Using Captcha for distributed processing
on
Defeating Captcha
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· Score: 1
Use captcha to encode math problems (IE, the captcha would have "sin(34) * 10" or whatever, and you have to type in the answer).
This way, not only does it take a little longer to analyze, but you get them to do a little bit of work for you. Force the spammers to be part of your little distributed processing system.
Of course the problems need to be simple enough for the users to figure out...
The reason I say replace the drive is that usualy, its an older drive, and a faster drive will make a noticable difference in speed, which makes them happy.
Certainly, if you can get away with just doing a reinstall, that's great.
Dont misunderstand, I'm saying to pull one over on the customer. Certainly not. Be completely honest. Try to recover data, of course. But let them understand that it may cost a lot more to clean things up (and they may still have odd problems afterwards) then to just start over from scratch.
Its always a judgement call, based on your experience. The main point is, do it quickly. You're not going for the ideal solution, just the one that is quick and gets the job done.
If they want you to do it the ideal way, just make sure they understand how much you charge per hour.
This is no different than, say, a mechanic. They can rebuild your engine, but that's probably going to cost a lot more and take more time than just getting a new one. But some people would opt for the rebuild.
People are right when they say its hardly worth fixing things. Particularly, trying to 'tune up' a system by getting rid of malware, viruses, etc, which is going to be 90% of the time what people need..
You should be able to diagnose whether the computer has a hardware problem or a software problem real quick. Use a bootable CD or something to do this.
Replace the harddrive, add more ram, replace mouse and keyboard, replace fans, replace the PS, if necessary. If its not clearly one of those, tell them they need a new PC.
If they have a software problem, just tell them they need a new harddrive and reinstall windows on it. That's a whole lot faster than trying to remove all the crap they've installed on it.
If they just need more ram, do that.
Keep the drives you swap out, format them at your leisure, and sell them to the next customer who has a malware problem.
Seriously, get real quick at diagnosing things, and be able to do what you need to do in an hour or two.
I've had to do this with family members. If they think you can sit there for a few hours and tune things up, they'll get you to do it, and you will waste your time and not make money. If instead they know that probably you're going to charge them $50 for an hour and replace their harddrive for $100, they will understand AND be a little less likely to hit you up the next time. And maybe they will learn to keep their system clean.
I got excited when I saw the title, and disapointed after reading the article.
This would be much cooler if:
It was the size of a harddrive and mountable like one, using normal power connectors. It would be super cool if it were the size of a 2.5" drive and used SO-DIMM, so I could use it on my laptop (Its a bit old and limited to 320MB ram, so adding even a 1 gb ram drive would help a lot as a swap drive).
It would be the coolest if instead of using DRAM it used some kind of flash memory. Something perhaps not as dense, but a lot faster. I heard some company was going to make something like that, but I havent seen it yet.
I thought of this a long, long time ago myself. So long ago, in fact, that I figured I didnt know that much about these things and there must be some reason why it wouldnt work..
Today, I realize, I think the reason we dont see things like this is less to do with the fact that it can or can't be done technicaly, but that the logistics of supporting this in the industry would be hard.
Think about it. Ram is a commodity, and is pretty simple to make. How often do we get new ram types? A lot less often than new CPU designs. To support this idea, you would have to get all the memory makers and all the cpu makers and all the motherboard makers to all agree on how it would work. Its hard enough just evolving ram from DRAM chips to SIMMs to DIMMs to DDR to DDR2 etc.. imagine adding the complexity and variability of a CPU-ish component to the mix..
If attempted, you would probably wind up with many different ideas about how it should be done... just like we have many different kinds of CPU's. Remember Rambus? And that was no where near as radical a change as this would be!
Maybe if Intel pushed for such a thing, it could happen. But they backed Rambus and that didnt work out so well...
Not to mention that the CPU would probably have to have support for this. And compilers would probably have to target it.
Technicaly its probably a great idea. Logisticaly implementing it, much harder... maybe in a game console or something...
Its the sort of thing that makes you want to design a computer from scratch, including the CPU! Too bad that's so much harder today than it was 20 years ago...
