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Morse Code on Cell Phones?
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent showdown, veteran Morse coders were able to send SMS messages faster via Morse than the fastest thumb-typists. What about embedding support for Morse code directly into handsets? This article on O'Reilly Network floats the idea of using Morse code to compose text messages, as well as tapping commands (i.e. answer call, forward to voice mail, etc) in hands-free mode by tapping on the handset case."
Having already posted one dupe today, timothy pulls off the amazing feat of posting a dupe of a dupe!
It's a dupe followed by a dupe-dupe!
What do you call that?
The supposed "showdown" on Jay Leno was a highly unscientific and inaccurate test which pitted the world's fasted morse coder using very expensive morse equipment against a teenager using a cheap cell phone with a membrane keypad.
If the pro-morser had been forced to enter morse on a phone keypad instead of his $200 morsing 'bug' then I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have won. It takes several keypresses to send a single character in morse and just because it's morse, it doesn't mean that you can press the keys any quicker. He could only key quicker because of the equipment he was using.
Add to that the fact that it takes ages to learn morse and only a few minutes to learn standard texting or T9 predictive text, I think you'll find that the take up on morse on phones would be pretty much zero.
I think anyone's efforts would be better spent designing better keypads or improving predictive text rather than wasting time trying to put morse code (designed for carrier wave) onto a phone (designed for voice and data).
The only part of his idea that I think is sensible is the idea that you can answer and redirect calls without having to look for the key to press (not that I find that hard after I've had my phone a few days, because you know where the main green and red buttons are without having to look). Having said that, most phones have any key answer if you enable it, and on a lot of bluetooth handsfree kits you can answer and make calls using a single button and voice tags (obviously requires phone support).
Also, the reason morse is as fast as it is is because you hardly have to move your finger at all. The article author is suggesting that you use your fingernail for a "dit" and the flat of your finger for a "dah". This would be ridiculously slow and very painful after the first few characters as it would be a very unnatural movement!
If you want to type seriously fast on your phone, then you need a way to plug in a standard sized keyboard (preferably Dvorak!).
This is a semi-http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/03/0 525225&tid=133&tid=215">dup. This submission has an article containing a reference to the material that Jay Leno stole, plus an unnecessary commentary on O'Reilly Developer Weblogs that provides no revolutionary thought and hardly any intellectual merit
/ 29/0212242&tid=232&tid=14">8 hours a part.
/. can fire http://www.monkey.org/~timothy/">this poor fellow and hire me for the seemingly cush job of /. editor? I promise to never dup! (or semi-dup in this case)
At least this time Timothy's dup and its original post were more than http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06
I'm not trying to be mean here, but is there anyway
Falun Dafa is good!
While Veteren morse code typers can do it quickly, I don't know how many average consumers are veteran more code typers. If people became veteran SMS typers, they could probably do it just as fast if not even faster. Not a fair comparison.
it takes a lot of practice to use morse code at the speed that professionals do. i don't think there are enough people out there that would want to spend the time to make this a viable product. you could maybe sell it on think geek but not to the people that shop wal-mart and best buy.
-.. ..- .--. .
(hi lameness filter)
And no, I'm not trolling, I'm being realistic. Find an average, everyday kid (as in, not a geek) and try to spend an hour teaching them Morse. It ain't gonna happen. Kids now days have the memory retention of a goldfish.
They'll happily accept more $$$'s for
all that over-charged air-time...
PS The reason Morse Coders were faster
was that their gear was on a table,
while their competitions' was hand-
held & subject to movement-based
error.
Morse Coders... what a TERRIFIC name
for a new programming contest!
Don't these Andover guys let you take a couple days off to do personal stuff like move? Seems like the strain has put your mind elsewhere.
Hope you get better soon!
Holy Repost of a Repost Batman!!
Reminds me of a song my grandma liked. It went something like this;
Dupe-a-dee-doo-dah, Dupe-a-dee-ay
My, oh my what a wonderful day!
Plenty of sunshine heading my way
Dupe-a-dee-doo-dah, Dupe-a-dee-ay
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Look away from slashdot for just a couple of days and try to find out exactly what you have missed.
