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Morse Coders Beat SMSers
dgnicholson writes "Jay Leno did a text off between two text messengers and two Morse coders. The Morse coders handily beat the young whippersnappers with time to spare. It might be a fun phone app to make a Morse code messenger, if you kept your headset in and had an external sender, could be interesting. Perhaps a Morse code Skype device."
An employee suggested to me that we use this encoding scheme for a few offices here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using morse code instead of a more complicated RF protocol. So I decided to let him train 5 offices to see how the employees got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using it in his wireless and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the client superhets?
Once he'd got the radios up and running with CW we let the users try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: Morse was a pretty good replacement for SMS and the users could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received. Users could not find things they were used to (like the encoding for SOS) or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with SMS. The constant harrasment by the FCC became more of a day job than my own. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when his wrist suddenly broke and corrupted his message.
Needless to say, Samual Morse offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee remove the Morse Code from the radios and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
or.. .- .-- . ... --- -- .
whatever.
Lameness filter
..once you start adding punctuation, formatting and emoticons, how do they fare?
Granted, but let's see them repeat the experiment with a device that has a full keyboard on it.
Or what about get the guy holding the SMS device (phone) to type in a specially crafted 10 digit number allowing a two way audio connection between two devices.
Every person on the planet has a wife, sister or mother than can talk faster than 250+ WPM.
(why do these things always sound less funny once you press preview?)
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
OMFG, Slashdot's "Lameness filter" just prevented me from posting a comment on this story in morse code. I cry censorship, someone call the ACLU!
Try it, if you don't believe me.
Umm ok, I drive my car while sending text messages to my friend's on AIM. I memorized the lettering on my cell phone's number pad, and it has predictive text. So to say hi I just hit 44. Or to say lol I'm busy driving I hit 565#*416#2879. I do this every so often when someone sends me a message on AIM and I'm out driving and it gets forwarded to my phone. I don't take my eyes off the road to answer the message, and I only read the messages when I'm stopped.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I tried posting Post Humously. I found my post lacked flavour.
Have you any idea what it's like to hear a vague beeping from somewhere (turned out to be my pocket), and instantly get the feeling "someone's talking to me!" in the back of your head? It's scary, I can tell you!
(I was quite well trained in morse code once upon a time, as part of my military service, but I haven't practiced it for 15 years. However, the sound of morse signals still connects directly to my subconscious, sort of bypassing any active "listening".)
This code has memory leaks.
Why not fork?
This is called "making it up as you go along"
"Predictive text input is much faster."
Actually predictive text input is no faster. See? I can make stuff up too!
"Also, the US is not the big SMS country."
Uh...which matters because...uh... our champion SMS users are not as good as "their" champion SMS users? What? Huh?
"It hardly has GSM!"
Yes, because SMS over CDMA is so much slower. Because it doesn't use the dixie-helmann-thingy compression that ...uh... the morse code thingy uses.
"More people still use outdated devices like pagers."
Yes, which really hurts SMS texting rates!
"Thirdly they also tested the transport medium."
And this is important because our networks are slower than the Japanese networks because uh... the dixie-helman-mayonnaise compression that is umbiqitious...uh...pagers used... ummm... and why, we hardly have GSM!
"and can be re-read if something was missed"
Yes, because I might've missed something in that SMS message that said "CU L8R, LOL!!!!!"
"This is not fair, as for very long distance morse messages one can have intermediaries as well which would lengthen the process considerably."
Well, it might have been fairer but they didn't use the Dixie-Helman...thingy that morse code has for uh...non-English languages.
"thus also making asynchronous conversation slower"
Oh hell, just call the other person on the phone, and if they're not there, leave a message. My way is fastest of all.
"I've recently been to Japan and had the rare privelege seeing a teenage school-girl on a Train sitting and texting on two phones at the same time! Beat that!"
I was recently watching my daughter use AIM talking to 5 people at a time on AIM.
I win.
Oh. She was using that Dixie-Hellman-Mayonaisse thingy you keep whining about.
It's open source, fix the leak and submit a patch. :)
Why I prefer SMS over Morse code:
I don't have to remember any encoding rules.
Why I prefer phone calls over SMS:
I don't have to remember how to spell.
Why I prefer silence over phone calls:
I don't have to remember to be polite or feign interest.
To be fair, the compression algorithm for this transmission method only allow for two messages: or
Off, course, considering they are teens, they pretty much only use the cell phones for variations of message #2, so your point is still valid : )
You can't take the sky from me...
You wouldn't beleive how many times I've almost been hit by a car while I'm talking on my cellphone. It's almost like the other drivers don't realize that _I_ am the King of the Road.