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.

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.

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.

Huge congrats to the team and my condolences on the loss.

FreeCAD is a huge part of my engineering toolkit and your work is greatly appreciated.

I expect that the 1.0 will be in the Debian repos by about 2026 and I’m looking forward to it. Stable distros be stable distros. :-p

I had a Pentium I 120 MHz Packard Hell machine. It came with Win95 OSR 1 and I loved that beast. I upgraded the disk (1.1 GB to 3.1GB!) and the RAM up to 40MB. The screen was a 13" fishbowl so I get a Sony Trinitron 15" screen eventually.

The combo modem/fax/sound ISA card wasn’t worth keeping, but I got a PCI Sound blaster as well as a 3Com 3c905 fast 10/100 Ethernet card. I had one of the best machines in the dorm for a while. Warcraft II played so very good.

The Linux support in RedHat 5.2, then through 6.2, and sometimes Mandrake, OpenBSD, and some other distros was great. As long as you set the IRQs in the bios right it worked like a dream.

I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.

I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.

What a wonderful world that would be. Fingers crossed.

With the wall style, it also feels like you’re crammed between two stone blocks too.

The bathroom looks like it’s 1 meter wide and no more.

At one point my 1GB disk was the “big one” in the dorm. It was the windows share of some random media. I had room for the whole 40MB videos “Jesus vs Frosty” (The Spirit of Christmas) and “Jesus vs Santa Claus”. It was before South Park became an actual show, but people watched those 100’s of times off my hard drive.

When I bought a 3GB from Fry’s it was an open question how we’d fill it. Of course, that was just as the mp3 codec started to gain traction… Problem solved.

I have it on the shelf, but haven’t gotten to it. I’ll put it in the reading queue.

There was also a competition (long ago) to see who could build a computer that would successfully boot Windows 95. The goal was to boot the slowest possible time (no arbitrary delays allowed).

The winner wrote a shim that emulated a floating point unit of the i486 so it would boot on a i386 (no floating point). The result was… booting after many weeks. They won big time.

I did some similar stuff on a Raspberry Pi. I had to NFS mount my desktop and make a swapdisk on the NFS mount to have enough RAM to build. It wasn’t fast, but it did eventually work.

We used a RPi 4 for a Plex server for a while. It was fine except it couldn’t do any live transcoding or handle h265 worth beans.

I upgraded to an OrangePi 5. I’m on a sata drive for the OS and a external USB disk for media. The thing is amazing!

No, it’s not a $50 computer. Yes, it works great.

I love RPi boards, but their hardware limitations are quick to be found as you move past simple hobbyist projects.