:)
Hell, just take your eye of the front page for a
while and you will miss things.
It always amazes me when I return from vacation or a short trip just how many articles I have missed, and for weeks afterwards, topic threads in the comments may refer back to things, and people will complain about dupes when I am reading a fresh new article.
On TV, we willingly accept dupes without complaint, so why bother so much about slash?
A dupe is only a dupe if you spend too much time here, change the channel, go outside, skip the story
I would much rather see interesting debate than comments about dupe.
(Note, I'm not saying anything about the classical "dupe on same front page" cockups most of us have witnessed)
liqbase
Lets just take the voice functionality out of the phones and have portable camera devices that can check email and make electronic dots and dashes. You can still download "dotonze" from the online store, which will play a certain song clip for a dot, and a certain one for a dash, making all communication nigh impossible, but you'll get to listen to the same note over and over again, and will therefore be a "trend-setter."
The one old fossil of a man, who still is competent at morse code, is pissed.
I was going to say something +5 Informative, +5 Interesting and +5 Funny but the lameness filter has no sense of humour. Junk characters indeed... philistine...
as well as tapping commands (i.e. answer call, forward to voice mail, etc) in hands-free mode by tapping on the handset case.
One shudders to think what you'd be tapping with if you're not using your hands...
Morse was developed in a clever way, so that much used characters had shorter codes, and were therefore faster to type. SMS has nothing like this. For instance, with SMS, E is 2 clicks, I is 3 and O is 3 (and S is 4!). This can be improved with "intelligence" like T9, but then you might have to wait for the software, and you have to read and choose the correct words.
I'd suggest something like Dvorak for SMS; rearrange the letters on the keys so that the most normal characters are one click, and the least normal characters are 3 clicks. No need to actually recreate morse on cellphones, but no need to be stupid about the design either.
While trying to post the below, WITHOUT the text (dot,line) the lameness filter went into action ...
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
So by slashdot.org definition morse code is junk.
dot dot line (..-)
dot dot dot (...)
dot (.)
dot line dot dot (.-..)
dot (.)
dot dot dot (...)
dot dot dot (...)
I think you mixed up usability and learnability. Morse code and vi are more usable than T9 or hmm notepad. They pay for this usability by being hard to learn, however.
;-) )
Also I won't hand in my CLI 'till we have turing complete GUIs. (If the answer to that is "how the fuck do you envision a turing complete GUI?", I think you just got the point
After watching the Jay Leno episode I was about to start writing a program to do that on my 6600, luckily I did some research before starting and found this with the source included!
You write the sms in morse and it converts and sends it as a regular sms.
You can use the joystick on the phone (left for dot and right for dash) so you have your finger on one button all the time!
Also I found this page for learning morse code ...
Command Line administration shown to be faster than GUI.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. /. will accept is "/."
looks like the only morse
flinging poop since 1969
well not exactly. Its handsfree, I just talk in to the phone, the phone automagically turns the sound in to a series of 1s and 0s (dots and dashes) then converts them back into a sound at the other end! Fantastic! No learning curve, just instant messaging. I live in the UK, so I'm more than aware of the actual use of SMS, I use it myself, but is it really worth devoting a week of my life to learning a code, that if I get really good at, may let me do 50 CHARACTORS a MINUTE! No. I know T9 isn't perfect, but its good enough esp as SMS is limited to 160 chars. The technology I'm interested in is projected keyboards. I don't see why a bar code reader couldn't be modified to create a keyboard image that could be trasmited from a phone. You could detect breaking the lines, and thus know which key was pressed.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I heard they were developing new technology to write SMS messages using voice recognition, and for cellphones to have the abilities to read out the recieved messages.
Wait a minute...
according to this :& nid=1541
p eed_recor.html
http://www.160characters.org/news.php?action=view
Just 90 seconds after Mr Hill began transmitting, Mr Gibson announced that he had the message received and written down correctly.
