Those little puzzle boxes that you have to solve or type in the letters when you complete a secure form on the Internet — know them? A computer spam spider can’t read them; only a human can recognize them because of their presentation and arrangement. Have you seen the ones that seem to have two words that are not always related or seem to make sense? Recently, I have noticed them and thought that this puzzle thing was just getting more complicated to improve security. The puzzle thing actually has a name ‘captcha’. Someone figured out that it takes an average of 10 seconds to do the average Captcha puzzle. Then, they made the rest of the math for how many hours people spent every year solving captcha puzzles and wished for that time to be spent productively for the good of the world. There is a scanning system used that is supposed to translate letters and words called OCR — Optical Character Recognition. The OCR software is vastly wanting. Just doesn’t work. Sometimes the print is messed up, sometimes the OCR language is just hurting. So, when books or printed items are scanned, OCR appears to make up stuff. ( I can do that, but I’m not this time) The funky captcha puzzles are letter combinations that are not translating and need the good old human eye to take a look. Then, the most frequently repeated ‘translations’ through the captcha puzzles are compared and schzam, there is the right word! And before you know it, another book has been digitized properly by utilizing casually spent, if not waste, time. What does this have to do with the price of onions? Probably very little, but it did please me to know it and I’m the one with the email list, so you are the one that has to put up with me.
Archive for December, 2007
Franken-Cell
Remember when a cell phone was intended for emergencies? Remember how the phone usually lived in a box or case under the backseat of your car waiting for you to have car trouble or pass someone on the road who had car trouble?
Now we have a computer the size of a candy bar where we can check email, news, and generally play office. And horror stories of how the services and tools have led to outrageous bills because someone didn’t clearly understand details.
Many of us are still mentally working with the emergency phone where we had a base rate we paid and were very aware of the high cost per minute of a call on the cell phone. We are inclined to ignore what could be happening to our bill with text messages and computing.
The service providers have managed to stay legal without making it REALLY clear what their little monster is clocking up to your account. The onus is on YOU to be informed and careful.
Your TEXT plan may not qualify for all numbers, particularly 900#s. You can be charged for random advertising TEXT MESSAGES and EMAIL that are basically spam. You can go to your service provider and block spam, but you should expect to have to pay for the messages that you let get past you before you caught on.
Your browser plan that lets you check email and weather on your cell phone may not extend to the idea of using the phone as a MODEM to connect your computer to the Internet. Because the connections are different, may is too tentative. You can be pretty certain that the service doesn’t cover your computer connection and that there will be some very high fees for the time you are online. A few minutes may be very well worth the cost, but using the service all day for weeks will ‘break the bank’.
Your plans may be for VOICE or text transmission only. Or the plans may truly be for the whole basket of fruit. It would be sad to have elements of your service that you neglected to use because you didn’t know about that part. If the fine print is difficult to digest, call the customer support department for your service provider before you begin using a designer service. Get solid information and write it down.
On a positive note: There is a new online service called TryPhone that will let you test drive a potential new cell phone before you commit. The program is still in Beta form, so there are not a lot of choices to test: the IPhone, the LG Muziq, the Samsung Juke and the Blackberry Pearl, but we can hope that the list of options will expand as the service gains momentum.
