I remember going to Holmdel to install our network backup product (which later became something named ABARS in AT&T if I remember well), in the 80s. For this young French Unix geek, this was like walking into the Olympe, among the gods :) Edit: Souvenirs, souvenirs. I remember how impressive the atrium was, nothing like it in France at the time (or now probably). However I was working in a basement room, which was incidentally full of Cisco routers. If I had seized the hint and bought a bit of stock, I'd be a richer man... Our software had a memory usage issue on the big Bell Labs file systems, and the very nice AT&T manager insisted that I would not be allowed to go back to France until I fixed the issue. This was a trivial linear reallocation problem, but there was obviously no Stack Overflow at the time so I had to invent exponential reallocation on the spot to get home. I still have the UUCP email paths to our correspondents in my mail archive.
Around 1999, I was testing a still young MySQL as an INFORMIX replacement, and network queries needed a very suspect and quite exact 100 mS. A bug report and message to [email protected], and this is how MySQL got to set TCP_NODELAY on its network sockets...
Just as a note, and I checked that it's not the case with the GNU coreutils: on some systems, cp (and maybe cat) would mmap() the source file. When the output is the devnull driver, no read occurs because of course its write function does nothing... So, using a pipe (or dd) maybe a good idea in all cases (I did not check the current BSDs).
The fact that TP-Link products are vastly better and cheaper than all their numerous competitors is indeed a bit strange. You have to either think that all the people at Linksys, Netgear, D-link, etc. are incompetents or that something a bit out of the ordinary is going on at TP-Link...