Wow. I haven’t seen a Sun keyboard like that in … geez forever. Whose were fun times. I was younger then.

No! I’ve used OSU’s mirrors for years. This would be a notable hit to OSS resources.

Because when I move left in tabs, the cursor isn’t clear which tab I’m on. It also tried to sit off the left edge of a terminal in some editors because it aligns with the right side of the character (the tab), instead of the left.

I do see how tabs are a better option : they allow the one editing the file to decide how wide the indentation is. That’s actually good User Interface design, by separating the data from the rendering layout.

I can see the argument both ways, but I like to use spaces so the visual and editing interfaces are more standard.

Would it be better if I clarified by calling them “ball bearing balls”? Or would that lead to my unpleasant pummeling by steel balls?

I haven’t looked into it too hard yet. I saw some design that would allow remote GUI rendering for Wayland, but it likely won’t be the all in design for network transparency that X11 had (has).

I use SSH with X forwarding for all kinds of system maintenance and demos in my CS courses.

15+… I was there, Gandalf… We had these kinds of setups 25+ years ago. How time flies.

Before that, it was often XTerm style systems. The local machine only booted an XServer and then connected to a central UNIX system. All programs ran on the UNIX server, and were rendered on the XTerm/XServer you were sitting at.

The original XServer systems were efficient enough to run over serial lines, not just Ethernet.

Another setup was to put multiple monitors/keyboards/mice on a single UNIX/Linux tower and have it launch multiple XServer sessions so you could have a single computer with up to six people sitting at it.

I also managed a Rembo lab for a bit. It used a PXE shim OS to get a menu from the Rembo server. From there, you could boot the main OS, or download a new hard drive image from the server. I would build new drive images and upload them to the server, then updating the lab would mean rebooting the computers and clicking a “grab latest” button. It actually worked very well for distributing OSes. We had both Linux and Windows images students could pull down.

Lab management at scale is a continual struggle to keep everything functional and patched.

I like to talk about this in my CS classes. We get compiles to compile code by compiling a compiler with a compiler. It’s an infinite regression problem that terminates with someone writing a compiler in assembly… Which requires an assembler to assemble… So you write an assembler in machine code directly on the processor.

If we lost all of the currently compiled programs one day, even with the compiler source code in hand, it would be some serious work to rebuild our current tool chains.

Conservatism consists of one core value: there should be laws that protect, but do not bind, the in group while the same laws bind, but do not protect, the out group.

It’s been that way on a lot of vectors. For example, if you are neurotic about something and poor, you are called crazy. If you’re neurotic about the same thing and rich, then you’re eccentric.

Last weekend I used a scrubber to delete every post and comment from my 15 year old Reddit account, then deleted the account, so I’ve finally burned the boats on the move. Lemmy is perfectly fine as it is. It’ll ebb and flow for users, but I’ve been happy for a year here now.

In US college football: Washington State University vs. University of Washington. WSU cares about it a lot. UW… has bigger fish to fry.

Not on my machines. Open Source oses and tools are the only way to have a chance at dodging this kind of thing.

My university in Germany operates entirely in English. The academic world is very international so it often falls back to English to support the faculty and students. Issues in the community will also be run through the university news routes, so while I’ve been learning German, I’ll also have a big resource with my work community.

There’s a few places to check for positions. I interviewed in Ireland and Scotland as well (didn’t get the jobs). There’s also Australia and new Zealand hiding out there. Or Canada. Hell, Mexico has a great university system you could look into.

Your PhD does open new doors. It’s by no means a guarantee of a faculty spot, but it’s valued so you can leverage it.

The position is in Germany. It might be out of the frying pan and into the fire given Germany’s right wing rise, but that’s happening across the western nations and we’re all in trouble.

I don’t have a ton of advice for you. I defended over 10 years ago, so I’m moving straight into a tenured/permanent position as senior faculty. For an ABD, I’m not sure what the landscape looks like these days.

If you want to make the move, start talking to people. Reach out to people publishing in your field and talk shop. Collaborate with them, talk about the future, and be willing to take a postdoc (or german system W1) position. It’s more ramen and a small bedroom, but it’s one where there’s healthcare and civil rights.

Academia (and most professions) are all about networks. Talk with people, collaborate, and grow that network. Something will come along.

Good thing I’ve just accepted a faculty position outside the US.

I’ll get to move to a country that doesn’t persecute academics and I think I’m just beating the crowds on the way out.

I bought a 386 motherboard that needed a patch. Not software, but by soldering a wire between two pads. You just basically figure it out and went from there with a soldering iron.

Build the computer from parts? Sure. Soldered it like it came as discrete components? Also sure.

Tech savvy is often in context of when you were learning in your teens to early twenties and then what of that skill set is still applicable today.

They’re also building mass transit with trams and metro lines like crazy. Paris is knocking it out of the park as a developed city should be.

We had a similar issue back in 2004 or so. Downloading a browser (Mozilla) was a bout 40MB. Normally it took about 30 seconds to pull it down on our University Internet. Then one day we were setting up systems and every time we clicked the download button nothing seemed to happen.

Further inspection showed that it had many successful download in under 1 second each. Our IT network team got us linked up to Internet2. It was able to download so fast that the bottleneck was the IDE bus of about 40MB/s. The file was coming from Intel over I2 so we couldn’t even see it download before it was done.

I had a three year bender with OpenBSD back in 2001-2003 or so. I even started building my own kernels and doing a tiny bit of hacking on the code. There’s all kinds of interesting tools and systems out there if you start exploring.

It sounds like you want to bring Sorcerer Linux back.

The packages were kept in the Grimore and you cast spells to build, install, etc.

https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=sorcerer

It was a very early source-based distro.