This would have to be ungodly expensive for a keyboard. OLED's are definately the way to go, though, because LCD's (especialy in color) are way to bulky and expensive (each key would need a light source, lcd, and a driver chip). With an OLED, if I am not mistaken, you can have the whole display and drivers on one piece. No glass panels, no backlight.
Still, until OLEDs are in mass (*MASS*) production, I dont see producing a keyboard like this for a reasonable price for some time yet.
For all the people thinking "OH NO! this would be way to confusing! Bad, bad idea for UI design..".. what's the problem? We have windows full of icons now. What's the difference in putting some icons onto a keyboard? With something like photoshop I could see this being a real time saver. And I bet you will start to use and remember keyboard shortcuts much more often with this, since you only need to look, where now you have to hunt around and find out what the shortcut is..
Actually, it is. It's more like you have a window open into your apartment and the guy across the street watches your Pay-per-view off your TV just by looking out his window and into yours.
Its even more different then that, in many cases. Sometimes its more like you have a stereo playing loudly on your front lawn and all your neighbors hear it and enjoy listening as well. Technicaly, that's illegal too (public broadcast).
And just like the stereo, sometimes it interferes with your own private, completely legal usage of your own equiptment and IP.
Sometimes, it's pretty much impossible NOT to break the law...
I think I am qualified to field this one, as a doctor... Do you have any idea how MUCH stuff a doctor has to write? We literally have to write EVERYTHING WE DO down somewhere. There's no excuse for illegible handwriting since this sort of defeats the entire
Maybe the problem is not one of poor communication skills, but of "over communication" -- since doctors and other highly skilled people generaly communicate much more than other people, they tend to develop methods to make that communication more efficient. Like spelling things the way they sound, or writing in a way that is physicaly quicker or (more likely) less of a strain on the hands.
Its not because we're dumb, or dont care about the "right" way to communicate, its because we need to get the point across efficiently.
And that leads to bad spelling, bad writing, etc. Ahve oyu noctied hwo uyo cna rdee bdlay msispleled wrods? The human brain does weird things...
Communication is an interesting subject indeed.
Or as Calvin (& Hobbs) would say: "Verbing weirds language.."
probably the same reason why doctors have such notoriously bad writing. One wonders how in the world you can get the proper prescription with such unreadable writing.
Personaly, I was an english major who worked as a draftman at Boeing and am now a programmer. So at one time, I wrote beautifully -- perfectly formed letters and at least decent sentance structure.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, my brain has gone lazy and unless I really think about it my writing becomes sloppy in every sense.. I am sure there are several mis-spelled words above.
A friend of mine would say, its because you learn so much new stuff and eventualy something old has to be shoved aside to make room.. and this is why really smart people become "crazy". There's no room left for useless stuff like pretty writing, fashion sense, humanity, etc...
I've yet to understand the sticker-shock reactions around here. You'd think a web-site populated by tech-heads would understand the whole concept of new things launching at high prices.
We understand the concept when the "new thing" is actualy in some significant way "better" than what came before...
UMD's aren't significantly better than, say, a 3" DVD, and suffer many drawbacks (can't get blanks, dont work in billions of DVD players, etc). Slightly higher density but totaly proprietary? No thanks. Double the price of a DVD for what, 1/4 the quality?
What's going to happen when somebody announces a standardized 3" or 2.5" blue-ray or HD-DVD disk that holds 3 or 4 times as much data? Now that would be cool...
I'm going to protest against these idiot protestors! I will be wearing clothes all day, in protest!
I am sure I will have a much more positive impact on people throughout the day because of it.
People will ask me, "Nice pants" and I will say "yeah I am wearing clothes today to protest the naked protestors who protested against nano-tech pants". And they will say "huh?".
I think that will nicely offset all those protesters who probably spend most of their lives saying "huh?".
xcode looks cool, certainly, but it appears that it is still using conventional compilation (it uses GCC). Sure, you can probably simply recompile your application for each processor. But that's not quite transparent.
A consumer might very well have two Apple machines with different cpu's and expect to be able to move programs freely between them, but they're not going to be able to recompile. Linux people get used to this sort of thing, but the average computer user isnt going to find that exceptable..
I dont know about the rest of you (or how much you make in a month) but there's no F'ing way I would put a $9000 ring on wife's finger (and she wouldnt have it, either).
Who in the world besides movie stars and former enron employees would spend that much on a ring?