The message was
"Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing."
thats 108 characters
108 / 90 = 1.2 cps
yet the world record for SMS entry is 3.7 cps
http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2004/06/28/sms_s
Ms Kimberly Yeo,a 23yo business student,clocked just 43.24 seconds for typing this 160-character, 26-word text."The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That could also be done with one hand, although it would take five fingers.
Of course, morse code could potentially be I/O, but chording could not, unless things of changed there.
"...tapping commands (i.e. answer call, forward to voice mail, etc) in hands-free mode by tapping on the handset case."
I bet that's already patented by someone - if not, I bet it soon will be.
AT&ROFLMAO
Now that you are hooked on using morse code, or more correctly, the international version.... be careful how you start learning. DO NOT memorize .- pattern.
Get the tapes and learn by sound. Direct random
access is MUCH faster than using lookup tables.
silah
Electronic morse keyers are very simple. All you need is one relatively simple integrated circuit (see The History of Curtis Keyers) and a switch or two. For a cell phone, the IC could be modified to generate ASCII characters for the SMS message while sending dots and dashes to the phone's speaker. If the phone could be attached to the user's arm or leg, it would provide a base for the keyer. The user could then use his free hand to operate the keyer. A pair of pressure sensitive panels on the left and right sides of the phone, near the bottom, would be ideal.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
morse speed records are measured in wpm, a crazy metric but I guess it stops people sending .......... really fast and claiming cps records
Ms Yeo's was 36.1 wpm
Hill/Gibson managed 14 wpm
the record for morse wpm is in the mid 70's, but for competition they transmit for 15 minutes from a newspaper
http://www.rogerwendell.com/morsecode.html
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
One of the main reasons for using text messaging is to communicate with someone without putting a phone up to your ear. Are they suggesting that the morse code be printed on the screen of the phone?
A small hit for a tech geek, a giant tip for this tech week.
I am eagerly waiting for the next (most probably not yet filed for patent) innovation: Voice over IP, based on tcp and transmitted with the help of an acoustics coupler.
If that works, a copperplate engraving of digital images seems useful as well.
Huh?
"worlds fastest morse coder"? nope. Not hardly. Just an experienced operator sending at less than 30 words a minute. Fast for morse code is 60 WPM.
"very expensive morse equipment"? uhhh, no. Not really. They used a cheap "Bencher" paddle, $100, not any "$200 morsing bug"...
Morse is the first and oldest digital transmission mode that I am aware of. The cell phone text message is also ultimately a digital transmission mode.
Personally, I hate text messaging because of the clunky input method. The idea that perhaps there is a better way to enter text into a phone is intrigueing. Also the idea that the phone could output the text message as morse code is interesting.
How many people are aware that when their Nokia sends "dah dah dah dit dit dah dah dah" it is in fact sending "SMS" in morse to indicate Short Message System? I hear it all the time, and nobody knows why it beeps like that!
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
What about having it vibe out incoming text messages in morse.. or sound them out.
meh
Yeah. My phone (nokia 6800) has a foldy-out qwerty keypad. I bet i can send messages with special characters (*&^%$£"!?~@:}{+_) and case sensitivity at least as fast as a morse keyer.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
in hands-free mode by tapping on the handset case
I don't know if I'm misreading this, but I certainly use my hands when I tap on something.
Whilst developing the Sony Ericsson P800, we put in an easter egg which would read your SMS's in morse code through the vibrator.
The reason was that one of the messaging developers wanted to receive football scores whilst in boring project meetings, and he'd set up a Perl script on a server somewhere to SMS him the results.
It worked - at least, he claimed it did - my morse wasn't really up to understanding the various vibrations. Unfortunately the developer in question wasn't brave enough to leave it in the final product.
The person doing the mobile phone mustn't have had predictive text. I'm not a fast typer at all, but I beat the morser handily. Not believing it I tried again. And still won. I'm sure someone can give me a good description in information theory how much information you have to send on the mobile, versus typing each character. Sure the speeds may be different, but if you have good compression by having background information in the domain at hand, you have a good advantage. Has anyone ever given any thought to mobile phone lettering layout? It would make it much faster if the most used letters were interspersed with the least used: if "aes" were the letters on one key, it wouldn't be able to ambiguify them. But if you had a common, a middly used, and a rare, like "emx" then it would make things much more efficient. Current mobile keyboards are the querty of our time. A "Dvorak" mobile pad with predictive text would kick anything that came its way!
