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Updated 150 Days ago
Watch the Olympics on your computer....if you have Vista
Are NBC, the Olympics, and Bill Gates conspiring to make you buy an operating system? Some might see it that way.
NBC announced today that fans will be able to catch up on the games, even when they can't be online. A system is being made available where your computer will automatically download coverage of the events you choose, so you can play them back when you want to watch. This will be handy with a 13 hour time difference between Beijing and St. Louis!
But there is one very significant catch. The Go Service, as it's being called, will only work on computers with the Windows Vista operating system. All you XP and Mac users out there (the vast majority) will be out of luck!
How convenient that they're announcing this a month and a half before the games begin. Plenty of time for that Vista marketing campaign to be rolled out! Thoughts?
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Still, this is like two unfunny jokes being combined into one even less funny joke. Neither the Olympics, nor Vista, have any credibility.
I can do without on both counts.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.