Post

Sup bitches You old

How to explain to the youngest generation the time of 65 wireless providers in the US, not 3 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

I worked at one of the big three *tower* real estate companies at the height of the wireless bubble. Companies that just owned the land, tower, power, & flashing lights & leased to all the providers to hang up their gear.

There was so much money flowing in 2003 that we built a datacenter that was mainly *for looks*. The walls were glass for easy touring. 40 plasma screens made to look like NORAD so that visiting AT&T executives would see our 10,000 dots on a huge map.

The f**ked up thing is that the folks I'm moonlighting with have one of these (they aren't plasma screens, but LCDs have improved a lot), and they actually pretend sitting people at desks looking at the wall-o-screens is providing operational monitoring.

I mean, it _looks_ impressive if you don't understand it, but it doesn't actually provide useful information, and the people at the desks have zero ability to trigger any kind of response. And yet, the customer management has decreed that it will be staffed 24/7.

Sad thing is that Nagios (now _there's_ a name from the distant past, but it was in a repo approved by their CM people) does a vastly better job at zero cost (well, beyond my billing rate for config, but that's still significantly cheaper than what they're paying for their solution).