The Greatest Dupe Known To Man! (Score:-1, Redundant)
Hilarious. Good luck to the meta-moderator trying to judge this one.
Either I'm going crazy, or this isn't so 'recent,' because I swear I've already seen at least 3 earlier articles about this so called showdown here on slashdot.
And it's no real feat the the morse code won, the person using it has know it for years and has likely had a lot of practice. Plus it's only one button, or lever if you will, that he has to press, where as you some kid having to choose between a dozen different keys to find the letter they want.
I dunno... it just doesn't strike me as impressive or newsworthy; even the first time around.
While theoretically this idea would be excellent, how would you convince teens to use this method when they can already write really fast the other way? Now what we need are mobile phones that can be hacked to shoot lightning at you if you accept a call from your ex-girlfriend.
A java app that might change your mind on the dvorak layout: http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePage .html
Gee.. I dunno..
I'm using my Palm with a Portable Keyboard.
Each time I need to send SMS, I attached the keyboard, start the SMS App (I'm using Monkey Messenger) and start typing.
160 taps later on the keyboard, key in the phone number, enable infrared on my phone, and transmit!
I would say all in all, that's less than about 180 taps combined both on the Palm and it's portable keyboard and the phone (My Nokia phone only needs 5 taps on the keypad to enable infrared)
I can probably get a 160 character message out in slightly over half a minute..
deunan_k
morse code is designed quite consistently with zipf's law, which is nice.... but computer morse readers tend to do a fairly poor job of copying code, and so using morse as input might be just as error prone as the so-called "predictive" input in cell phones (the first feature I turn off -- highly annoying).
why not have the screen of the cell phone be a Graffiti input area designed to be 'written' on with one's finger (about twice the size of the Palm graffiti sensor area)... ?
Amazing magic tricks
Sending morse code isn't so important to amateur radio any more but here were some long-standing requirements:
5 words/minute -- novice/technician license.
13 words/minute -- general/advanced license
15 words/minute would get you highest privileges in some countries if I remember correctly
20 words/minute for a U.S. extra license
(a "word" averaging 5 characters)
There are "Q" abbreviations like "QTH" for "location" and slang like "C" for "yes". But I expect most amateurs in the day were banging out under 20 wpm with a "straight key". It's true that a "keyer" can be a one IC device. Touch pads have been used for them. So I suppose a keyer could be integrated into a phone quite easily. Ergonomics could be a factor. I don't know how well you could key on the metro.
why limit ourselves to morse code ... with every phone having a camera we could take advantage of image recognition and send our sms via smoke signals or even semaphores
The problem is time and a niche form of communication. Who has time to learn morse code yet alone uses SMS as a primary form of communication that needs the utmost speed? A bunch of nerds who do nothing but sit on the internet all day do. For the average joe, or even more importantly businessman, time is something that is better spent on real world communications training and technology that doesn't demand arcane knowledge. I was trained as in intercept operator in the military where I took and transmitted morse by type and hand up to a speed of 25 words-per-minute and thats nothing compared to some of the morse operators back in the cold war. The initial training time and continuing training is not something that a real world person is going to use. Of course there are different situations where morse could be of practical use eg. disabled.
IMO this is merely a narrow fascination rather than a practical means of modern communication.
Then the code would be easy to memorize and recreate in case one forgot it.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
In my opinion this may be a neat idea, but I can't see any companies biting on this and putting morse capabilities on cell phones. There is just not enough of a following to justify doing this.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
The ability to play back SMS messages in morse code would be very useful. Imagine listening to a text message in morse code as it comes in - this would be the ultimate chick magnet!
"King of SMS. In November 2004, a seventeen-year-old from Utah became the world's text messaging champion. Ben Cook typed his way into the Guinness World Book of Records by using his cell phone to type 160 characters in just 57.75 seconds. The message was: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."
