Chapter 15 3. Convenient connections. Digitization alone is not enough

As you read this page, your eyes and brain are constantly converting this print medium into signals that you can process and recognize as meaningful words.If you want to fax this page, the scanner on the fax machine will draw a fine graphic composed of lines, and use 0 and 1 to represent black and white with ink and no ink respectively.This digitized graphic reflects the fidelity of the original, depending entirely on the sophistication of the scanner.But no matter how accurately your fax machine scans, the fax is ultimately just a duplicate image of the original—not letters, not words, but pixels.

If a computer interprets the content of this image, it must go through a recognition process similar to that of a human reading: First convert small blocks of pixels into letters, and then spell the letters into words, which also includes distinguishing the letter 0 from the number 0, distinguishing text content from handwriting traces, figuring out the difference between coffee stains and illustrations, and at the same time. See details in backgrounds full of noise (interference from scanning and transmission processes). Once this work is done, your digitized file is no longer an image, but a variety of data that appears in the form of letters and is composed of certain structures, usually encoded into binary codes according to the "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". Plus some relevant data about fonts and typography.This fundamental difference between fax and ASCII exists in other media as well.

CDs are "sound facsimiles," digitized data that allow us to compress, error-correct, and manipulate audio signals, but they don't capture the structure of music.For example, it is difficult to remove the piano sound from a CD, replace the singer, or change the spatial position of the instruments in the symphony orchestra. Eight years ago, Mike Hawley first observed the dramatic difference between sound fidelity and structured music.He was still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has just stayed on to teach there. He is also a very talented pianist. Hawley's doctoral dissertation included his research on a specially designed Boursindorfer grand piano.The piano records when each fret starts to strike, and how fast the hammer hits the strings.In addition, he electrified all the keys, so this piano can play a hundred pieces backwards almost without a problem.This particular piano is like a combination of an elaborate keyboard digitizer and one of the most expensive and high-resolution performance pianos in the world.

The Japanese company Yamaha has just recently released an inexpensive model of this piano. Hawley was thinking about how to store more than an hour of music on a CD.There are two incremental ways of dealing with this problem in industry.One is to change the laser from red light to blue light, which shortens the wavelength (wave1ength) and makes the storage density 4 times the original.The other is to use newer encoding techniques, because your CD player is actually using an algorithm from the mid-70s, and since then, we have mastered better sound compression techniques, at least 4 times than the original compression ( and the loss of sound does not increase).Using both technologies together, you can store 16 hours of sound on one CD in one go.

Hawley told me one day that he had found a way to record hours and hours of music onto a single CD.I asked, "How many hours?" He said, "About 5,000 hours." I thought, if this is true, then the World Music Publishers Association will definitely hire a killer to kill Holly, and he will be thereafter. Like the writer Rushdie, who lives in perpetual hiding from the killer.But anyway, I asked him to explain it to me (and I snagged him, sworn to secrecy). Hawley found on the Bossandofi piano (he found a man named John Williams to play on this piano as his collaborator in the experiment), even if the human fingers played fast on the piano At that time, the sound produced on the Bossandofi piano could not exceed 3 bits per minute.In other words, the data obtained by measuring finger movement is very low.That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 1.2 million bits per second sound rate on a CD.In other words, if you store gesture data instead of voice data, you can store 5,000 times more voices, and you don't need a $125,000 Bossandolfi piano, just have a cheaper one equipped with A piano with an instrument digital interface will do.

In the CD manufacturing industry, everyone who has ever studied the capacity of music compact discs timidly and understandably treats the problem as if it were only in the audio domain, just as faxing is entirely in the image domain.Hawley's idea is just the opposite. He thinks that the gestures of playing are like the digital interface of musical instruments, and both are closer to the American standard for information exchange code.In fact, the score itself is a much more compact form of musical representation (admittedly low resolution, and not subject to human interpretation). By looking for structure in the signal and how it is produced, we have gone beyond the surface of the bit and into its interior, discovering the basic building blocks of an image, sound or text.This is one of the most important facts of digital life.

