On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 1:49 PM Brandon Svec <bsvec@teamonesolutions.com> wrote:
Don’t dismiss and underestimate the curiousity and amazement of those who have not seen such things in person.
Indeed. Not too long ago I was at the headquarters of an organization which runs some "critical infrastructure". In the lobby there are 5 or 6 racks behind glass, all lit up with pretty blue lights. The racks have a bunch of Dell servers, some multi-U copper switches, a couple of older routers, etc. The switch lights all go blinky blinky, and the cables are all suspiciously nicely dressed -- and in the very bottom of the last rack is an Ixia... Chatted with a friend who works there, and yup, the devices don't do anything at all, and the Ixia exists purely to make das blinkenlights blinken. The waste of power was quite sad, and we spent some time discussing how much work it would be to rip the insides out of all of the gear and replace it with some arduino controlled LED blinkers... and then we got sidetracked and had lunch instead... IIRC it was Foundry that had a few linecards that just had blinky LEDs for use at tradeshow? -- 'tis much lighter and cheaper to ship a chassis filled with LEDs than actual hardware... W
In the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley area tourists come from around the world to see signs and parking lots of places like Google, Twitter, etc. it is easy for me to scoff at them, but I try not to.
It is not really different than most other tourist attractions. Some are amazed and curious to see the largest ball of twine and some think it is ridiculous.
Brandon Svec
On Jan 7, 2021, at 10:38 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
On Thu, 7 Jan 2021, Christopher Morrow wrote:
almost all of this seems like ... really not worth the time for external people to bother with. which is maybe why: "Sure, you wanna visit? pay me" (Oh, now you dont' want to visit? ok, cool!)
I'm imagining a bunch of MBA's at large carriers thinking, gee the NOC is treated as a cost center. How can we make the NOC a profit center?
I know -- Let's sell NOC tour tickets!
On the other hand, NASA (or SpaceX) I would still go on a tour of Mission Control during a launch (geek out)
-- The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making. -- E. W. Dijkstra