We are happy with our silver cladaghs (the irish ring mentioned earlier)... sheesh!
If Apple was *really* smart, they would have perfected some way for executables to run on any processor (they had 10 years to do it since switching to PPC), which could have been easily deployed by now. Then the switch to Intel could be nearly transparent from both the user and the developer's perspective. And they could continue to use PPC or Intel or whatever, depending on which worked best for the target market.
It could have been their answer to.net.
But no, they have to be locked into one processor. And thus alienating most of their current market.
I really dont understand why we are still locked into any particular architecture anymore.
It's the kind of thing that makes me want to pack my bags and move to a parallel universe where things actualy make sense...
While I probably wont use this myself (as a web designer it IS neat to be able to switch between IE and Firefox renderers, but its not enough all by itself to compare to all the advantages of normal Firefox), it IS potentialy good for deploying to regular users at the company I work.
I would love to get everybody to use Firefox but unfortunately there are a lot of sites the users here frequent that require IE (mostly because of Activex controls), so there's no other option but to use IE. Until now.
Now I can give them netscape 8, and tell them to use the IE renderer when they have a site that does not work right. They will appreciate the tabs and the other firefox features.
This is good way to transition over from IE. It would be perfect if it were more like Firefox though...
so, wait, you're telling me that MS has rights to the PPC design and then they took that and advanced the design to 3Ghz and tri-core? They've made a better PPC than IBM or Motorola or anybody else?
That's pretty scary.
How long before they start making Microsoft PC's based on these PPC chips and running windows? Then they can control both the hardware AND the OS...
However I still assume that this "3 core" cpu can't be 3 full fledged G5 cpu's running at 3ghz. If it were, I am sure Apple would be, or will be, using it.
Heck they dont even have a single G5 ppc running at 3Ghz yet, do they?
One other note on the G5, if Microsoft can take a tri-core G5 based CPU and put it a Video Game Console (Xbox360) at 3+GHz, why can't Apple do this in a desktop system and be a technology leader?
I'm sure a lot of people are probably thinking this, and there's a good reason: Because its not a triple-core cpu. At least not the way you are thinking (hopeing?). It has a PPC like cpu, but the other processors are not PPC's. They are much more simplified and specialized for processing graphics and such. Great for games, but not all that usefull for general PC tasks.
You know what bothers me? Ay my daughters school, when you go into the office, everybody has a shiny eMac (the one that looks like a desklamp). WTF? Why in the world would they pay for a premium, trendy computer like that for general office work? I could see it if they were in the graphic arts department or something.
It really bugs me that they've spent all that money on fancy macs for the office, but in the classroom they have 5 year old PC's and powermacs...
If its using a blue laser then its not using it well, because you can get mini-dvd's that hold almost 1.5gb.
So what is UMD? Its an unnecessary proprietary format that's only slightly better than current mini-dvd's. Just like Memory sticks are an unnecessary proprietary format that's about the same as SD memory. Gee thanks, Sony!
It would be neat to have a little player like this that could play regular mini-dvd's. But then they couldn't make as much money reselling you videos. It sure would be neat if my CLIE used standard SD memory. I refuse to buy anymore Sony stuff, regardless of how cool they otherwise are...
It will be like that episode of the Simpsons where all the kids come out side, rub their eyes from the sun they haven't seen, and begin to do all the things kids should be doing.. running, playing, etc...
I hadnt seen that trailer yet. I was a little worried, but this makes up for it. This was funny. I think the movie will be OK. Maybe not spectacular, but decent.
Alan rickman as marvin I think is funny as hell, and it was even funnier when I actualy heard him.
Most recently I wanted something to tame the mess of wall warts and table-top clutter of multiple PDA's, cell phones, digital cameras, etc. I thought of having a stylish box with a power strip inside where you'd plug all the warts into, and then on top would be an angled shelf with dividers where you would "dock" your phone, pda, etc and the power cord would be held right there so you always knew where to plug in.
Turns out there is a similar device being sold at drug stores that I saw recently... its plastic and kinda retarded looking and only holds three devices but its exactly the same idea.
Wont work for me though (between me and the wife, that's two cells and two pdas)..
