Posts by Cian_ 17 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2021
In my 90s school there was still a split between using a modern, stencilless duplicator (admin staff called it a Gestetner but I think that was more as a generic name, not that it was a Gestetner process or even brand machine) and an actual copier based on the required volume of copies. Duplicator looked like any other 80s copier, just maybe even more grey and boring.
The Irish FSPO (ombudsman equivalent) is funded by a compulsory levy so its not like they need to keep the banks happy to get it. My one complaint that needed the FSPO was resolved rapidly by a [s]bribe to go away[/s], sorry, an ex-gratia payment for the trouble caused.
Had much the same issue, except much more frequently - chimney to chimney for two linked doctors surgeries a short walk from each other had good line of sight, except the four times an hour a train went over the bridge over that road.
They actually lived with it (brief drops on RDP sessions) until better uplink became available on the cable company in that area and a proper site to site VPN went in.
The almost 20 years ago, high speed internet and Netscape refusal reminds me - pretty much exactly that amount of time ago, I was getting an 'engineer'-lead install of a blisteringly fast 512/128k DSL line, which hadn't been provisioned properly. Said ISP 'engineer' didn't actually have a computer and tried to blame the line not working on my use of Mozilla; as if it had somehow poisoned the Cisco router - as clearly sites didn't work in Internet Exploder either afterwards.
One argument and a trip to the exchange later, there was internet connectivity. In both browsers.
The radio station I worked for had just changed to IP units in late 2019 - to replace temporary ISDN lines (which were getting costly); and analogue Band I links from an OB truck.
This meant that getting people kitted out to work from home in March 2020 was so much easier.
I'd also just replaced the firewall setup with one that didn't have a per-user fee for VPN clients; for a completely unconnected reason to that; a few weeks beforehand; and the parent firm had finished their on-prem to Google Cloud email migration in December 2019.
Incredible amount of coincidence made the first few weeks of COVID a hell of a lot less panicked for me as for nearly everyone else working in the same job!
DVD-RAM discs could/should be readable in any drive. I used them fairly extensively in ~2006 as I had both a TV DVD+VHS recorder that used them, giving something more like DVR functionality as it could delete shows from the disc; and a laptop that properly supported them.
Most modern drives do actually support at least reading them still - out of caddy of course; but most later DVD-RAM drives were caddyless anyway. I have used this quite recently to copy a VHS to DVD-RAM and then pull the files on my PC; and use Handbrake to to convert to something sensible.
There was a relatively common, 56k modem based STB pushed by a cable TV company in Ireland, a Unison Box, which were about a third or less of the price of a PC at the time. Lots of people got burnt buying those instead thinking it was a good cheaper option.
I've never got my hands on one to figure out what they ran but I'd guess WinCE on SH or ARM.
Something possibly of interest to said Reg FOSS desk is the origins of Transmission - and also Handbrake the popular media transcoder. Both started as native BeOS apps written by the same author due to there being no other native applications for it.
Both have long since lost BeOS support, or even Haiku support except using QT. Shows the afterlife something can have when its OSS
The article mentions Shannon (EU) as having them, and separately both Dublin (EU) and Cork (EU) have ordered them.
Amsterdam (EU again) have them already and while they strongly advise you don't use bottles >100ml as you could be made throw them out at a connecting airport, they do allow them - the website still has the <100ml entry in the rules list but there's a note below saying that staff can allow >100ml. And they do, I've seen it.
I worked with one of the software providers cleared for use on the pharmacy end of this, closer to two decades ago than one by now.
The NHS England prescription transfer system Just Worked, even back then. It was extremely frustrating for us as we were trying to get our local health authority (Irish firm) to move away from using modems for financial claims and paper for prescriptions.
The former happened - replaced by a HTTPS API with client certs. The latter has been replaced by... sending PDFs of prescriptions via a restricted Office365 Exchange tenant shared between all the GPs and pharmacies (can't handle mail to/from any other domain)
After your clarification that you meant this in a racist, rather than country of birth manner, how about you remember *the only other country the UK has a land border with*. Who had a leader of partial Indian origin a number of years ago; and will again in a few months due to a coalition deal.
I actually worked on that support team well over a decade ago, it was outsourced and split between the UK and Ireland at the time, and also handled anything that had come in from Ofcom. Agents had refund capabilities and priority technician bookings.
Would make you wonder why anyone would ever use the main system for support!
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