I did the original BeOS port - not particularly much effort as the game was already very portable and SDL worked fine on BeOS - few lines to use the native MIDI rather than timidity was about all that was needed. Shoved it up on BeBits, and then promptly spent about three weeks solid playing it. Original TTD had been one of my favourite DOS games and I still had FreeDOS installed to play TTDPatch.

No, that type of employment contract is not "the norm" in Ireland. At all. Indeed, it isn't even legal to have that type of contract and roll it over repeatedly - if an employer does that, the contract becomes considered permanent. Permanent employment contracts are the norm in Ireland. Taking unpaid leave does not impact that at all. You would resume employment at your previous terms, or you would get a five figure sum of compensation from the Workplace Relations Commission.

I had similar-ish issues when working for an outsourcer for BT in the early-mid 2000s. They only @bt.com addresses we could get were impossible to read to someone over the phone (containing numeric staff IDs, and some form of sub-domain setup that seemed to refer to your outsourcer), but we had no problem getting @btinternet.com addresses like 95% of the UK's end-users had.

Cue actual BT staff who you were meant to work alongside assuming you were a user when you contacted them with it as the reply-to, and other such fun. You got in trouble if you used your actual, direct outsourcer email address as it was meant to appear seamless internally - when it clearly wasn't.

That is if there's any way to get CoD or Portal to run in twenty five years time - easily defeatable or no copy protection on older games makes running them in DOSBox or similar quite easy. Trying to figure out how to work around Steam, Origin or the newer optical media protection systems to allow games to run in emulation in future isn't going to be as simple.

A5/1 is not the export cipher - that's A5/2.

The UK (and other countries nearby) - Wilkinson Sword is the brand. Schick is the same products in the US from memory.

Based on the IT industry here (Ireland) at least, there's been a huge increase in the number of gay men in IT, or out gay men at least. Not much use in having a booth babe if the guy buying the product doesn't like boobs.

...assuming your software can support being run on a recent 32 bit Windows properly

My employer has only recently taken off sale a re-shelled 1980s Object Pascal application that needed direct serial and parallel access and we were able to provide machines that handle it and the various peripherals perfectly well. Intel Reference boards (which they're withdrawing for PCs sometime soon unfortunately) and Startech PCI-E cards for the ports. I think the boards even have a floppy controller although the need for them was finally removed by an upstream supplier buying some CD burners a few years back.

Something written to work on 1987 grade hardware can sometimes run faster than intended on a Core i7, though.

Because its the Daily Mail, a paper that is generally read by particularly stupid people, to whom Smartphone = Apple.

Or they're fake. Not sure which is more likely.

I am definitely doing this job in the wrong country. Think our sleaziest salesman would have trouble getting more than $40k CAD for a similar size practice before financing costs including manually-assisted data migration from whatever existing system they were using.

This is my industry and I'm not aware of any system where you could be on a compliant, secure system that had been updated that won't run above XP.

The only systems I run in to that are stuck on XP or below are some Win16 apps. Would consider seeing if they'd run on ecomstation to have a less easily attacked (if only by rareness) system if they weren't competitors systems. Our own Win16 and DOS applications were borked in to running on Windows 7 and a brief bit of playing with one of them on Windows 8 was succesful too - but the last one to be withdrawn from sale was in 2008.

To be stuck on XP you either need to have been extremely unlucky, or be using something ancient and likely unsupported. And if a normal upgrade for an opticians is $10k, we really need to move markets/country.

Lego have re-issued sets before, including large/expensive ones, as a "Legends" line. There's also been adhoc re-issues of sets other than the Legends line. All it takes is Lego to do the same again with the few sets that are being ridiculously hoarded and traded at obscene prices for some people (Those who bought early) being left with no gains and some (those who bought in older sets late) being left hugely out of pocket. The more they push it as an investment idea, the more Lego may realise there's demand for the sets to be reissued.

RTE has Aertel which was on the analogue services until they closed this morning, and is still available as a DVB insert on satellite (and possibly digital terrestrial - it was, but they suggested they'd turn it off too).

They also have the exact same data and page numbers in an MHEG5 app and a web interface to it also:

http://www.rte.ie/aertel/desktopxhtml/100-1.html

Don't think its that popular anymore, but it was common to see pubs leave 150 (lotto results) or the rotating football results page (222? I think?) up on a TV in the corner to save staff being asked the same questions over and over or being asked to change channel.

My house has FTTH. Except its dark, ever since the firm providing it went bankrupt and was bought by another that promptly went bankrupt itself. It *was* sold at 10mbits and 20mbits when they were in business, at a time when DSL was usually 512k or 1mbit. So I'm stuck with 3mbit DSL, due to the estate having been connected to a second-string exchange as the telco never thought anyone would want DSL with FTTH. The rest of the town gets either 8mbit or 24mbit depending on who they get service from. Then, to make it worse, as the FTTH provider had an early IPTV package, the cable company never cabled this estate. They legally could (totally unregulated market) but they decided it wasn't worth it. They have the rest of the town cabled. They now offer 150/10mbit. I've decided its time to move house!

QT has been ported, but the OS is definitely not built on QT.