Windows XP Reaches 10 Year Anniversary
With
Windows 8 already taking form, it
may surprise many to know neither
Windows 7 nor Windows Vista
rules the market share roost. That honor
goes to Windows XP, which first went on sale
10 years ago. (Windows 7 is almost ready to
take first place in market share.) Microsoft
celebrated Windows XP's past, which
dominated OS usage from 2003 to 2011.
But just as Microsoft would like people
to
ditch Internet Explorer 6, it would
also love consumers to stop using the
older XP. In an effort to encourage
those upgrades, Microsoft's own Internet
Explorer 9 only runs on Windows 7 or
Vista because of graphics acceleration
support. Other software, like some of
the latest video editors, are starting
to have similar requirements.
Looking back at the year XP hit the market,
Microsoft notes that Destiny's Child and
flip phones were all the rage, and that "10
years is a long time to have the same old
technology."
So happy birthday, Windows XP. You've
given us a decade of powerful computing,
with your three Service Packs. Now,
don't let the door hit you on the way
out!
Each instruction (the most basic computer command) can process the number of bits indicated in the registers. So, a 64-bit machine processes a 64-bit width register with each instruction. Likewise, a 32-bit machine processes a 32-bit width register per instruction. While it would seem that a 64-bit processor would naturally be faster, the number of instructions executed per cycle (the fundamental unit of time measurement in a device) indicates actual processing speed, so that may not always be the case. It’s the combination of hardware and software elements which make up the computer architecture that determines processing speed.
Chaptchas
Not Great
for Security
A team of
Stanford
University
researchers
has bad news
to report
about
Captchas,
those often
unreadable,
always
annoying
distorted
letters that
you're
required to
type in at
many a Web
site to
prove that
you're
really a
human. Many
Captchas
don't work
well at all.
More
precisely,
the
researchers
invented a
standard way
to decode
those
irksome
letters and
numbers
found in
Captchas on
many major
Web sites,
including
Visa's
Authorize.net,
Blizzard,
eBay, and
Wikipedia.
Captcha
stands for
Completely
Automated
Public
Turing test
to tell
Computers
and Humans
Apart. Their
decoding
technique
borrows
concepts
from the
field of
machine
vision,
which has
developed
techniques
to control
robots by
removing
noise from
images and
detecting
shapes. The
Stanford
tool, called
Decaptcha,
uses these
algorithms
to clean up
the image so
it can be
split into
more readily
recognized
letters and
numbers.
The security of Captchas is important because they're used to defend against malicious 'bots, including operators of botnets who try to automatically create accounts on Web e-mail services to send spam. Captchas are also used to curb bot-generated comments and automated ballot-stuffing in online polls.
The only tested Captchas that withstood the researchers' attacks were Google's. The researchers ran into a remarkable zero percent success rate when trying to decode Google's slanted-red-letters Captcha, used in Gmail, and the fuzzy-lettered ReCaptcha, which was created at Carnegie Mellon University and acquired by Google in 2009. c/net, Oct 2011





