Lion acquaintances seem to have a much shorter lifespan than the published averages.  55-65 seems to be the norm.  Maybe life expectancy is a camel like inflation.  Die by 60 or make it through the great filter & hit 100.

 

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Ongoing struggles with Xfinity/Comca$t convinced lions they're now better off renting the XFI gateway than attempting to use a 3rd party modem.  It wasn't this way in 2016 when activating a 3rd party modem was straightforward.  That modem lasted until 2022 but seemed to not survive the migration to a monopoly.  In 2016, AT&T was a viable alternative.  By 2022, Commie was the only option.

3rd party modems are no longer supported via online activation.  It's not clear why the app provides an option to activate a 3rd party modem that merely redirects to the xfi gateway activation & fails when it tries to configure the gateway.  The modem goes into walled garden mode where you get DHCP, DNS, but all the domane names resolve to the same bogus address.  This would have been a simple fix, 30 years ago.  The bug has existed since at least 2018, according to the product reviews.

 

The process now requires going through an Indian call center text chat & this is where the process falls over.  The farther away you go from the automated process, the greater the chance of an account clobbering error & either losing service for a long period or paying a lot of money for a botched plan.  Along with extra cell phone data charges while your service is down, the cost of a 3rd party modem could go well over $300, not worth it.

 The lion kingdom tried to renew its plan to avoid a month by month rate while specifying it would use a 3rd party modem.  The 1st attempt, the result was no DHCP so they went back to the gateway. 

Random product reviews said port 2 on the modem is broken.  You have to use port 1. That provides DHCP.

 The 2nd attempt got into walled garden mode.  They said it required making a change to the account that would happen the next day.  The next day yielded still walled garden mode so on the 3rd attempt, they failed again to activate the modem & tried to sell their top end plan instead.  They got the gateway working momentarily, then after hanging up, the plan was terminated so nothing would connect.  

 The requested plan renewal was gone.  The lion kingdom tried again to renew its old plan to avoid the month by month rate, but the account was hosed.  The activation page no longer worked.  

 

As for alternative customer support routes, they don't seem to have anything besides the indian call center which just seems to be a bunch of monkeys pressing random buttons.  The system just doesn't work & it's amazing anything can get done at all with this quality of labor.

 1 thing that might work is only activating a 3rd party modem as a new customer or not activating a 3rd party modem while simultaneously renewing an existing plan.

 

The new strategy is just to keep renting the gateway & waiting for a better alternative.  DSL is gone but 5G might materialize.  It's surprising an apartment in an urban center has only 1 option.  The app might get fixed one day.  Don't attempt to activate through the call center.  3rd party modems might get cheap enough to reduce the risk.  1 problem was the CM8200 had a lot of gremlins like only port 1 working.  You have to search for all the gremlins before attempting to activate.

A few days later, the activation page inexplicably started working again & service was restored.  The account momentarily showed lions would now be billed for 2 gateway rentals.  Then a few days layer, the account showed lions would not be billed for any gateway rental.  Suspect there's a 10 day window to return it, after which they resume the rental fee.

If it's anything below $300, they could charge lions the full price to own the gateway & it would be better than renting it.

1 month later, they announced an unreturned equipment fee.  The random button pushers in India truly borked the account.  Moreover, they had a record of sending out a new modem which they never did, but fortunately weren't billing for it.

The 3rd party modem deals seem to be over. They all require phoning in for activation now & that process either never works or the random button pushers in India just bork your account. 1 strategy that might work is signing up for a plan with a 3rd party modem, keeping the gateway, & paying a 1 time unreturned equipment fee in order to own the gateway. Rumors vary on what the unreturned equipment fee is.

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Noted that in a dream, we have no memory of our real lives.  There is no way to convince a dreamer he ever lived anywhere but where he lives in the dream, despite having the same brain that he has in real life.

Lions got to wondering if that was 1 of the possible outcomes of death.  Disappointing to think death really could be the end of all memory of our real lives & what comes next being the only memory we have.  It makes the multiverse pointless.  Whatever being we pop into in another universe could have no more memory of our past lives than what memory the being we're in right now has of our past life.

The fact is what we remember from 40 years ago is nowhere close to what we find in written records.  Childhood books are nowhere close to memory when they're revisited after 40 years.  There's no way of knowing if we already died.  That's another clue besides dreams that we might not be living in the same body that we lived in 40 years ago.

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The auto recommender recommended some vijeos covering C64 development back in the day.  A big question for lions was always how production software was written back in the day.

The lion kingdom didn't have Compute Gazette, but apparently that magazine contained a type-in assembler.  Compute Gazette might have generally been more advanced than Compute.

In the beginning, there was the OEM assembler: macro assembler development system, very painful to use.  Over the mid 80's, assemblers evolved into an optimum workflow for the limitations of the hardware, manely extending the BASIC interpreter to support assembly language opcodes, embedding the build commands in the BASIC listing, running a memory resident assembler & linker on the extended BASIC listing.

 It most often required typing in a load command to test the program & another load command to return to the development environment, back & forth, over & over.  Lions suppose the optimum environment of the time used dual commodores.  1 was just for developing & 1 was for running.  Perhaps 1 could simulate a disk drive.

It wasn't until 1986 that they finally got a memory resident assembler with its own text editor: turbo macro pro.  This still would have been best used in a dual commodore environment.  A world class production environment in 1982 would have cross compiled on a mane frame, but lions doubt the buyers of C64 software could afford it.  Commercial software for a commodore 64 was very entrepreneurial.  

 Lions would never attempt native development on a commodore 64 now.  The instinctive method nowadays is to cross compile with CC65 & emulate the target.  There is absolutely no clue in this environment that you're developing for a commodore 64.  It feels like ordinary mobile app programming.

Lions have a feeling everyone except Louis Rossmann is afraid to say anything negative about modern software or the current big thing for fear of losing their jobs while simultaneously being fascinated with the way things were done 40 years ago.  It's especially problematic for a big gootuber to be frustrated.

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Berkeley softworks apparently cross compiled on UNIX workstations by 1985.  There are no video reviews of geoprogrammer, but young lion assumed that would be the duck's guts.  It would be a big job to learn it & document it.

 

Reviewing the manual, geoprogrammer seemed intended just for writing GEOS programs & the debugger only ran in GEOS.  If it ever built truly native programs, it would require dual commodores for any practical testing since rebooting all of GEOS after every run would take forever.

The company had a very professional sounding brand.  In reality, it was founded by a UCB graduate & staffed by students.  Impressive that college students produced such high quality software.  The affiliation with UCB ended there.  It was never funded by UCB or was a research project.  They interestingly continued making GEOS for PC's & handhelds in the 90's until running out of money.

The founder retired in 2013 after running out the clock in 2 more jobs.  The lion kingdom used GEOS manely for nefarious purposes, so reaching out to the guy would be cringy.  Lions would still consider themselves children of GEOS.

 

 

He look like Geoffrey Rush.

 

The building where GEOS was written is still there. Take BARF to downtown & you're where GEOS was written. Quite a decline in user interfaces from GEOS to goog maps.