work out.
"Either way I'm screwing with them"
Are you American?
If so, please consider whose taxes pay for all those salaries and their shiny and ever-growing datacenters and then consider who's screwing who.
"why would it? thinking about it pragmatically, what would such a powerful species want with us?"
Of course eating our brains. Everybody knows that's the hidden link between aliens and zombies!
"It's like you or I looking at an ant hill for all of a 1/10th of a second before forgetting it."
Before stepping on it and killing the ants by thousands without even noticing, you mean.
Such a civilization wouldn't doubt a second to clean the planet out of the way of its new Interstellar highway, heck, they probably wouldn't even notice. Our only chance to survive is demonstrate that the 187 form is not properly managed -there're only two copies and it requires to be presented by triplicate! out of that, resistance is futile.
"Stop with the aliens nonsense."
Well, an alien species that it's able to release in milliseconds what the sun in 300000 years is something to worry about, don't you think so?
"Oh .. fuck .. We don't have a space program, only a high altitude orbital flight program. Well, it's been nice knowing you all."
Dolphins are still there, so not time to worry yet.
"if this were true, Fedora would not have something like 5x as many packages as RHEL does."
See?
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=17443218&sid=214388
"Use of CPUs from cloud-based providers is not as efficient for computations as using multiple GPUs linked together on a custom built setup."
Per spent dolar? On a "pay as you go" fashion?
"This is a waste of money, and poorly done systems analysis"
Of course yes. Because your silver bullet is the real silver bullter, of course.
"Some people are incredibly underskilled at sysadmin life if they think 20 servers is hard to maintain."
Some people are incrediby underskilled at sysadmin life if they think the proper way is reinventing the wheel.
"If your sending data up from your servers for centralized processing that's probably not something puppet or any other config management bit does."
Wrong. In the case of puppet that's the realm of exported resources, custom facts, ENC, hiera and/or some others.
"How well does puppet really help in heterogeneous, custom environments? I have Windows and Linux servers."
Quite fine. Of the tens of different systems you can support, there's only one -you see, one among tens, with poor support. That one is Windows.
But that doesn't come for a surprise: we all know Windows is impossible to be properly managed (and I say that from the standpoint of somebody that supports about 2000 windows servers, so I might know something about the issue).
"How much work will it reduce?"
It really depends. And then, tools like puppet are not only about how much work they can reduce, but how much assurance they can offer to your employer -even in a single server scenario. Properly used, puppet means that any server can be rebuilt at any time, and that's something that all your effort can't asure (if only, by the time you are in the company no more).
"We're using OpenView [...] I have a script framework"
So, in the end, your point is that the poster is right: you require automation.
"An optimisation in configuration management shouldn't be causing such a large impact"
I remember that when Windows 95 came to the party I was using whatever window manager used HP-Ux back then, VUE, or something like that -and it was far from a fair comparation (and that's out of my generosity of not trying to remember when it was not Windows 95 but Windows 3.x the one to compare against). But Windows 95 brought that kind of interfaces to the masses and *that* made a big difference.
Puppet, Chef and the likes are bringing CM to the masses (and making obvious some inherent limitations of Microsoft Windows when compared to unix-like systems) and you can bet that *is* quite a large impact too.
"What I've come to suspect, is that the advocates of these tools have never learned how to do disciplined system administration."
It's quite like Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is rubish, so you can bet 90% of those advocates are...
But don't fool yourself: infrastructure.org has been up, how much? 10/15 years? and the concepts are already there, so it's nothing fancy new.
"unless a system has been subjected to Puppet, then it's some mysterious black box full of scorpions and sharp glass."
I've been roughly 20 years in the field and well, the plural of anecdote is not statistics and all that, but yes, basically if they are not under CM, they usually are "mysterious black boxes full of scorpions and sharp glass". That I'm kindof an Indy Jones of system administration quite capable of managing mysterious black boxes full of scorpions and sharp glass doesn't change that reality.
"If that's been your experience, then you've been doing it wrong."
There are in the world about seven billions souls, so they outnumber me: most of my experience doesn't come from what I do, but what I see others do.
Using a strategy that depends on the people around you being well above average is usually a bad strategy. It happens that tools like puppet not only don't require people above average beyond the starting steep curve but even they tend to educate people on the proper way of doing these kinds of things -so eventually and ironically they end up being professionals above the average.
"But you bet your ass we use automation."
Of course you do. Now, your next step is doing automation without reinventing the wheel. Those days are already in the past.
"10 years ago things like puppet didn't even exist"
cfengine, anyone? (you know, it's about 20 years old, not just 10)
It is overkill for you but, if your boss has any professional acumen (I know, most don't) it wouldn't be overkill for him. A commonly understated value of automated configuration management is that it allows the company to own the knowledge it paid to acquire instead of letting it live only in some employee's memories.
"Nowadays any sheep meat that isn't classified as lamb due to its age is usually called mutton. [...] Offhand, I can't think of any words from French or Romance languages."
Then, you will be surprised that mutton in French is... mouton.
And it comes from the ancient French moton. In Italian, montoni.
"I'm a doctor who makes computer programs in his spare time which makes me a little odd."
Which means, as per parent post, that you are not a trustworthy doctor.
"Not voting is also a vote."
It heavily depends on the voting system. But in the cases I know of, no, not voting is not a vote, it's not voting.
And usually the effect of your non-voting is usually quite against your expectations. So, please, study the voting system your vote (or non vote) is metered against before reaching any conclusion.
"Maybe the next thing you'll hear of him is referring to himself as the Prince of Lanai."
That, or that he's breeding sharks and mounting lasers on them.
And don't forget the white cat. Above of all, don't forget about the white cat.
"What you're saying is that this company has an automatic "monopoly" over something they built and paid for."
No. What he said is that there are some markets where the entry of one party inhibits the ability of other parties to enter into competition. That's a natural monopoly.
And you know it.