Even God got to rest after creating the world for six days. Not me. I've been going nonstop for nearly two weeks now trying to reconfigure and reinstall tons of hardware and software on these blankety-blank computers trying to fight every verschnizle the hackers and their corporate counterparts throw at me in their ever-more-Byzantine OS's.
It began when my cams server went down and I couldn't get a reinstall to fix it, even after reinstalling Windows. So I went deeper to a clean reformat as is my wont, foolish though it may be. And the further I scrubbed the hard drive clean, the more problems I created. Since that time I have simultaneously tried to piece that functionality together on three different machines, all with the same negative results.
So far I've bought a new cheap-o E-Machines desktop, failed to get past the Vista blockages, failed to get my video capture program to run, and taken it back. I've also tried to resurrect the old Dell by reinstalling XP and still failed to make my program run. Tried a new video capture card and many reinstallations, user forum advice, attempted fixes from far and wide, to no avail.
Ah, the hapless consumers. We're caught in the middle of a war of cataclysmic proportions. The virus-creators and trojan-mutators vs. the frantic attempts to keep them out of our computers by the security police, aka hardware and software engineers.
How much operating system code is commandeered for this battle, I wonder? It's got to be over half the total, and every new version that comes out ups the ante. What's it all for? So one side or the other can play "gotcha!"? Is it really all about security, or is it maybe about ego as well? Who's da Ubergeek? It all reminds me of the endless military weapons escalation, the perfect armor-piercing bullet, cyber-speaking, vs. the perfect tank armor to stop it.
I've never been able to understand what is the "rush" for some sick mind who's compelled to design a computer virus. There's no money motive, usually, but the perp must get something out of it. Is it just a sophisticated version of cow-tipping, window-soaping, or other juvenilia of less technological days? Is it just for the private chortle? Maybe it's just for the sake of the game; I can defeat your best attempts to stop me. Oh no you can't.
Of course in the middle of all the fuss, I lost my access to my school email. It seems they glitzed up the website and moved some things around, and in the process required that we all reset our passwords. And how did they notify us what they were doing? With emails, of course. And who couldn't get the word because he couldn't access his email? I think it's called Catch-22. It's also called the modern world.
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3 comments:
Once again, I think you fail to comprehend the business side of hacking. It's not about erasing hard drives or making funny things happpen to your computer anymore. These days they can TAKE OVER your computer: Use your hard drives for storage, use your internet connection to gain access to other computers on your network, and have access to any sensitive info that's anywhere on your system (Some of us DO bank online).
One of the scarier things about the burglars that hit our home was that they didn't steal the computer, but they DID turn it on. As far as we can tell, however, they didn't find anything useful -- Luddites that we are, we don't keep sensitive stuff on our computer.
My latest beef with software upgrades is about how Microsoft seems to be trying to force everybody to upgrade to the new Office 2007 -- documents created in that system are NOT readable by the 97 or 2003 versions unless the user takes extra steps to save the file in the older format. Now that the college where I work has upgraded to 2007, most of my students are discovering the hard way that they can't work at home on documents they created at school -- and most of them just plain don't have the financial wherewithal to upgrade their home software. It's highway robbery.
you may want to look into a different camera system. or there might be updated drivers for the hardware you're using for these cameras. just a thought.
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