Show me an ad in my own kitchen and that screen is going to be broken.
I moved to Germany. It’s been an experience because the tech status dialed back about 15 years. One area I don’t miss is the ever pervasive drive to have screens with ads on every surface.
The Linux Mint GUI updater is an interesting bit of code, or at least it was about 5 years ago. I looked at updating it a bit with a status bar for a stage I thought could use it.
I opened up the code…Python that just uses a shell call to apt. No muss, no library calls. Okay, that’ll do.
It was a functional wrapper on the command line calls, exactly as you’d hope for a tool.
America is owned and operated by rich people. They couldn’t make money running passenger trains so once we were ordered to invest in car-only infrastructure the trains were mostly disbanded and shut down. There’s a ghost of a system left with just a few corridors that could be considered bare minimum service in a developed nation.
How many kilometers of high speed rail does the US have? Zero. We have some that gets close, but not really.
My mid-sized city has two trains per day, one each direction, and they both leave between 1am and 2am. In Germany you would have 30+ trains per day in a city this size, likely a notable S-Bahn network, and also some trams and/or U-Bahns in the city to compliment busses. I’ve got busses in town, but they operated about every 30-45 minutes each, with evening service being every 60 minutes. Here’s the fun part: our busses are the most used public transit system for a mid-sized city in the US right now and it’s still pathetic when compared to even basic services in Europe.
DB needs to keep getting investment. Germany must get to a dedicated passenger rail network to separate out the freight trains. DB should also be re-nationalized and operated as a national service, not a for profit system that will inevitably fail as a commercial venture, leading to yet more terrible service. Here’s hoping the latest German Parliament follows through on investment money that they pushed through at the start of the year! Also, keep the Deutschland Karte! That’s such a great resource for everyone.
My city has two trains per day: one each way. They leave at 1am and 2am. The US train system is hilariously bad.
I know that DB in Germany is horrible compared to the rest of Europe, but at least it has trains that run during daylight hours!
Sample size: 1
That’ll do! Let’s hit the pub.
It’s not a conservative’s problem until it effects them personally. By then it’s usually too late, but at least they feel bad about that one issue for a while.
I just finished teaching an Internet of Things class this term. I went strong on the ‘things’ bit of the title. We did all kinds of hardware projects, along with web apis, mqtt, and a tiny bit of clouds services to move data.
It was one of the most fun classes I’ve ever taught. That stuff is great!
I still live it. I use some Atmega chips like the attiny85. It only has 256 bytes if RAM and 5 i/o pins to work with. I code in C++ so I have 100% control over memory if I want it.
Someday I’ll find a reason to work with attiny10 chips… There’s almost no resources on it and it’s about the size of a grain of rice!
Just to put you all on notice: I started my kids on Linux from day 1 of their computing lives. I’m playing the long game here. In another 80 years they’re going to be in the longest living users category.
They mostly use Linux as their daily drivers. Any time they have to use windows for school work they also rage at the terrible UI and lack of ease of use. <Insert evil laughter here>
Been there! It was Avery different time.
The first program I wrote was in the Logo Turtle Game on an Apple Iie in 4th grade. Did some BASIC programming on the Apple IIe’s building interpreter too.
I use Arduino boards with Atmega, Esp32/8266, and M0 chips on them for embedded projects. These $8 boards have more processing capability then my first desktop computer…
I was given a logging on a RedHat server in 1997. It was operated by a fellow student in the dorm.
My school taught the engineers how to use SunOS for class, so it wasn’t a huge leap to start using a telnet connection to a local Linux machine.
Within a few months I was dual booting an older desktop Linux/Win95, and away I went. Since then it’s been about 90%+ of my daily computer use on Linux machines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one who survived the attempt to require others to use it.