And as others have pointed out that the morse code team were just a couple of hams. Not the fastest in anything.
Also, somehow I doubt that the world reigning champion of text messaging would use a "a cheap cell phone". He would use the best he could get. Most likely the same he used to get into the guiness book of world records.
Yes it was unscientific, but the SMS side had the best that could be offered.
there's lots of research, both industry and academic, as to what constitutes usability. vi and the cli are the OPPOSITE of that. function != usability. good looks != usability. it's a complex metric that involves time to learn, amount of information that it takes to use compared with payoff, and so forth. vi especially is an absolute abortion on that scale.
Morse is one of the first Huffman codes. The more common letters are simplier and shorter strokes. E . A .-
s...
Compare that to
E 33
A 2
S 777
Also morse code needs only 2 keys (3 if you want to key in the pause).
[walking off on a tangent]
This reminds me of my friend. He went to Marines into signals. He met his future wife there. I was invited to thanksgiving dinner and they were tapping messages on their glasses to each other during conversations.
One of my f
.
set the case for all lower case - 4 and 7 are dots, 6 and 9 are dashes - space key is good - SOS would be keyed as 474696474, and would text as gpgmwmgpg - the method has a specific advantage visually whereby, with experience, the round part of the g and p look like dots, and the vertical lines of the m and w look like dashes - you have to oscillate between 6/9 and 4/7 to avoid "next letter lag"
i hereby release this "method of entering morse code via phone keypad as described in the paragraph above" under a creative commons license, 2005 Slashdot User KaiBeezy, some rights reserved: attribution, noncommercial, share alike
.
Now the question is, when will MAKE magazine run a feature on how to modify your cellphone to do this?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I've been a proponent of cell phones for the deaf for a long time. Unfortunately the phone companies just don't get it. The idea is that they would need a plan with no minutes, but lots of text messaging. They can use sms instead of relay calls to customers who can accept sms, and use the relay call network for others who don't.
</off-topic>
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
okay this is what you do then...
Create a ten key keyboard, with each key nestled under each finger.
Include t9, or similar context predictive choice spell check.
Place most commonly letters under most agile fingers.
Use qwerty typers as baseline, and run this new mode keyboard against Dvorak, after having given them a week of immersion with the new keyboard.
Then, bring in a court stenographer and have him or her run the race as well.
What slows down typing for me is mental REPROCESSING. I can type my own thoughts fastest of all. If I am transcribing written or spoken word, I slow down.
Thank you, I can't wait to install the Morse code package into my Nokia 3650 -- the round keypad is impossible to type with, as the buttons are not in the standard T9 layout. This makes typing while driving very difficult.
Now I can send messages using two buttons, and I don't even have to look at the keypad or screen anymore -- Thank you!!! I made mention of stuff like this in yesterday's post about blind/deaf UIs.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
http://withthefleet.com/cw/danger.php
Isn't this pretty much the same thing?
Don't wank off sheep or smear poopoo all over your upper body.
Yeah, morse might be faster in very specific conditions, but is it practical or probable means of sending SMS in the future? No way!
Typing SMS through the keypad IS fast, after you get accustomed to it. Most European kids (and adults!) send many messages per day, and typing becames very natural.
Anyway, a working voice-recognition might provide an alternative input method in the future... But it really has to work properly.
I had this up and running on a Danger Hip-top in 2002 with many of the projected features described:
1. phone app decoding single-button morse input
2. output in "skinnable" sound pulses... or LED flashes... or vibe... or read as text on the screen
3. all but latter output form retained original timings of the encoding keywork -- to preserve sender's "fist"
4. My media was character-buffered channel-based chat (like wireless telegraphy), but had the Danger offered "stack-like" access to SMS traffic, tying into SMS would have been a natural.
I have a write up on it at
http://dreadnoughtproject.org/WTF/cw/
In hindsight, the lessons I took were these:
Morse entry is more FUN than traditional phone text entry -- providing a Tetris-like enjoyment. It does not require the user to "interact" with the phone as he must with T9 (where the user must watch what the phone is offering for completion). This makes it a pure input mode which would ultimately require less attention. It was comparable in speed to conventional entry (see anecdotal chart on the webpage).
