Morse Coders Beat SMSers 483
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."
Well, yeah. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:no surprise... (Score:3, Interesting)
Though he also had the crappy cell phone keyboard (which was probably the point), and the sending ham had a high quality paddle that by itself was bigger than the guy's phone ...
AD5RH
Not a true test. (Score:4, Interesting)
Secondly they used TAP method which is outdated and inefficient.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 More people still use outdated devices like pagers.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!
Re:Well, yeah. (Score:2, Interesting)
With text messaging I can get or send info no matter how noisy the environment is (try understanding spoken directions while standing on a street corner in Osaka) and whatever info I receive I can refer to over and over again (my memory has never been too hot either).
I still want the ability to call or receive calls, but my preferred channel clearly is text.
Re:incorporated functionality (Score:3, Interesting)
But what you may not know is that the really long Morse SMS tone on Nokia phones says "connecting people"
Re:Well, yeah. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What you say??? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 agree (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:morse code over skype (Score:5, Interesting)
The greatest thing is, this program actually converts what you type to Morse code.
The text messaging contestants sucked (Score:1, Interesting)