Archive for July 19th, 2007
Indiana waitress gets $10,000 tip
by Fukdatshhh Viewers on Jul.19, 2007, under Weird News
ANGOLA, Ind. (UPI) — Paying for college got a whole lot easier for Indiana waitress Jessica Osborne when one of her regular customers recently slid her a $10,000 tip.
Osborne, 20, says she lost her breath on a recent Friday when she opened the envelope the customer gave her and saw all the zeros after the $1, ABC News reports. It was amazing, said Osborn, who works at the Pizza Hut in Angola, Ind.
The customer, who asked that only her first name Becky be used, said she recently had received a large settlement following the deaths of her husband and eldest daughter in a traffic accident and she wanted to do something special for the pleasant young woman who waited on her family.
She was sweet and bright and cheerful and never complained, Becky said. She was just a sweet waitress.
The money couldn’t have come at a better time. Osborne has had financial troubles that had forced her to withdraw from college. Now she will be able to use the textbooks she had kept in the trunk of her car.
It’s unbelievable. It doesn’t happen to people every day, she said. I mean, I work at Pizza Hut!
Copyright 2007 by United Press International
Content-recognition Software – Video
by Fukdatshhh Viewers on Jul.19, 2007, under Technology
Recently, Time Warner and Disney partnered with YouTube to test video content-recognition software developed by Google. The software is similar to existing audio content-recognition programs in that it analyzes content to create a fingerprint. Then it compares that information to fingerprints in a database to determine if there is a match. However, video presents unique challenges that are not easily overcome.
For example, most videos on YouTube are limited to 10 minutes or 100 megabytes. Since a clip could include any 10-minute segment from a film or television show under copyright, the content-recognition software must analyze the entire original work in such a way that it can make meaningful matches from a relatively small sample clip. Google isn’t saying much about how the software manages this, but it’s likely that the program analyzes overlapping chunks of the original content to create multiple fingerprints.
Photo courtesy of stock.xchng
Analyzing video is more challenging than analyzing sound.
Video content-recognition software must be able to identify footage even if the person who uploaded the content edited it first. For example, people can fool software that matches color resolution by tweaking the color saturation in a video. Cropping a video or uploading footage of a film captured on a video camera can also fool recognition software. Some pirated films are captured on cameras set up at an angle to the screen, further complicating the identification process.