The picture of the 747 is more spectacular than anyone really knows... I dont know about you but I dont know of any 747's that can go 17,000 mph. I would imagine at that speed it could probably make orbit...
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Use captcha to encode math problems (IE, the captcha would have "sin(34) * 10" or whatever, and you have to type in the answer).
This way, not only does it take a little longer to analyze, but you get them to do a little bit of work for you. Force the spammers to be part of your little distributed processing system.
Of course the problems need to be simple enough for the users to figure out...
The reason I say replace the drive is that usualy, its an older drive, and a faster drive will make a noticable difference in speed, which makes them happy.
Certainly, if you can get away with just doing a reinstall, that's great.
Dont misunderstand, I'm saying to pull one over on the customer. Certainly not. Be completely honest. Try to recover data, of course. But let them understand that it may cost a lot more to clean things up (and they may still have odd problems afterwards) then to just start over from scratch.
Its always a judgement call, based on your experience. The main point is, do it quickly. You're not going for the ideal solution, just the one that is quick and gets the job done.
If they want you to do it the ideal way, just make sure they understand how much you charge per hour.
This is no different than, say, a mechanic. They can rebuild your engine, but that's probably going to cost a lot more and take more time than just getting a new one. But some people would opt for the rebuild.
People are right when they say its hardly worth fixing things. Particularly, trying to 'tune up' a system by getting rid of malware, viruses, etc, which is going to be 90% of the time what people need..
You should be able to diagnose whether the computer has a hardware problem or a software problem real quick. Use a bootable CD or something to do this.
Replace the harddrive, add more ram, replace mouse and keyboard, replace fans, replace the PS, if necessary. If its not clearly one of those, tell them they need a new PC.
If they have a software problem, just tell them they need a new harddrive and reinstall windows on it. That's a whole lot faster than trying to remove all the crap they've installed on it.
If they just need more ram, do that.
Keep the drives you swap out, format them at your leisure, and sell them to the next customer who has a malware problem.
Seriously, get real quick at diagnosing things, and be able to do what you need to do in an hour or two.
I've had to do this with family members. If they think you can sit there for a few hours and tune things up, they'll get you to do it, and you will waste your time and not make money. If instead they know that probably you're going to charge them $50 for an hour and replace their harddrive for $100, they will understand AND be a little less likely to hit you up the next time. And maybe they will learn to keep their system clean.
I got excited when I saw the title, and disapointed after reading the article.
This would be much cooler if:
It was the size of a harddrive and mountable like one, using normal power connectors. It would be super cool if it were the size of a 2.5" drive and used SO-DIMM, so I could use it on my laptop (Its a bit old and limited to 320MB ram, so adding even a 1 gb ram drive would help a lot as a swap drive).
It would be the coolest if instead of using DRAM it used some kind of flash memory. Something perhaps not as dense, but a lot faster. I heard some company was going to make something like that, but I havent seen it yet.
I thought of this a long, long time ago myself. So long ago, in fact, that I figured I didnt know that much about these things and there must be some reason why it wouldnt work..
Today, I realize, I think the reason we dont see things like this is less to do with the fact that it can or can't be done technicaly, but that the logistics of supporting this in the industry would be hard.
Think about it. Ram is a commodity, and is pretty simple to make. How often do we get new ram types? A lot less often than new CPU designs. To support this idea, you would have to get all the memory makers and all the cpu makers and all the motherboard makers to all agree on how it would work. Its hard enough just evolving ram from DRAM chips to SIMMs to DIMMs to DDR to DDR2 etc.. imagine adding the complexity and variability of a CPU-ish component to the mix..
If attempted, you would probably wind up with many different ideas about how it should be done... just like we have many different kinds of CPU's. Remember Rambus? And that was no where near as radical a change as this would be!
Maybe if Intel pushed for such a thing, it could happen. But they backed Rambus and that didnt work out so well...
Not to mention that the CPU would probably have to have support for this. And compilers would probably have to target it.
Technicaly its probably a great idea. Logisticaly implementing it, much harder... maybe in a game console or something...
Its the sort of thing that makes you want to design a computer from scratch, including the CPU! Too bad that's so much harder today than it was 20 years ago...