As a neophyte, I never got good at "copying" morse, but then again, as the app decoded to text, I had a crutch which spared me the actual need toi develop this proficiency.
What people seem to forget is that encoding text on phones is not terribly easy to learn in and of itself, though I'd think it easier than Morse. However, if this practice is one you feel you're going to rely upon regularly, you might as well look to Morse as a better solution once proficiency is achieved. QWERTY is even better for most people, obviously, when form factors allow.
tone
tone
Who really cares which is faster? Both suck tremendously. This is like racing snails or ride-on lawnmowers.
When will Xerox invent us something better?
I'd like touchscreen keyboard or touchscreen OCR or Speech-to-Text on a phone.
See, there are equivalent keypresses in morse and plain keypad.
Sometimes you hit a key once, sometimes twice.. up to 4 times. If you need two letters in a row, you gotta wait a split second.
Same thing in morse. It's slower typing "to" in morses than it is w/ the keypad. -*wait*--- as opposed to pressing 8666.
Sorry, morse loses... that is, if you were using morse on your CELL PHONE to send messages.
Besides, the input methods are very different. What, you gonna use the left/right buttons to send morse as opposed to the lil tapper that's really used? Yeah, as if you'll be a pro at that right off the bat.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Binary found to be more efficent than base 10....
And if you drop your phone, that's a couple taps on the bounce... lets say that calls 911.
:) No baby... my girlfriend would never know you keep bumping into me (BTW: I'm sure a 'what's a girl' comment will follow).
C'mon- Most users have a tough enough time knowing that the E on their desktop opens their Web browser, let alone memorizing that three taps answers their call.
Not to mention the normal bumping a phone would get. I can see awkward moments in a club/bar.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
The hams who did the code part of the competition are NOT world record holders at all, but just regular amateur hams and are not professionals. They specifically limited their speed under 30 WPM. The world record is held by the late Ted MacElroy at 72 WPM in 1943, if I recall correctly. I'm only an occasional code operator and the speed they used is quite comfortable for me. I'd like to point out, too, that the hams send the entire text verbatim while the cell phone messagers used abreviations.
This same thing could have been accomplished using very rudimentary equipment for much less than the retail cost of a single cell phone. You would need a cheap "learner" key a 9 volt battery, a buzzer and the wire to connect to the other room. A straight key can be used easily to send code up into the low 20's words per minute.
I agree that the concept of the nail/finger method is impractical. Right off it would make things very difficult for those poor folks who bite their nails. I'd suggest some sort of two button arrangement simulating the automatic key paddles where one button makes a series of dots and the other a series of dashes.
I'd be quite glad to have a phone that responded to code commands. Some radio equipment has audible code output so you can get readings, such as frequency and so forth via code instead of requiring a display.
BTW, the code used in the test and on radio is actually the International code rather than the landline Morse that the telegraph in the US used. It's better suited to tones as opposed to the clicks and clacks of a telegraph sounder.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
This has got to be the most lame thing I ever heard. Who is going to memorize Morse code. Why not learn Latin or Klingon and power your cars with steam and coal. I will just use the number pad like the other 99.9999999% of the realistic people in the world.
Flame away byatches, I could give a fuck!
That is just plain crazy talk. Crazy talkers.
If this means that people will have to pass an Amateur Radio license exam to use a cell phone, then I'm all for it. Please, anything to get fewer people running around with annoying loud ring tones in movie theaters, driving while on the phone, and yelling into phones in restaurants! :)
Strangely enough this is not the first application of Morse Code in the tech world... Older UPSs have used Morse to signal error conditions.
They sent considerably more slowly than the folks on TV, and a sticker on top of the UPS showed what each code pattern meant.
It really made a fair amount of sense in context. Morse is a code that's extremely easy to generate by computer (even on a PIC with limited power), and can be read by ear by a skilled operator. For slow speeds and the limited vocabulary of a UPS, it wouldn't take much skill to read the Morse well enough to know what's going on. And the hardware costs of doing this in a UPS (or similar device) are zero, if you're going to have an audible error annunciator anyway...
