When I had CenturyLink, I replaced the ONT via a JTAG cable on the new ONT. The stock CL ONT (Calix 716GE-I R2) had a 16384 connection limit, which prevented me from running high-bandwidth Tor relays. The new ONT (Calix 803G) did not.
Calix for some reason makes it easy to clone some models.
Now I'm in NYC with Verizon Fios where I don't need a cloned ONT. Woo! The Verizon ONT is big and has a huge power brick, presumably because of RFoG alongside GPON.
That's very cool, but just to point out: that's not JTAG, it's serial (UART).
JTAG is a much lower level protocol, typically used for hardware or low-level software debugging. Serial/UART gives you a command-line interface to the software that's running.
Using a JTAG interface is a lot more complicated. If you're interested in playing with it, check out OpenOCD.
There is a mis-feature on the ONT called "Broadcom Packet Flow Cache". It apparently speeds up TCP sessions but at the expense of allowing a large amount of then.
Lumen fortunately moved off these ONTs. However, the new Smart NIDs have their fair share of issues from what I heard. I moved out of Lumen territory so have no experience with them.
Modern AT&T isn't really Ma Bell, it's SBC who bought AT&T and kept the AT&T name. That's why AT&T is based in Dallas and not New Jersey.
Ma Bell today is really AT&T, Verizon and parts of Lumen, Frontier and Consolidated.
AT&T also is worth less than Verizon due to bad mergers (DirecTV and non-cable Time Warner) which added a lot of debt, money that should've been used for fiber and 5G or even a bidding war against T-Mobile for Sprint if you had to buy your competitor.
I work for (current) AT&T, in Atlanta. SBC also bought Atlanta-based BellSouth in 2006, and some of my coworkers who are ex-BellSouth complain that working for this company hasn't been the same since. But I haven't heard that as much lately - a lot of those people have retired by now.
re: some of my coworkers who are ex-BellSouth complain that working for this company hasn't been the same since.
That would be correct and only natural. I started with Michigan Bell in 1977, went through divestiture, the assembly of Ameritech, then SWBT/SBC. The Bell System / along with Western Electric/Bell Labs was a great place to be. You could spread out the SD's to work on problems and end up talking with engineers/programmers. My bosses went from being in Michigan, to Wisconsin, to St. Louis, to NJ. So, yes, the jobs have changed, the coworkers have changed, the jobs have changed. Plus, we all missed Ed Whitacre when he retired.
Dont forget the takeover of Cingular. That always seemed to be when the old DNA was comprehensively switched out for the new. No more ATT with sleepy offices in San Antonio, now it was a mobile company based out of Dallas.
Yep - those were around the same time so I think people might find it hard to disentangle the two, especially when they’re just complaining instead of trying to do serious corporate history.
The reality is, when a CDMA carrier deploys LTE without deploying UMTS, there are usually compatibility layers between CDMA and LTE such as CSFB and eHRPD for when VoLTE is absent. CDMA was never designed to interoperate with LTE as LTE was built around IMEIs and SIM cards but CDMA was built around burned-in ESNs and PRLs, so LTE support was hacked on.
This is why Sprint and Verizon used whitelists: they literally couldn't accept GSM-only devices because you wouldn't be able to make a phone call (the phone would try UMTS but only the non-supported CDMA2000 can be used to actually call, so in turn no phone calls).
Sprint went further by using the CDMA provisioning system on top of LTE instead of just using SIM cards and 3GPP provisioning like most GSM and CDMA carriers. This was a nightmare for custom ROM users like me as custom ROMs were designed for GSM carriers in mind and Sprint was at best an afterthought.
Whereas in indie coffee shops they use a Square tablet and in Apple stores the store people just use iPhones with special cases. Best Buy or Walgreens uses POS tablets with a relatively ugly GUI.
Legacy apps never die. Charles Schwab might use mainframes while Robinhood won't but Schwab won't move off because it's too hard for an established firm. Same with Costco TUIs.
I think it's a mistake to frame this as legacy vs. new. There are real benefits to the approach taken by these TUI applications and it would behoove modern app designers to learn from them.
It's perhaps the case that those coffee shops will someday adopt a TUI once they reach a level of sophistication. As an example: I believe Starbucks uses a TUI for order processing.
I remember around 2010 seeing ads about how KLM/AF did a huge upgrade of their passenger handling system - and how they explicitly went with TN3270 talking to z/TPF application as the new main interface for agents to use.
At least at the time, it sounded like they made a completely new application... and explicitly went with this stack.