Fax machines are a disaster If the computer science community had made a prediction 25 years ago about the percentage of new text that computers can understand today, they would have estimated numbers as high as 80 or 90 percent.This prediction was correct until about 1980.But then, the fax machine popped up. The fax machine was a glaring blemish on the information landscape, a giant step backwards, with entangled effects that endure.The object of my condemnation, of course, is a telecommunications medium that seems to have revolutionized the way we do business, and even our personal lives.But the long-term costs, short-term mistakes, and other viable alternatives are not understood.

Fax is the heritage of the Japanese, but not simply because the Japanese are smart enough to produce standardized fax machines that are better than others, just like video recorders; but because of the Japanese culture, language, and business habits They all tend to be very visual. Until 10 years ago, the Japanese did not do business by paper, but by voice, and often face to face.Few businessmen had secretaries, and business letters were often painstakingly written by hand.What is equivalent to a typewriter looks more like a typesetting machine. There is an electric arm on the densely packed lead templates to pick out the required Chinese characters one by one from more than 6 characters.

The graphical nature of Chinese characters made the invention of fax a natural success.Since there were very few Japanese characters that computers could understand at the time, there was no harm in using faxes.But for a symbolic language like English, faxing is a disaster when it comes to computers' ability to read. English only uses 26 Latin letters, 10 numbers and a small number of special symbols, so it is much more natural for us to consider communication issues from the perspective of 8-bit ASCII codes.But the existence of fax makes us ignore this point.For example, most business letters today are drafted on a word processor, printed, and faxed.Think about the process.We draft documents in an entirely computer-readable form, and computers "read" them so well that it often doesn't actually occur to us to use a spell-checker to correct spelling mistakes.

What do we do next?We printed it on stationery with the unit's name, address, and phone number, so the document has now completely lost its digital character. Then we took this piece of paper to the fax machine, and the content on the letter paper was re-digitized and turned into an image. The original texture, color, font and other characteristics of the letter paper were lost through this process.The letter was sent to a destination, perhaps in the file basket next to the copier.If you happen to be the unlucky recipient, you get this sickly, thin, sometimes uncut piece of paper, like an ancient scroll, and you have to read it.Forgive me, this is as stupid as passing tea leaves around.

