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Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

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Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#52

"Phonemakers never expected it to takeoff, it was teenagers who decided that this was the way to keep in touch" Makes me wonder what new trends dinosaurs like us don't see coming. VR?

VR isn't something average teenager can afford yet.

I can see something that's a mix of VR chat and some creation tools a'la Dreams would be a hit. User generated content for VR Chat is already popular and making it possible to make the game in the game is natural next step

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#53
post #6

I just watched this video on a plane, going nearly 600mph at 33K ft above northern Canada. The pace of technological evolution I have experienced in my lifetime is absolutely miraculous.

I often think about this. My grandmother was born at the end of the 1800s (yes, I'm old) and remembered electricity and the first car coming to her rural village in Wales. By the end of her life she'd lived through two world wars, seen men on the moon, could talk to her relatives in Australia on the phone, and been on holiday to America on a 747. And what always amazed me was that she grew up with people (mainly farm…

The things you can accomplish when education, science and curiosity are valued over theology... the Enlightment was truly an enormous age.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS. The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required. In Europe…

_free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east. Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me. I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour. I could acces…

In Sweden we had it around that period, I was a subscriber. With HSDPA rolling out but everyone carrying WAP-capable features phones, the operators had lots of capacity but couldn't figure out how to use all that bandwidth.

Once the iPhone and other smartphones caught on those plans all disappeared. Now they're back again with LTE-A/5G.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#55

In the early 2000's, I remember in art school I did a project that involved driving around the country, leaving tiny sculptures wherever I went. To keep people updated where I was, I made a Perl script that accepted messages and photos sent to it that I authored on my fancy Sony Ericson picture phone. The script would update a website showing the photos and messages in reverse chronological order. Took maybe about 3…

But note how you invented only the better half of Instagram. The other half is all the "social" shit: "Tell us your email to see more John's photos", "Have you seen recent posts from Kate, Mike and Cristiano Ronaldo", etc.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#56
post #27

I went to Japan in 2004. I hiked a mountain and at the top saw a woman talk to someone on her flip phone. At some point she said something like “hey do you want to see the view?”, she then turned the phone around and I realized she had been video chatting the whole time. I was so amazed. I bought a Wap-capable NEC that year, it felt so ahead of anything we had in Europe!

That with the video of shakira someone posted, it's a shame Japan now has a reputation for being behind the times now, I wonder how much the language barrier had to do with why none of the tech companies in japan other than those tied to video games have an international footprint today.

The Japanese have a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#57

MMS' where ridiculously expensive when they came out. 2-3 times a regular text message wouldn't do it. On top of that, MMS was janky AF (probably still is. I don't know anyone who uses them on purpose). Unclear if receiver could receive your message. If they couldn't, you still had to pay. Sometimes they'd receive a link instead of a picture, sometimes just junk. Pictures where already pretty lousy straight off the p…

This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS. The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required. In Europe…

Yes. People bemoaning the ad-supported free-at-point of use Internet should be aware that a lot of companies wanted a much worse nickel-and-dime walled garden. It has been a great positive feature of the Internet that it doesn't include a billing mechanism.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS. The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required. In Europe…

_free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east. Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me. I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour. I could acces…

What Americans call "unlimited", I used as, the only way to get Internet at home between 2005 and 2008. It was an early offering reasonably priced - I had spotty reception though so telnet/ssh and later mosh were the name of the game. Used shell account on high school servers to run torrents etc. Made Sun's offer to send you NetBeans and Solaris DVDs for free way more interesting.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#59
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east. Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me. I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour. I could acces…

I recall (in a European country) a brief time window around then when you indeed could a get an unlimited plan rather cheaply. There were no restriction on tethering either so you could get unlimited data on your laptop. Considering how low GPRS/EDGE bandwidth was (and that only a very limited number of people probably did this) the operators probably didn't mind, they added caps pretty soon after '3G' came out.

Now that you mention it, I actually seem to remember that most plans nowadays are limitless in the same sense: When you've spent you 4 or 10gb, you simply "run out" of 3/4g data and start using data speed limited to essentially 2g, which is unlimited.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exciting Boring Ha, thanks for sharing, that is amusing! On the one hand it seems like it almost could be the way people humorously transcribe Japanese accented English, of “Exciting Bowling,” and on the other hand in a purely English context that really does strike me as a quite good description of bowling when you think about it.

I dunno I actually really like bowling and never thought it was boring but in Japan it was like the holes were too small for my fat fingers or something. ボウリング - bōringu, this is the word they have for it, so yeah

Yeah I have that issue even not in Japan of having to search and search to find a ball I feel like my fingers won’t get stuck in.

I didn’t mean to disparage, the exciting half carried equal weight in my mind, just something about maybe the environment, the wooden floor, the shoes, the overall aesthetic, waiting your turn in a group, punctuated by the anticipatory excitement of watching your ball travel down the lane gave me this feeling of like the type of balance common in Eastern spiritual traditions or Schrödinger’s cat, where it is boring and exciting at the same time.

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