It’s a remote job offering so it must be networked somehow. Probably behind VPN and Remote Desktop though.

>It’s a remote job offering so it must be networked somehow.

Why do you assume that? The Siemens SIBAS 32 system can be used at home, and an old PC system with Windows 3.11 should be the smallest problem to use at home. The question is, if that's enough to simulate an environment similar to the train.

Source? Looks like it's in Erlangen, a German city.

It's the first word in the title.

>Remote: Windows 3.11 Administrator (m/f/d).

What is mfd

Male, female, diverse.

It's the law in Germany to advertise jobs as open for every sex and there is a third sex in Germany, called 'divers' (means: other)

It's very strange to me that they do this for job postings in English, but it's probably a consequence of how the equivalent Germam postings are impossible to avoid gendering: Ingenieur is “male engineer”, Ingenieurin is “female engineer”, etc. There's workarounds like Ingenieur*innen but that's an unpronounceable neologism. And I guess there might be an ambiguity there about whether the divers is covered.

Why do you have to specify a gender? In the US I would assume anyone could apply and capable candidates would be considered. Doesn’t mean you would get a job if they were really seeking a female or male. Not trying to go into a gender or political questions, only curious how another country works.

Because in German, it is grammatically impossible not to.

Exactly. Language like Italian, French, German (and more) assign a "gender" to any word. "Chair" is female in Italian, male in Germsn (iirc). And articles like a, the, this, that have slightly different forms for male and female (German also has "neuter"). Articles also have to match the gender of the word: "la sedia rossa" (the red chair in Italian) vs "il divano rosso" (the red couch).

English has "gendered" words in rare, exceptional cases (master/mistress?) but for Latin-based languages it is the opposite.

English has several of them for professions, e.g. waiter/waitress, aviator/aviatrix, actor/actress, but in modern English the masculine is always treated as neuter/generic. If I post an ad hiring an aviator, nobody would think that means means only men can apply either grammatically or factually, nor is anyone likely to correct me if I describe Natalie Portman as an actor instead of actress.

German can be weird in that the grammatical gender of a word doesn't always match the sex or gender of the person it describes. The most famous example is probably that das Mädchen (the girl) is grammatically neuter but unambiguously describes a female person. Nouns describing professions, however usually (always?) have a masculine and a feminine form and do describe the sex or gender of the person. An ad hiring a Fahrer would have the same meaning as "male driver" in English. That would be illegal sex discrimination in the USA or Germany.

The linked ad also included the following text, which has no connection to reality for the English translation:

> Note: In order to improve the readability of the text, the masculine form is used to refer to persons, functions, etc. However, it stands for all genders without exception.

There's a lot you could know about Erlangen... https://youtu.be/Z4Ic1mzzAiI

Wow, thanks, really useful knowledge about the Erlanger

Erlangen, the city where the job is offered:)

Presumably, a deep knowledge of Erlang wouldn't be amiss when working there.

Thank you for stepping up and taking this pun for the team.

They are suggesting the train system being offline, not the programmer/build system

And that's where the security holes potentially are.

> It's a bit sad that our initial expectation, that software would be like mathematics, where you can keep building on previous results no matter if they were from last year or last millennia, didn't work out.

If you think that, you haven't seen some of my dependencies.

Depraved degenerated decadent debouched and dangling dependencies. Cthullus madness has nothing on this. It may be co-dependent on its future self. Barock pipes, going allthrough the project, knowing no boundaries when it comes to language, platform and versioning. Laakon in cables, these spaghettis of missery, create work from 5 minutes safed work, to build the best problem-accelerator there ever was, flooding it all with exotic particles on collission. Dependencies you can depend on, like a druggy on his dealer. A spider, excreeting web, made from nutrients, it extracted from itself - which it caught in the web. To be aware of them, is to become aware of mortality, as time decays everything away, even this gordian knot, whos fraying leather belts, whip those who untangle it. God may be all powerfull, but his ability to strike us down, for that unholy abomination of a universal dependcy, implies the universal simulator not having found all modules. It still runs, but once stop it shall never rebuild. Scratch your chin and mumble: "It depends.." cause in the deep ends - it always does.

PS: I got carried away, thinking about my own, sorry.

Better yet, why do we need operating systems with the bloat that they got today? Win3.11 was a decent system at the time and if all they need is included in it and there is no security repercussions than I guess it is ok.

Its super easy to get a no-bloat operating system. Not from microsoft, but there's a flavor of linux for everything.

How well does Linux run on Windows 3.1 era hardware?

As someone who ran Linux on Windows 3.1 era hardware, perfectly well.

Very well, and striped down kernels run on hardware with even less resources today (embedded systems) than 3.1 minimum requirements. If a platform has lost support, and there's sufficient money in it to justify it, you can always go back in time to an older kernel. What really sucks is when a platform vendor maintains their own tree and it gets lost to time.

The real pain is populating the userspace if you need more than just busybox.

There's distros for this: https://github.com/marmolak/gray486linux – it's based on Linux 6.7.

Never used it; don't know how well it works in practice. But it's the type of thing that can be made to work. Looks like some minimum requirements are a tad higher than the minimum of Windows 3.1 though, so it depends a bit on what you mean exactly with "Windows 3.1 era hardware".

Pretty good I would imagine. The first public release of Linux predates Windows 3.1.

I can't read the original article anymore.

The orginal Win311 ran fine for 30 years probably until the HDD failed and they need someone to do a reinstall. Why would they change the operating system?

My comment was replying to someone claiming that you can’t get a no-bloat operating system like 3.11 anymore. I was just pointing out that it has been possible the entire time.

It would certainly be silly to change OS just for the sake of it on a 30 year old project.

There is no Linux flavor that is even remotely comparable with Win3.1 if you include the GUI in the comparison.

I think it is doable if you don't change the hardware.

But once you add the expectation that it should work with future hardware as well maintain backward compatibility, then bloat is inevitable.

It would if we built software like other durable public infrastructure. Instead we are continually reinventing the wheel.