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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...

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.

All for show. We didn’t stare at a giant wall of monitors, if the power dropped or a bulb burnt out in a tower, we got SMS alerts. You had a few minutes to tell the FAA before you started pulling $1M/hour fine. The servers were purple to match the L3 switch, the CTO liked purple, thought it popped

There was so much cash flying around that when I’d spec out a new set of servers and get estimates they’d make me buy twice as many just to fill the racks the whole way.