Although a native Joost client hasn't been released yet for the Linux platform, the open-source community is already experimenting with ways to make the Windows version run in Wine. The process is relatively complex, but it is known to work.

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We've all seen CAPTCHAs, those automated pictures of letters and numbers meant to foil spam bots. Some are more diabolical than others, but most are annoying. Now a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out a way to put them to use beyond aggravating users and confusing robots. Their idea: use them to help digitize books.

People decipher over 60 million CAPTCHA images per day, spending over 150,000 hours in an attempt to stem the tide of spam and keep automated bots from wasting the resources of web sites. That's time the team at Carnegie Mellon thinks can be put to a good use. They've figured out a way to use CAPTCHAs to help digitize old books using a program they call reCAPTCHA.

There are many projects underway to scan old books and other texts into digital format, but Optical Character Recognition software often falls short, especially with oddly stylized text or old, faded works. When the computer can't figure out a word, a human has to step in and enter it manually. This means reading thousands of digital images of words and deciphering them -- or essentially what you do when you solve a CAPTCHA image.

The Internet Archive project scans 12,000 books per month and sends the team at Carnegie Mellon hudreds of thousands of images of words the computer can't figure out, according to the Washington Post. These images are turned into CAPTCHAs for the reCAPTCHA program.

But if the computer doesn't know the word, how will it know if the human entered it properly? The reCAPTCHA program gives users two words to decipher: one which it already knows, and one which is a mystery. Employing a certain level of trust, the computer assumes that if the user correctly identifies the word it knows, then he probably figured out the one it doesn't correctly as well.

The reCAPTCHA tools are available to any website owner who wants to employ them. The program is written in Python, but libraries are available for developers in PHP, Perl, and Ruby as well, and there are premade plugins for WordPress, Movable Type, MediaWiki, phpBB, and Typo3. There is also a way to protect your email address with reCAPTCHA using Mailhide.

Conclusion

Though I am sure that some mistakes probably still slip through, this is a brilliant use of otherwise wasted time, similar to the SETI@Home or Folding@Home projects, which both employ down time for a useful pursuit (though there are some who would argue searching for E.T. isn't useful at all, but I digress).

Back in college I took part in a project to digitize old maritime journals. Even using a very expensive high resolution scanner and top-of-the-line OCR software, half of our time was spent correcting mistakes the computer made. After a couple of hours staring at computer screens filled with garbled text and comparing it to musty old books, you started to get jaded and make mistakes.

If every website that uses a CAPTCHA image switched to the reCAPTCHA system, it could theoretically solve 60 million words per day. Even if you employed double or triple checking of new words (i.e., ran them through the system multiple times to make sure you got the same results back), that would go a long way toward the goal of digitizing all of the world's information. I would suspect that Google might be very interested in the reCAPTCHA program (so far Intel, Novell, and the MacArthur Foundation have given their support).

Filed under: News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Open Source

(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will enter the event-driven architecture space Monday with a product geared for SOA in Java environments.

This unveiling of BEA WebLogic Event Server will be coupled with an upgrade to the company's real-time server. Together, they can be used as part of a solution for high-speed, high-volume transaction environments or XTP (extreme transaction processing).

Event Server is a Java application server for handling large volumes of streaming data. It meets needs for predictable response times and complex event processing, the company said. High volumes of events are handled with the speed expected in C and C++ environments but with the lower total cost of ownership enabled by Java, according to BEA.

With Event Server, information is aggregated from distributed systems in real time. Rules are applied to discern patterns and trends, giving users the ability to respond to opportunities and threats posed by seemingly unrelated events.

"What people are trying to do is drive data to knowledge," said Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic Products at BEA. "As we come out of the gate, we're going to provide 50,000 complex events per second," putting the product on par with C and C++ offerings, he said.

The product serves as an infrastructure for SOA aspects by enabling high-performance computing without modification of current or planned SOA infrastructure, BEA said.

When used with BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition and the new BEA WebLogic Realtime Time 2.0 product, Event Server can work in XTP environments.

Part of the company's microService Architecture for SOA, Event Server supports simple Java programming, or "plain old Java objects," and the Spring Framework as well as event processing language.

A public beta for WebLogic Event Server begins on May 29 with general availability planned for this summer.

BEA's entrance into the event-processing market is another sign that the market is going mainstream, said analyst Roy Schulte, vice president of Application Strategy and Governance at Gartner.

"Oracle and Tibco are also already active in this market, and IBM, Microsoft, and SAP are expected to expand their event-processing offerings during the next 18 months," Schulte said.

"The product is potentially applicable anywhere there are high-volume event streams and a need to detect threats or opportunities quickly [with sub-second latency]," Schulte said. "Until recently, this kind of scenario was only found in niche applications, such as financial trading, telco, and network management. During the past several years, however, many new types of stream processing applications have emerged in such areas as customer experience management, credit card security and fraud detection, transportation operations, and compliance."

BEA also is announcing WebLogic Real Time 2.0, which provides guaranteed microsecond pause times for standard Java applications. Guaranteed worst-case pause times of 10 milliseconds are offered with average pause times in the sub-millisecond range. Previously, the product offered a 30-millisecond worst case.

"The neat thing about WebLogic Real Time is it gives real-time, predictable behavior to an application without having to rewrite the application, so it's automatically inherited," Churchward said.

Real Time 2.0 features a latency analyzer tool providing developers with the ability to analyze sources of latency in applications.

General availability for Real Time 2.0 is slated for this summer.