This would have to be ungodly expensive for a keyboard. OLED's are definately the way to go, though, because LCD's (especialy in color) are way to bulky and expensive (each key would need a light source, lcd, and a driver chip). With an OLED, if I am not mistaken, you can have the whole display and drivers on one piece. No glass panels, no backlight.
Still, until OLEDs are in mass (*MASS*) production, I dont see producing a keyboard like this for a reasonable price for some time yet.
For all the people thinking "OH NO! this would be way to confusing! Bad, bad idea for UI design..".. what's the problem? We have windows full of icons now. What's the difference in putting some icons onto a keyboard? With something like photoshop I could see this being a real time saver. And I bet you will start to use and remember keyboard shortcuts much more often with this, since you only need to look, where now you have to hunt around and find out what the shortcut is..
Actually, it is. It's more like you have a window open into your apartment and the guy across the street watches your Pay-per-view off your TV just by looking out his window and into yours.
Its even more different then that, in many cases. Sometimes its more like you have a stereo playing loudly on your front lawn and all your neighbors hear it and enjoy listening as well. Technicaly, that's illegal too (public broadcast).
And just like the stereo, sometimes it interferes with your own private, completely legal usage of your own equiptment and IP.
Sometimes, it's pretty much impossible NOT to break the law...
I think I am qualified to field this one, as a doctor... Do you have any idea how MUCH stuff a doctor has to write? We literally have to write EVERYTHING WE DO down somewhere. There's no excuse for illegible handwriting since this sort of defeats the entire
Maybe the problem is not one of poor communication skills, but of "over communication" -- since doctors and other highly skilled people generaly communicate much more than other people, they tend to develop methods to make that communication more efficient. Like spelling things the way they sound, or writing in a way that is physicaly quicker or (more likely) less of a strain on the hands.
Its not because we're dumb, or dont care about the "right" way to communicate, its because we need to get the point across efficiently.
And that leads to bad spelling, bad writing, etc. Ahve oyu noctied hwo uyo cna rdee bdlay msispleled wrods? The human brain does weird things...
Communication is an interesting subject indeed.
Or as Calvin (& Hobbs) would say: "Verbing weirds language.."
probably the same reason why doctors have such notoriously bad writing. One wonders how in the world you can get the proper prescription with such unreadable writing.
Personaly, I was an english major who worked as a draftman at Boeing and am now a programmer. So at one time, I wrote beautifully -- perfectly formed letters and at least decent sentance structure.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, my brain has gone lazy and unless I really think about it my writing becomes sloppy in every sense.. I am sure there are several mis-spelled words above.
A friend of mine would say, its because you learn so much new stuff and eventualy something old has to be shoved aside to make room.. and this is why really smart people become "crazy". There's no room left for useless stuff like pretty writing, fashion sense, humanity, etc...
We understand the concept when the "new thing" is actualy in some significant way "better" than what came before...
UMD's aren't significantly better than, say, a 3" DVD, and suffer many drawbacks (can't get blanks, dont work in billions of DVD players, etc). Slightly higher density but totaly proprietary? No thanks. Double the price of a DVD for what, 1/4 the quality?
What's going to happen when somebody announces a standardized 3" or 2.5" blue-ray or HD-DVD disk that holds 3 or 4 times as much data? Now that would be cool...
I'm going to protest against these idiot protestors! I will be wearing clothes all day, in protest!
I am sure I will have a much more positive impact on people throughout the day because of it.
People will ask me, "Nice pants" and I will say "yeah I am wearing clothes today to protest the naked protestors who protested against nano-tech pants". And they will say "huh?".
I think that will nicely offset all those protesters who probably spend most of their lives saying "huh?".
xcode looks cool, certainly, but it appears that it is still using conventional compilation (it uses GCC). Sure, you can probably simply recompile your application for each processor. But that's not quite transparent.
A consumer might very well have two Apple machines with different cpu's and expect to be able to move programs freely between them, but they're not going to be able to recompile. Linux people get used to this sort of thing, but the average computer user isnt going to find that exceptable..
3 months pay?
I dont know about the rest of you (or how much you make in a month) but there's no F'ing way I would put a $9000 ring on wife's finger (and she wouldnt have it, either).
Who in the world besides movie stars and former enron employees would spend that much on a ring?
We are happy with our silver cladaghs (the irish ring mentioned earlier)... sheesh!