Anyway, I think the idea of using Morse to send text messages is an excellent one. It's a whole lot easier to manipulate a single button in an timed manner than it is to find the right key on a 12-button pad and *then* manipulate it in a timed manner...
I believe anyone who can learn to type can learn to send Morse at at least half their typing speed. That's a whole lot faster than most of us can text!
But Morse should stay the way it is. It is a backbone for all sorts of emergencies. Morse code and the wonderful folks that use it have helped countless folks over the last century. Sticking the capability in a cell phone is simply ridiculous.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
I'm still holding out for a cellphone which sends the callerid as morse code for a ringtone ... saves all that searching for the phone and peering at it to see if you really want to answer it.
Here you have two professional morse coders, and two amateur text messagers. Hmm...
I can text on my phone sometimes just as fast as a keyboard because it remembers words that I type and it finds the most likely word im going after and fills in the blanks.
I dont see how morse code could beat that.
Think of the first dupe as interation 3 of the article. Or maybe iteration 2 after an initial engineering spike.
This approach has clear advantages. If you say something obviously stupid in a prior version of the article that could have been prevented with a ten second Google search, it's gone in this version. If you engaged in a flame war that, in cold light of the next day is an embarassment, then you have a blank slate. On the other hand, if you said something that what was pretty good, you can wordsmith it up until it is positively brilliant. Think of all the effort we have put into posts that it turned out nobody wanted; on the other hand, little offhand comments ofthen out to be the best thing we have to say.
By a Darwinian process, our best ideas and expressions will emerge, so that by dupe 4 or 5, we'll be able to put references to the article on are CV when we apply for the position of philosopher kings.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
An employee suggested to me that we buy a few SMS cell phones here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it for our employee's day-to-day work. I decided to let buy 5 of them to see how the users did. Besides, our main morse operator had been using cell phones at home and it seemed to work fine, why not try it at work? Once he'd got the machines up and running we let the operators try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: SMS was a pretty good replacement for Morse and the operators 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 from users who could not do things they were used to or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with Morse code. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when the SMS phone suddenly had a weird processing error and deleted his message. Needless to say, the SMS people offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee toss the cell phones in the garbage and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
Umm.... you do realize where you are, don't you?
Not to be too picky and uptight, but you got your dits and dahs mixed up. It's di-di-dit da-dah di-di-dit for SMS, not da-da-dah di-dit da-da-dah, which would be OIO.
They're taking their dog to get its two shots before it's too late. You're taking your dog there too, right?
phones to make them vibrate with the code... non verbal/text communication. Its' practically telepathy... ^^
> Then, bring in a court stenographer and have him or her run the race as well.
stenographers spell everything "fuh net ick lee". There's a key combo for nearly every syllable. That's why the stenographer has to read out the record and not just pass it to the baliff for review.
They're absolutely a dying breed -- every last courtroom I've seen (which is not many) simply uses microphones now.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Morse Code in FireFox - install, right click on any text input field, select leetkey->Morse Decode (SPCBAR for typing,) and just use the space bar for typing Morse code as if it was a Morse code pad.
Then you can check what you typed by selecting the typed text, right clicking on it, selecting leetkey->Morse Decode (SPCBAR for typing,) and you will see what you typed in English.
You can't handle the truth.
"Wireless mobile phone with Morse code and related capabilities"
US Patent 6,418,323, Jul 9, 2002
...would have been to have the morse coders tapping not on a morse code key, but the hangup button of an old fashioned wired telephone.
Phone vs phone.
A couple of interesting links: Nokia has filed a patent for tranmitting and receiving optical messages (blinking LEDs) in morse code. Morse Texter is an open source morse code application for Nokia/Symbian Series 60 phones.
I proposed this (Morse input on cell phones) on /. a couple years ago, and was mocked for it - for once I wish I were a subscriber, so I could check my comment history that far back. (And find out who to say, "I told you so" to.)
Oh great, now Nokia (or perhaps even Amazon) will see this article and go patent the concept.