Now, before you point to Amadeus still being command oriented just like that, modern Amadeus is accessed over GUI client - even if you're going to use all console commands.
Meanwhile when I had to reschedule a flight due to a volcano exploding and grounding all planes, I got to see what the KLM/AF local agent did. Fullscreen red-on-black TN3270 session. Took only a moment to handle my case and throw in a few extras.
But there are no benefits, you can replicate everything in terms of user interaction identically in a more readable/better looking GUI app, so efficiency is maintained
Sure you can, but it's rare to see a GUI app built keyboard first and specifically optimized for the productivity of power users. The list of apps that do this successfully is a tiny fraction of the total.
- Excel
- 3D modeling tools
- Adobe Creative apps
- Programming IDEs
- ?
Also, if you are focused on that metric: the productivity of the power user, then in many cases adopting a more modern GUI framework will not necessarily make it easier to achieve that goal (and in some cases may make it harder).
TUI apps aren't optimized for the productivity of power users, and by the same token, replacing a GUI app with a legacy TUI framework will not necessarily make it easier while almost definitely will make it harder since some advanced productive UI patterns simply don't get implemented in TUIs - they might not've been invented/known at the time this legacy framework was created
Thus there is no innate framework benefit, only downside, so it doesn't make sense to handicap yourself tying to this legacy
why would a gui app be more readable for reading text?
The only inate difference I can think of is the ability to vary fonts and rendering based on what you are rendering more.
And that can be a nice improvement to e. g show your code at a normal size but pop a tooltip up with smaller text, or have the linter/errors tab be a smaller font.
But that's a difference and not necessarily an improvement, because having a consistent font and fixed width text can make things more predictable and faster to interact with as you don't have to scan around as much.
Someday the COBOL programmers are going to cross the sea to the undying lands and there's going to be a reckoning for companies that have kept legacy apps around this long.
Before Apple switched to the iPhone for their POS system they used iMacs with a very ugly app. I think it was called iPOS. I know as a customer I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I was surprised Apple used something like that, considering Jobs always talking about how even the inside of something that no one ever sees should still be beautiful.
My favourite is how what most people think of "apple store" in Poland the Macs that run sales will actually run windows with BootCamp and run some run of the mill POS/ERP software.
I wonder what they'll do when they will have to switch to ARM-based macs without BootCamp support. Also, do you mean Apple resellers that market themselves as actual Apple Stores? I don't think there is an actual Apple store in Poland yet
In the US, you could still use cash or debit/credit cards. Not everyone uses mobile payments, my mom and brother use cards but I use Google Pay on my OnePlus 12. You could live a smartphone-free life in the US, but the US is super iPhone-heavy.
In Germany, I know they prefer physical cash the last time I checked. Maybe move there?
The reality is, many Lenovo customers buy their laptops just for Linux. In turn, Lenovo knows they need to cater to Linux users. Same with Dell.
It's not most of their customers, but it's the most loyal customers. Customers who won't switch to HP, Asus, or Surface.
In comparison, HP knows only a few of their customers use Linux, so they can be mostly-Windows with so-so Linux support.
Before switching to a M2 MacBook Air, my HP Spectre's Linux support was behind my work ThinkPad. Not being a huge ThinkPad person myself is why I bought many Spectres. But for most people, if a ThinkPad works better, they'll buy it.
Maybe unrelated, but I have a Deciso DEC2752, which is an OPNsense firewall appliance. For some reason Deciso made it in the Netherlands instead of China or Taiwan. I don't know for sure how much cheaper, or more expensive it would be if it was Asian-made.
It's unique for sure. It's a bit pricey but other firewalls were less-than-statisfactory. Chinese Mini PC boxes were too little, Supermicro Front I/O boxes were too much. I don't exactly like Netgate's alternative either.
"Made in" laws can be "hacked." For example, I can purchase fully manufactured printed circuit board assemblies in Taiwan or China. I then ship those boards to Singapore where I load firmware and do all my testing. I can then say that the products were "Made in Singapore" because the value of the firmware is greater than the entire hardware BoM.
The above example comes from a colleague who used to work in the SSD business.
I WORK at Microsoft 365 (not on Word), and it's actually good LibreOffice can read old Word files even if Word can't. I wasn't even born until 1997, tho when I was young I played a lot with MS-DOS and Win9x, since my toys were old PCs.
The reality is, both MS Office and LibreOffice are legacy messes. In the 90s MS aggressively broke compatibility to get users to upgrade, which is why LO can read it. Now MS is excellent at compatibility, because the focus is subscription software your employer pays for.
Source: https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/9168/l2tp-static-ip-tunn...