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Super interesting. At Burning Man this year it seemed like a significant percent of the city had goTennas, which had never been true before. I also remember rea

by frisco 7y ago

Super interesting. At Burning Man this year it seemed like a significant percent of the city had goTennas, which had never been true before. I also remember reading about a big mesh in Brooklyn being a thing recently. I bet we’re going to be hearing more about practical mesh networks in the coming years.

mintplant 7y ago
Reminds me of Nintendo's PictoChat, a peer-to-peer, physical proximity-based chat application that was built into the DS. I've written about it on here before [0]: > [You could] chat on one of four available channels with nearby users over local wireless, by exchanging text and hand-drawn pictures. > At about the peak of its popularity—right before smartphones became truly prevalent among kids my age—I was doing middle school science fairs. This involved lots of standing around waiting in front of your trifold posterboard while judges slowly worked their way along the rows and rows of other projects. We weren't supposed to leave our own stations in the meantime, and they were spaced out enough to make talking with your neighbors inconvenient. Instead, the whole room was on PictoChat, filling up all four channels with streams of chatter and doodles and mutual commiseration on our anxieties over presenting to the judges. For a company known for perpetually trailing behind its competitors in online services, Nintendo was oddly ahead of its time here (and with the Download Play feature, too: peer-to-peer software distribution and wireless networking!). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20106929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20106929
- cwyers 7y ago
  I think a few things hampered Nintendo. Their (laudable) commitment to backwards compatibility led to them getting stuck behind the curve technologically -- the POWER architecture they stuck with from GameCube (when it was a mostly mainstream choice) to WiiU (when it really wasn't) and the older pre-Cortex ARM designs they were using in the 3DS years after Cortex was shipping left Nintendo of the position of not being able to really ride the bulk of the improvements happening in the marketplace. (It's notable that the Switch is an abandonment of hardware-based backwards compatibility in favor of Nvidia internals that wouldn't look out of place in an Android tablet.) And because Nintendo prides themselves on being a family company, in much the way that Disney does, they had less of a tolerance for looking the other way at just how bad other users can be. Microsoft would just throw out an "Online interactions not ESRB rated" warning and moderate the worst of it after the fact when building Xbox Live. I don't think Nintendo ever saw that as an acceptable option.
- Izkata 7y ago
  PictoChat was great, we used it during schoolwide assemblies (put in the middle of the day so students couldn't ditch as easily).
daniper 7y ago
https://imeshyou.com https://imeshyou.com — self-reported goTenna Mesh community map (globally) https://globalmeshlabs.org https://globalmeshlabs.org — goTenna’s open-source Lot49 protocol, to incentivize build-out of global ISP/carrier-free messaging network

by frisco 7y ago

mintplant 7y ago

Reminds me of Nintendo's PictoChat, a peer-to-peer, physical proximity-based chat application that was built into the DS. I've written about it on here before [0]: > [You could] chat on one of four available channels with nearby users over local wireless, by exchanging text and hand-drawn pictures. > At about the peak of its popularity—right before smartphones became truly prevalent among kids my age—I was doing middle school science fairs. This involved lots of standing around waiting in front of your trifold posterboard while judges slowly worked their way along the rows and rows of other projects. We weren't supposed to leave our own stations in the meantime, and they were spaced out enough to make talking with your neighbors inconvenient. Instead, the whole room was on PictoChat, filling up all four channels with streams of chatter and doodles and mutual commiseration on our anxieties over presenting to the judges. For a company known for perpetually trailing behind its competitors in online services, Nintendo was oddly ahead of its time here (and with the Download Play feature, too: peer-to-peer software distribution and wireless networking!). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20106929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20106929

cwyers 7y ago
I think a few things hampered Nintendo. Their (laudable) commitment to backwards compatibility led to them getting stuck behind the curve technologically -- the POWER architecture they stuck with from GameCube (when it was a mostly mainstream choice) to WiiU (when it really wasn't) and the older pre-Cortex ARM designs they were using in the 3DS years after Cortex was shipping left Nintendo of the position of not being able to really ride the bulk of the improvements happening in the marketplace. (It's notable that the Switch is an abandonment of hardware-based backwards compatibility in favor of Nvidia internals that wouldn't look out of place in an Android tablet.) And because Nintendo prides themselves on being a family company, in much the way that Disney does, they had less of a tolerance for looking the other way at just how bad other users can be. Microsoft would just throw out an "Online interactions not ESRB rated" warning and moderate the worst of it after the fact when building Xbox Live. I don't think Nintendo ever saw that as an acceptable option.
Izkata 7y ago
PictoChat was great, we used it during schoolwide assemblies (put in the middle of the day so students couldn't ditch as easily).

daniper 7y ago

https://imeshyou.com https://imeshyou.com — self-reported goTenna Mesh community map (globally) https://globalmeshlabs.org https://globalmeshlabs.org — goTenna’s open-source Lot49 protocol, to incentivize build-out of global ISP/carrier-free messaging network