Cody Taylor

jcatcw writes “Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that CAPTCHA cracking isn’t that difficult these days. It has even become a business. For example, DeCaptcher.com will solve CAPTCHAs for your spamming needs at a rate of per 1,000 successfully cracked CAPTCHAs. In response, newer systems are in development. Both Carnegie Mellon and Penn State (is there something about the water in PA?) are working on image-based systems. ESP-PIX and SQ-PIX both require the viewer to interpret pictures. Imagination CAPTCHA from Penn has the user find the center of an image. The idea is that humans are better at image recognition that computers, but humans can legitimately disagree on their interpretations and some humans are color blind. Problems remain. For now, sites would be well advised to look at reCAPTCHA — the system that works with Google Books and the Internet Archive to digitize printed texts — which comes with a wide variety of application and programming plug-ins and an open API.”

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Marvel vs. Capcom, Earthworm Jim, Space Harrier and so on… what happened to all of these awesome franchises? We’re going back again to better days and counting off 14 more video game series that have little to no hope of getting another crack at a new title. What treasured franchises got left by the wayside that you’re still carrying a torch for?

Digg announced today that it’s going to be chilling out on growth plans, and maybe even reducing staff. I caught up with Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson last week at the L.A. Diggnation meetup, and asked them about the state of the San Francisco company, features in the works, the power-user problem and their take on the media landscape

Every so often, a comic actor goes through a crisis of faith. Maybe they feel they’re being pigeonholed into roles that involve fart jokes and being hit in the balls too often, or maybe they just want to see what else they’re capable of. Sometimes this can be a trainwreck, but for these eight actors, it’s gone pretty well at least once.

mytrip writes “In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems’ market capitalization for the first time. Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market. Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun’s market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat’s.”

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snydeq writes “Windows XP, Windows Vista, and (soon) Windows 7 all support SMP out of the box, but as InfoWorld’s Randall Kennedy notes, ‘experience has shown that multiprocessing across discrete CPUs is not the same thing as multiprocessing across integrated cores within the same CPU.’ As such, Kennedy set out to stress the multiprocessing capabilities of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 in dual-core and quad-core performance tests. The comprehensive, multiprocess workload tests were undertaken to document scalability, execution efficiency, and raw performance of workloads. ‘What I found may surprise you,’ Kennedy writes. ‘Not only does Microsoft have a firm grasp of multicore tuning, but its scalability story promises to keep getting better with time. In other words, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are poised to reap ever greater performance benefits as Intel and AMD extend the number of cores in future editions of their processors.'”

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