If Apple was *really* smart, they would have perfected some way for executables to run on any processor (they had 10 years to do it since switching to PPC), which could have been easily deployed by now. Then the switch to Intel could be nearly transparent from both the user and the developer's perspective. And they could continue to use PPC or Intel or whatever, depending on which worked best for the target market.
.net.
It could have been their answer to
But no, they have to be locked into one processor. And thus alienating most of their current market.
I really dont understand why we are still locked into any particular architecture anymore.
It's the kind of thing that makes me want to pack my bags and move to a parallel universe where things actualy make sense...
While I probably wont use this myself (as a web designer it IS neat to be able to switch between IE and Firefox renderers, but its not enough all by itself to compare to all the advantages of normal Firefox), it IS potentialy good for deploying to regular users at the company I work.
I would love to get everybody to use Firefox but unfortunately there are a lot of sites the users here frequent that require IE (mostly because of Activex controls), so there's no other option but to use IE. Until now.
Now I can give them netscape 8, and tell them to use the IE renderer when they have a site that does not work right. They will appreciate the tabs and the other firefox features.
This is good way to transition over from IE. It would be perfect if it were more like Firefox though...
so, wait, you're telling me that MS has rights to the PPC design and then they took that and advanced the design to 3Ghz and tri-core? They've made a better PPC than IBM or Motorola or anybody else?
That's pretty scary.
How long before they start making Microsoft PC's based on these PPC chips and running windows? Then they can control both the hardware AND the OS...
Sorry, brain fart! You are right.
However I still assume that this "3 core" cpu can't be 3 full fledged G5 cpu's running at 3ghz. If it were, I am sure Apple would be, or will be, using it.
Heck they dont even have a single G5 ppc running at 3Ghz yet, do they?
I'm sure a lot of people are probably thinking this, and there's a good reason: Because its not a triple-core cpu. At least not the way you are thinking (hopeing?). It has a PPC like cpu, but the other processors are not PPC's. They are much more simplified and specialized for processing graphics and such. Great for games, but not all that usefull for general PC tasks.
You know what bothers me? Ay my daughters school, when you go into the office, everybody has a shiny eMac (the one that looks like a desklamp). WTF? Why in the world would they pay for a premium, trendy computer like that for general office work? I could see it if they were in the graphic arts department or something.
It really bugs me that they've spent all that money on fancy macs for the office, but in the classroom they have 5 year old PC's and powermacs...
I know this is way off topic but what the heck!
They should replace the towers which a gigantic "laser" to be used against the terrorists...
If its using a blue laser then its not using it well, because you can get mini-dvd's that hold almost 1.5gb.
So what is UMD? Its an unnecessary proprietary format that's only slightly better than current mini-dvd's. Just like Memory sticks are an unnecessary proprietary format that's about the same as SD memory. Gee thanks, Sony!
It would be neat to have a little player like this that could play regular mini-dvd's. But then they couldn't make as much money reselling you videos. It sure would be neat if my CLIE used standard SD memory. I refuse to buy anymore Sony stuff, regardless of how cool they otherwise are...
It will be like that episode of the Simpsons where all the kids come out side, rub their eyes from the sun they haven't seen, and begin to do all the things kids should be doing.. running, playing, etc...
I hadnt seen that trailer yet. I was a little worried, but this makes up for it. This was funny. I think the movie will be OK. Maybe not spectacular, but decent.
Alan rickman as marvin I think is funny as hell, and it was even funnier when I actualy heard him.
Over the years I've considered this many times.
Most recently I wanted something to tame the mess of wall warts and table-top clutter of multiple PDA's, cell phones, digital cameras, etc. I thought of having a stylish box with a power strip inside where you'd plug all the warts into, and then on top would be an angled shelf with dividers where you would "dock" your phone, pda, etc and the power cord would be held right there so you always knew where to plug in.
Turns out there is a similar device being sold at drug stores that I saw recently... its plastic and kinda retarded looking and only holds three devices but its exactly the same idea.
Wont work for me though (between me and the wife, that's two cells and two pdas)..
The picture of the 747 is more spectacular than anyone really knows... I dont know about you but I dont know of any 747's that can go 17,000 mph. I would imagine at that speed it could probably make orbit...