These Are The Mo Fo's Of The 'CAPTCHA' World

You've seen them all around the web, CAPTCHAs are those distorted images of letters and numbers used to prevent the automated use of websites. They are supposedely random, but sometimes they seem to be "telling you" something; others are just plain ridiculous or humanly impossible to read. Here's a collection of the strangest, most bizarre tests agains spam bots.

How The Tech Companies Got Their Names

Apple - for the favourite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple orchard. Apple wanted to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time.

eBay - Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. “Echo Bay” didn’t refer to the town in Nevada, “It just sounded cool,” Omidyar reportedly said. Echo Bay Mines Limited, a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.

Google - a deliberate misspelling of the word googol, reflecting the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available online.

Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters “HTML” — the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

Yahoo - a backronym for ‘Y’et Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. The word Yahoo was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver’s Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and barely human. Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang jokingly considered themselves yahoos

And my personal favorite and most fitting: Lycos - from Lycosidae, the family of wolf spiders.

Microsoft 'v' Google

Google's age: 10
Microsoft's age: 33

Google's revenue in the last 4 quarters: $19.6 billion
Microsoft's revenue in the last 4 quarters: $60.4 billion

Microsoft's revenue at age 10: $140 million
($279 million in today’s dollars)

Google's revenue per hour in the last 4 quarters: $2.2 million
Microsoft's revenue per hour in the last 4 quarters: $6.9 million

Google's net income in the last 4 quarters: $4.85 billion
Microsoft's net income in the last 4 quarters: $17.6 billion

Google employees, as of June 30th 2008: 19,604
Microsoft employees, as of May 31st 2008: 89,809

Google's revenue per employee: $1 million
Microsoft's revenue per employee: $672,000

Market value of Google: $142 billion
Market value of Microsoft: $241 billion

Number of tech companies with a market value
larger than Google's: 3 (Microsoft, I.B.M. and Apple,
in that order)

Worldwide searches on Google in April: 48.7 billion
Worldwide searches on Microsoft in April: 2.3 billion

Worldwide searches per hour on Google in April: 65 million
Worldwide searches per hour on Microsoft in April: 3.1 million

For the record, the second most spoken
language within the Microsoft Corporation
is Romanian, Multumesc !!