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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."
Anyone using morse code on an even occasional basis should have guessed that it would cream the text messagers! There are three simple reasons: (1) A single character of Morse can be keyed in less time than a single character can be entered on the cell phone with the "TAP" method. (2) With the bug, there is no delay created by moving the finger from button to button. (3) Most importantly, however, the text message is time-shifted, whereas morse transmission is real-time. When the sender is done, the recipient is done also.
Someone already wrote an application for Nokia phones that lets you write your SMS by using Morse code.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
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.
Morse code was created for the purpose of sending text over REALLY low bandwidth. Cell phones were created to talk to people. The idea of entering text with a numeric keypad was a wart they hung on the side of the phone when they realized that a full keyboard wouldn't work.
Personally, I just don't understand the appeal of text messaging. Maybe that marks me as an old fogey (27), but I just don't need my tendonitis to get any worse, TYVM.
..once you start adding punctuation, formatting and emoticons, how do they fare?
Why should I keep coming back to /. if the news is repeated, slow and bias?
I come to slashdot not for late breaking, fresh news, but for the discussion that follows. Who really cares if a submission is a dupe? You are not forced to read it, just skip it and go on to the next one. People that feel the need to point out dupes are just as useless as the grammar/spelling nazis. If you really have nothing to add to the discussion and are just going to whine, why post at all?
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Firstly, the morse code they used was the final optimised product. It basically uses huffman-like compression for english only. Thus texting other languages using morse would not be so efficient.
Secondly they used TAP method which is outdated and inefficient. Predictive text input is much faster. Also, the US is not the big SMS country. It hardly has GSM! More people still use outdated devices like pagers.
Thirdly they also tested the transport medium. An SMS may be relayed faster via different networks (sometimes immediate) and can be re-read if something was missed (unless ticker-tape is used). This is not fair, as for very long distance morse messages one can have intermediaries as well which would lengthen the process considerably.
Fourthly, most people cannot send morsecode while receiving it, thus also making asynchronous conversation slower. (And you cannot receive morse from multiple sources sil
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!
You can encode, decode and listen to morse here
Oh, and try setting the speed at 40 wpm before you start thinking it's easy!
(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.
And Morse Code is particularly stupid next to speech when it comes to speed. I mean why in the world would you want to use Morse Code if you have a medium reliable neough to use speech. I mean look at how much longer it takes to transmit the code as opposed to when he reads the message, and he's reading it at a normal speed. A person could read it much faster and you'd still udnerstand what was said.
Morse code isn't useful for it's speed, it's useful for it's transmission capabilities. You need only a very simple transmitter, and since it can be done in a binary fashion (just tones and silence, they were using a more advanced dual-tone key which allows for faster transmission) it can be transmitted successfully even with extremely poor signal-noise ratios. You can actually have the signal well below the noise level, and still clearly make out the message.
If you have an at all reliable means of communication, it becomes rather worthless. Even most untrained persons can type as fast as a good coder, and speech trumps both easily. Morse code remains a useful backup method of communications if all other means are not feasable, but it isn't really something anyone would choose for speed.
But what you may not know is that the really long Morse SMS tone on Nokia phones says "connecting people"
If Morse code is so much better than using text messaging, why doesn't everyone do it?
Rhetorical question. The answer, obviously, is that it is a pain in the ass to learn and gain any serious encoding/decoding speed.
It's a lot like typing (which most of us take for granted). Objectively, it is the fastest way to transcribe data. However, it requires quite a bit of practice to get up to a level fast enough to make it better and more useful than normal writing.
No, it's not the fastest way to send data. For example you can type faster than you can send morse. The reason the morse coders won was because of the tools they used. A morse code key, which is an electrical switch, is optimized for extremely short contacts. It also can be fine-tuned for individual senders. Phone touchpads were originally designed for entering only short phone numbers, so speed was not really an issue. It was more important to prevent the user from dialing a wrong number. So there's a lot more resistance built in to the phone keys.
The results would have been closer if the morse coders had to use a cell phone to send their code, maybe just pressing the 1 button on and off. I think in that case the texters would have won.
I live in Japan, and probably send twenty text messages for each call that I make. Though I must admit, the Japanese software seems better than what I remember in the states. The word-completion is usally really clever if I am typing in Japanese. Also, typing in Japanese is intrinsically easier because in general, each kana corresponds to two English letters. I wish people would use this service more in the states, for all of the reasons people have been mentioning. Despite the enormous number of cell phones in Japan relative to the US, you are forced to listen to people yapping away on them far, far less often. This might be my favorite element of Japanese society, I swear.
The greatest thing is, this program actually converts what you type to Morse code.
In "spoken" morse, dots are pronounced as DIT (DI- if it's not the final sound in a word), and dashes as DAH.
This (almost) mimics the way morse would actually sound.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
But you need to practice A LOT to keep up your morse skills. I learned it once and now I can't even beep out my name.
T9 OTOH scales well with ability of operator as the letters are written on the keys. If you forget how to do it just look at the keys and they will help you.
This code has memory leaks.
Why not fork?
French is a Hindi. It just happens to use different words for most things.
An electric oven is a gas oven. It just happens to use electricity instead of gas.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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. :)
Well... A real morse code app would only rely on 1 button, wouldn't it?
One or two, actually. You can key Morse on a "straight key," which is one single key, or on a "Paddle" or set of "paddles" which is either one horizontal key that can be pushed left or right, or two keys arranged to behave as a single paddle. Pushing the key in one direction causes a string of properly timed dashes, pushing it the other way produces a stream of properly timed dots. This is the set up that was used by the ham operators in the video.
Still, I would have to say that I would feel completely unsatisfied by the Nokia phone app. It should rely on timing, and timing alone, to identify the spaces. It can be done in the electronic realm, even if it is not known in advance if the bit being sent is a dot or a dash. With the machine knowing whether the operator is sending a dot or a dash should make it a total cakewalk. Further, it should properly recognise the "error" character (........) and use that to undo the last word, rather than using the "C" key to undo the last letter. That would be proper use of Morse code.
73 DE KC2IDF
www.wavefront-av.com
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.
that beep pattern you hear from most phones with the ringers on when they get an SMS message is "... -- ..." which is of course, morse code for "SMS"
Oh the irony!