Let me wager a guess: Mercedes models W124?

> I don't think MB makes them like they used to anymore.

You guessed correctly. The 1980's W124 was one of those cars that would keep going and going. Mechanically great, with a galvanized chassis and bodywork that made it also pretty rust resistant.

The 1993 version of the W124, supposed to be an "improved" remodeled version of the original car, was a worst car in every aspect. It rusted, the plastics were cheaper, etc.

The follow-up, the W210, is the model that cost MB dearly. Through cost-cutting and greed, they lost a huge chunk of the taxi market. The car itself was also an absolute rust-bucket piece of cr*p, the interior was also worst, with the whole woes compounded by crappy electronics.

MB as a brand hasn't really recovered from that. The engineering excellency, attention to detail, and engineering pride that made those W123/W124 almost unkillable is lost, and won't be found again.

Betteridge’s Law applies here.

> other options available to her include

> port her cellphone number to a VOIP provider that does support receiving SMS from shortcodes over wifi

That's generally a great solution – unless the company she's dealing with is one of those that don't send SMS-OTP codes to VoIP numbers for seCuRiTy reasons, or demand that the number is somehow "registered in her name" (which many smaller carriers apparently don't do).

I really wish that were illegal. A phone number is a phone number.

> she turned on wifi calling on her phone. now she could receive SMS messages from friends and family, but 2FA codes still weren't coming through.

Interesting, I was under the impression that SMS over IMS was implemented transparently to external senders. But given what a hack the entire protocol is, I'm not really surprised.

> other options available to her include

> port her cellphone number to a VOIP provider that does support receiving SMS from shortcodes over wifi

That's generally a great solution – unless the company she's dealing with is one of those that don't send SMS-OTP codes to VoIP numbers for seCuRiTy reasons, or demand that the number is somehow "registered in her name" (which many smaller carriers apparently don't do).

I really wish that were illegal. A phone number is a phone number.

> she turned on wifi calling on her phone. now she could receive SMS messages from friends and family, but 2FA codes still weren't coming through.

Interesting, I was under the impression that SMS over IMS was implemented transparently to external senders. But given what a hack the entire protocol is, I'm not really surprised.

https://nats.io is easier to use than Kafka and already solves several of the points in this post I believe, like removing partitions, supporting key-based streams, and having flexible topic hierarchies.

Creative use case for a TSR :)

The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :)

When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.

But how do you get a "clean IP" to actually run it on? My ISP's IP changes every so often (whenever there's a power outage for example).

Last I checked, you can't run mail servers on typical cloud providers (like Azure, Oracle) and cheap VPSs are almost guaranteed to have "dirty IPs" (used for spam and thus blacklisted).