Do you really believe the average cell phone user could learn morse code? It took me 5 minutes to explain T9 to someone yesterday.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
All those years of struggle and hard work will pay big dividends, now that the Morse Code I learned is coming back into vogue!
Speaking as an Extra (ahem) class Amateur Radio Operator, I can attest to the superior intelligence, natural good looks, and Savoir Faire of we (ahem) elites.
Those of you - and you know who you are - whom did not put in the effort to raise your code speed to the level required by we Olympians will now sit on the sidelines, moaning and lamenting the opportunities you had and did not pursue.
On the other fist (pun inteneded), we of the upper crust will join our brothers in the new Telegraphers' Union and offer our services to desparate fumble-fingered cell users on every streetcorner.
Eat your hearts out! HA!
Did you just tell me to send a load of pickles to Java? No. I dropped the phone.
That would be even more irritating than Windows keys and the way my laptop spuriously does stuff if I don't shut off the touchpad and use a mouse.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I got as far as SOWHATIFITS before I said screw this. I'm so glad I'm not obsessive compulsive.
Why?
Because of two reasons:
- Morse Code was developed so that the most frequently used characters are the quickest to transmit. For example, E and T, the most commonly used letters in the English alphabet, each take one keypress to send (see http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutw
o rds/frequency for details). With T9, on the other hand, each character has the same "cost" - even Q and Z.
- You can keep one thumb on the key for short tones, and your other thumb on the key for long tones. Because you now don't need to look or feel for the letter you want to send, seek time drops to zero; you are limited in your speed only by how fast you can map letters to their Morse equivalents in you head, and how fast your mobile device can process inputs. Given technological improvements in cell phones over the years, that make competitive multimedia systems and are almost certainly not going to be the bottleneck.
So yeah, Morse Code is superior. It may take more skill to learn to use, but that should only scare away teh lUsers.Matt
I'd like to see Semaphore communication with a cell phone.
Okay, maybe that's a stretch.
dot dot dot dash dash dot dot dot
I live in Japan, too. While I am definitely not fluent, I always text in Japanese, because it is much, much faster - even when the recipient speaks much better English than I do Japanese. Essentially, you get the two-for-one character bonus in addition to excellent guessing on word/sentence completion. Despite being easier to type, I wouldn't recommend this system for any new language. It is far too difficult to learn to read and write.
The other SMS announce sequence that my Nokia has reads "CONNECTING PEOPLE". Pretty cool; now only if the stupid phone didn't hang during every other conversation...
The problem is that you're assuming that people will be willing to spend all this time learning to do morse code at a decent speed. Sure, comparing the best of each will result in morse code being faster, but we're dealing with your average person, not the fastest.
Plus if you really want to design a more effecient communication method, since the issue here is just the input method, not the receiving method. The advantage morse has isn't just the input method, but the method of receiving--it's easy to distinguish just two tones. However, the receiving method is not of concern here, since it's already very effective (it's just reading text on a screen).
Thus, it makes sense to design a sort of "next generation" morse for cell phones. It would include multiple keys for which a cell phone user could keep their hand on at all time. For example, the side of the cell phone could have four keys for four fingers and perhaps a fifth on the other side for the thumb. 5 keys can represent 32 combinations, which gives you the entire alphabet and 6 keys. So perhaps another key would be added for the other hand, making enough key combinations for every single punctuation mark, number and letter.
Thankyverymuch. And I have many more where that one came from, unfortunately.
:)
:-/
I don't get it: how is Morse-coding on a cellphone gonna be any better - and less hard on one's thumb(s) - than thumb-typing now? Will they actually produce new cellphones with a traditional Morse-code contact lever? Can I still put the thing in my shirt pocket? And how can I tap out Morse code on a small object that isn't firmly anchored, like in some cradle sitting on a table?
Somebody isn't thinking this through....
This will never happen as it takes skill and discipline to learn MC and these SMS phone kids are rapping idiot gangsta wanna-be wiggers.
It might wind up a project on Sourceforge, but like Unix itself, it will; always be for the few.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.