Even if your computer has a fax modem that eliminates the need for printing, or even if your fax machine uses paper and prints in full color, faxing is still not a smart medium. Because you shut out the reading ability of the computer, and only with the help of the reading ability of the computer, the recipient can automatically store, retrieve and process the information you sent. About 6 months ago, it seems like someone passed something to you from somewhere... like "so and so" A thing that happened—how many times in this situation can you remember what kind of thing it was? But if the letter had been sent in ASCII, all you had to do was search a computer database for the "so-and-so" file to find the letter. When you fax a spreadsheet, all you can send is an image of it.But if you send it by e-mail, you're sending the recipient an editable spreadsheet on which he can manipulate, ask questions, or look at it any way he wants. Faxing isn't even economical at all.If you faxed this page at the normal rate of 9600 baud, it would take 20 seconds, or about 20 bits of information, to be transmitted.And if you use e-mail, less than 1/10 of the ratio is enough: that is, ASCII codes and other control characters.In other words, even if you claim that you don't care about the computer's ability to read, if you calculate the cost per bit or per second at the same 9600 baud transmission rate, the cost of e-mail is only 10% of the cost of fax (if At 38400 baud, the cost of e-mail is reduced to 2.5% of that of fax).E-mail catches up with fax and the idea of ​​e-mail both started about 100 years ago.In an 1863 manuscript "Paris in the Twentieth Century", which was first discovered and published in 1994, Jules Verne wrote: "The facsimile telegraph can transfer any manuscript, signature or diagram Sending it to great distances can also allow you to sign up with someone 2 kilometers away. Wires go into every home.” In 1883, the automatic telegraph introduced by the Western Union Telegraph Company (Western Union) was a point-to-point electronic mail delivery system using reinforced wires.The widespread use of multipoint-to-multipoint electronic mail as we know it today actually predates the common use of fax. In the mid-to-late 1960s, when e-mail was just taking off, few people knew how to use computers, so it's no wonder that when the fax machine came along in the 1980s, it quickly caught up.The advantage of faxing is that it is easy to use, images can be transmitted, and originals (including forms) can be reproduced easily.Also, in some cases, and until recently, signatures on facsimiles had the force of law. But today, when computers are ubiquitous, one only needs to look at the soaring population of e-mail users to know that e-mail has an overwhelming advantage.Beyond the benefits of digitization, e-mail is a more conversational medium than other mediums.Although it's not spoken dialogue, it feels closer to speech than to writing. I check my email first thing in the morning.Later on I can say, "Yeah, I talked to so-and-so this morning," even though it's just an e-mail.During the frequent back and forth of e-mail messages, spelling mistakes often occur.I remember one time when I specifically apologized to a Japanese colleague for a spelling error, and he replied, don't worry, because his ability to correct spelling mistakes must be higher than any spell checking software I can buy.That's true. This semi-conversational new medium is indeed very different from letter writing.Electronic mail delivery is much more complicated than express post office.Over time, people will find various uses for it.There is now a set of emoticons in e-mail, such as :) for a smiley face.In the next millennium, electronic mail is likely to become the dominant medium of human communication, and in the next 15 years, it will be on par with or even surpass voice communication.We're all going to use e-mail, if we all know some digital etiquette.Internet etiquette Imagine this scene: In the resplendent ballroom of an 18th-century Austrian castle, the flickering candlelight of hundreds of candles, Venetian mirrors and ornate jewellery, dazzle the hall. Accompanied by a 10-piece orchestra, 400 handsome men and women waltz gracefully, just like the scenes in Paramount's "Girl Queen" or Universal Pictures' "The Merry Widow" (The Merry Widow).Now imagine the same scene, except that 390 of the guests had just learned to dance the night before, and everyone was stepping carefully.It's similar to what's happening on the Internet today: most users are clumsy. Internet users today are mostly newbies, many of whom have been online for less than a year.At first, they would send a large number of messages to a small group of specific recipients, not only at length in content, but also in a tone of urgency, as if the recipients had nothing better to do than reply to them as soon as possible. To make matters worse, sending copies of documents by e-mail is so easy, and it seems to cost nothing. The other party can just "enter" and fill your e-mail box with ten thousand words of books that you have no interest in. .This simple act transformed e-mail from a medium of personal conversation into a mass information dump.It's especially frustrating when you're networking over a narrowband channel. A journalist is tasked with writing a story about newbies and their reckless use of the Internet.To research this, he sent me and others a 4-page questionnaire without my prior consent and without warning.His report is really an excellent self-portrait, slapping his own mouth. Simplicity is the soul of e-mail For journalists, e-mail can be the best medium.E-mail interviews are less intrusive and give respondents more room to think.I believe that many, many news outlets around the world will consider electronic interviewing to be an excellent medium and a standard interview