I’ve been diggin around for a while trying to find a hack to renable the GPS hardware on my Verizon provided 8830.

(See similar story here: What Does Verizon Have Against GPS In BlackBerrys?)

Around here, Verizon’s network is simply the best. Hands down, no doubt about it.

For years Verizon has butchered cell phone interfaces (see the lovely Razor Verizon UI, or any LG for that matter).

They’ve already been smacked around for disabling Bluetooth functionality, but the only thing that got them there was some advertisements that said it would work.

In the article listed above they do show that Verizon did advertise the 8830 with GPS functionality.

Truth be told, I don’t want VZ Navigator. There are plenty of other free solutions out there. Google Maps and plenty of other sites that are just fine and dandy (if) they can tell where you are.

I get that it’s all about money, I do. But it’s also about crippling your customers and limiting their options. I don’t see what Verizon does as any different than Microsoft bundling ie in the OS. For which they were certainly beat up over.

So who’s up for a class action suit?

We can tackle a number of Verizon anti-competitive issues all at once. We shouldn’t be forced to:

Use their music or media service.
Use their GPS/VZ Navigator just to use the hardware.
Use their inferior UI
Use crippled Bluetooth technology.

All in favor, say eyeeeeee!

The above graph represents the CPU Graph of a server. A server which we’d recently been having performance issues with.

Everything worked, and it did appear that one process seemed to run longer than it used to but we couldn’t for the life of us figure out why.

Today we stepped back and looked at basics. Brought up the logging graphs associated with this box and there it was plain as day.

Something changed towards the end of Week 39.

This information alone pointed to some external changes that we made during that week that software on this box was having trouble coping with.

Without this baseline we’d still be beating our brains in.

In this case Cacti, is being used to monitor and log CPU, disk space, bandwidth, SQL queues and what not. Again, this proves to be well worth having.

Thank you for your email. Please note that Maximizer Software’s maintenance support is provided to named technical contacts listed on your maintenance support agreement who must be sufficiently technically competent to communicate, receive and implement instructions on the Maximizer Software and the hardware upon which it is configured.

We provide support to named technical contacts for your protection and security.

Reviewing your account we see the technical contact/s for your account are:

Nice…

Especially the “who must be sufficiently technically competent to communicate, receive and implement instructions on the Maximizer Software and the hardware upon which it is configured”.

This is support afterall, don’t bother us if you can’t figure it out yourself.

I fully understand trying to weed out the imbiciles that contact companies for support. No doubt about it. But it is still support and you don’t have that luxury, expecially for paid maintenance.

Even if a customer had a track record for being technically incompetent, you still have to work with them. If your products are so confusing and technically difficult to configure that this has to be your initial canned response to service requests, you realy need to look inward for the problem.