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Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

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Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#91

Post by WalterBright »

throwaway290 wrote: post #67
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time I see a 555 number in a movie, I'm reminded that it's a movie and am dropped out of immersion. What about a cut? A camera zoom? A title screen? Sub-titles? I am intrigued about how you experience films.

I am intrigued about how you experience films... or books for that matter. If all you see is black and white letters, does this mean you could never experience immersion in the story?

I experience immersion in books. What drops me out of immersion is misspellings. I remember one which was a good story, but about 90% of the pages had at least one misspelling. It's like hitting a pothole when you're driving.

Book misspellings have changed over the years. Since people use spell checkers now, they are of the form:

    He arrived at the top of the stairs painting heavily.
Yes, that's an actual example :-)

With films, I drop out of immersion when seeing things like reflections of the camera crew, anachronisms, etc.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#92

Post by WalterBright »

throwaway290 wrote: post #88
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a filmmaker. I went to film school. Maybe that has something to do with it? I cannot recommend enough a book called In The Blink Of An Eye by Walter Murch.

Ah, then there's no need to be intrigued by how WalterBright experiences films. Just remember how you experienced films before you went to film school, or remember how you experience a book or a cartoon (unless you went to book or cartoon school too I guess). Scenes and cuts, like letters on paper, are the medium. A phone number OTOH is part of the story. Immersion is broken by a badly told story, not the medium.

Going to film school would likely ruin movies for me, as I'd see the man behind the curtain. I used to watch the "making of ..." bonus features, until I realized they'd ruin the movie.

It's like that for video games for me. I used to program them for a job when I was in college. Ever since, when I see a video game, I don't see the game so much as how it is constructed and programmed.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#93

Post by nopenopenopeno »

throwaway290 wrote: post #88
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a filmmaker. I went to film school. Maybe that has something to do with it? I cannot recommend enough a book called In The Blink Of An Eye by Walter Murch.

Ah, then there's no need to be intrigued by how WalterBright experiences films. Just remember how you experienced films before you went to film school, or remember how you experience a book or a cartoon (unless you went to book or cartoon school too I guess). Scenes and cuts, like letters on paper, are the medium. A phone number OTOH is part of the story. Immersion is broken by a badly told story, not the medium.

Thanks. This is a good point. I don’t remember experiencing films that way. I actually struggled to even follow storylines in films when I was younger, so I don’t think I ever got immersed as described.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#94

Post by mathgorges »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #90
misnome wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as the other poster said, there is. Even the article points out that it was difficult and expensive to maintain, why is it unreasonable to charge proportionally to that, or indeed whatever the small number of people wanting it will actually pay?

What, exactly, is difficult and expensive to maintain about a 555 number compared to any other? Let's be real, we're all tech engineers here. Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop. There's nothing at all special about maintaining one mapping vs another.

Iirc the article mentioned that 555 numbers used to be reserved for internal use, so my hypothesis is that implementing external 555 numbers likely required some sort of retrofit.

But I don’t have any domain knowledge here, so this is really just a guess

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#95

Post by samstave »

pests wrote: post #50
samstave wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely because large movies were already willing to pay for such... I've never tried to call a 555 num from a movie because it was "common knowledge" that they were fake... I had NO idea that you could actually call one....

555-1212 is free directory assistance, for example.

411.

I wonder if POPCORN for time still works...

(back in the day you could walk up to any payphone and dial POPCORN and it would give you the current time)

in the 80s while were were BBS-ing, we used to have a challenge of calling 411 (information) and the challenge was social engineering how long you could keep the OP on the phone and how much info you could get out of them, like where is your call center, tell me about it, tell me about you... blah blah...

2600 type stuff... we were 13 years old. Captain crunch is my hero.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#96

Post by throwaway290 »

WalterBright wrote: post #91
throwaway290 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am intrigued about how you experience films... or books for that matter. If all you see is black and white letters, does this mean you could never experience immersion in the story?

I experience immersion in books. What drops me out of immersion is misspellings. I remember one which was a good story, but about 90% of the pages had at least one misspelling. It's like hitting a pothole when you're driving. Book misspellings have changed over the years. Since people use spell checkers now, they are of the form: He arrived at the top of the stairs painting heavily. Yes, that's an actual example :-)…

It's slightly individual, e.g. some may pick up on misspellings in books (or anachronisms or mismatching sound in video) more easily than others, but my theory is whenever something concerns the story or requires any effort to determine whether it concerns the story or not it breaks immersion.

Misspellings in books, foreign objects or people in a show or film, obviously fake phone numbers and things like that fall into that category.

On the other hand, things like paper quality or font choice (and lens angles, cuts, video resolution, color) tend to not break immersion if the story is right.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#97

Post by iudqnolq »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #90
misnome wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as the other poster said, there is. Even the article points out that it was difficult and expensive to maintain, why is it unreasonable to charge proportionally to that, or indeed whatever the small number of people wanting it will actually pay?

What, exactly, is difficult and expensive to maintain about a 555 number compared to any other? Let's be real, we're all tech engineers here. Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop. There's nothing at all special about maintaining one mapping vs another.

> Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop.

All I know about telecoms comes from Wikipedia, but that makes no sense. Why would the technology that determines where to route your call be related to the protocol used to transfer data long distances?

(Also the Verizon quote is from 2003.)

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#99

Post by mynameisvlad »

iudqnolq wrote: post #97
mynameisvlad wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, exactly, is difficult and expensive to maintain about a 555 number compared to any other? Let's be real, we're all tech engineers here. Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop. There's nothing at all special about maintaining one mapping vs another.

> Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop. All I know about telecoms comes from Wikipedia, but that makes no sense. Why would the technology that determines where to route your call be related to the protocol used to transfer data long distances? (Also the Verizon quote is from 2003.)

Telephony backbones are, for the most part, just SIP. When I say they’re IP based I mean they’re not old school POTS loops anymore.

It might have cost 2500 per area code when that was a requirement and you had to set these up loops up manually across longer distances, but nowadays it literally is just going to be a mapping in a computer, like any other.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#100

Post by FPGAhacker »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #59
FPGAhacker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is you don’t have to dial an area code with the 555. 555-abcd, sans area code, would just work and route to you no matter where (in the USA) a caller was calling from. Therefore it is equivalent to having that number in every area code. Now there is a good chance you aren’t old enough to know/remember this, but people in the US didn’t have to dial an area code (and occasionally nearby area codes) when calli…

Paying X per area code is justified, nobody is arguing against that. Paying $2500 per area code is unreasonable, as, like I said, there is nothing inherently special about 206-555-1234 vs 206-689-5312.

As I said, you paid per minute long distance charges to call another area code. A 555 number would not be long distance. Therefore they charged up front.
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