tool—if only journalists can learn a little digital etiquette. The best way to demonstrate e-mail courtesy on the Internet is to assume that the recipient is communicating at only 1200 baud and has only a few minutes to read the letter.The negative lesson is to include the original letter verbatim when replying (worryingly, many Internet veterans I know have this habit).There are many ways to make e-mails clear, and this is probably the laziest of them all.It's even worse when the letters are long or the aisles are narrow. The other extreme is worse.For example, only answer "of course" when replying to a letter.What is of course? In my opinion, the worst of all digital habits is unnecessary copying, the habit of "cc" (carbon copy) every now and then.The mountain of copies has made many senior managers of enterprises fear going online.One of the big problems with electronic copies is that since replies are often sent to the entire cc list as well, the copies propagate themselves and become more and more numerous.You never know if someone writes back to everyone occasionally, or just wants to or doesn't know what to do.If someone is planning an impromptu international conference and invites me and 50 other people to attend, the last thing I want to see is 50 schedules and trivial discussions about those arrangements. "Simplicity is the soul of email," a bard might say.Sundays are no exception. E-mail as a way of life has had a major impact on the way we work and think.A concrete result is that the pace of our work and play has changed.Gradually, working from 9 am to 5 pm every day, working 5 days a week, and taking 2 weeks off every year will no longer be the mainstream pace of business life.Sunday and Monday are no longer that different. Some would say (especially Europeans and Japanese) that it was a disaster.They would rather leave their work in the office than take it home.People have a right to stay away from work, and I certainly don't begrudge that.But on the other hand, some of us just like being "snared" all the time, and the quid pro quo is easy.Personally, I'd rather answer a few more emails on Sunday for a lazy Monday morning.Both at home and outside there is a very good and now famous cartoon of two dogs having a conversation on the Internet.One of the dogs typed a line on the computer to his companion: "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." It should have added a note: "And they don't know where you are." During the roughly 14-hour flight from New York to Tokyo, I spent most of the time typing and composing forty or fifty emails.Come to think of it, if I handed these emails to the front desk for faxing as soon as I arrived at the hotel, it would definitely be considered a bulk email.However, if I use e-mail, I can easily and quickly get things done by dialing a local number.And when I send letters, I send them directly to many people, not to an address; they also send the message to me, not to a certain place in Tokyo. E-mail allows us to be incredibly mobile, and no one needs to know where we are.The process of staying connected raises some interesting questions about the differences between atoms and bits in digital life, perhaps most affecting the traveling salesman. When I travel, I manage to get at least two local phone numbers that connect me to the Internet.Contrary to popular belief, these network portals are very expensive commercial portals, allowing me to either connect to the local messaging system (this is the case in my case in Greece, France, Switzerland and Japan), or to connect to the SP Linked to the global message service system of Lindt Corporation and Microwave Communications Corporation (MCI).Sprint has access numbers in 38 cities in Russia, and any of these numbers can connect me to my single-user time-sharing system or media lab mainframe as a backup.Once connected to my timesharing system or mainframe, I'm online.The physical barricades of digital life are being connected to the Internet everywhere in the world is a kind of magic.The question is not digital survival, but whether the plugs are well equipped.There are 20 (count) different electrical plugs in Europe!Maybe you've finally gotten used to the little plastic phone jack, the so-called RJ-11 plug, but don't forget that there are 175 other plugs in the world.I'm proud to own at least one of each of these plugs.So when I'm touring long distances, 1/4 of my suitcase is filled with assorted phone jacks and electrical plugs. But even with the best equipment, you can still hit a wall because many restaurants and almost all phone booths don't provide a modem connection port. In this case, you can attach a small sound coupler to the phone handset.How easy it is to do this depends on the degree of overdesign on the handset. Once connected, the bits could be transmitted back home through even the oldest, rotary analog telephone switches, though this sometimes required a transmission system that was slow and highly error-correcting. Europe has launched a European plug (Europ1ug) program in order to develop a single power plug style that can meet the following three goals: 1) It looks different from all current plugs; 2) It has the safety of all current plugs; 3 ) will not allow any one country to monopolize economic advantages (this is an idea unique to the EU).The problem isn't just about the plug.As our digital lives unfold, we encounter more and more physical roadblocks rather than electronic roadblocks. For example, the hotel removed the little plastic clip on the RJ-11 jack so you can't plug your laptop's cord into the wall, which is worse than charging a fax reception fee.This is an example of artificial sabotage of digitization. The Zakats have promised to feature this in future restaurant guides, so digital folks can resist such sleazy restaurants and find better places to make their digital living.