In Win XP, you could plug in most any USB webcam or microscope and see its image. In Win7, that's gone and you have to load a driver.
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I bought a cool 30-foot-cable waterproof borescope-type webcam for $15, for snooping above the sheetrock for the leak in my ceiling, or clogged pipes, or junk fallen behind my workbench. There's a nice free app from Bustatech that's a general webcam viewer for Windows, which lets me use the cam without loading the Chinese driver.
What's amazing is to aim the webcam at the screen of my PC.
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There's an infinite amount of bizarre and beautiful and squirmy patterns. Rotating the cam gets really wild.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
On a sunny day (Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:45:53 -0800 (PST)) it happened " snipped-for-privacy@bid.nes" wrote in :
Sure they do, I have this:
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use it mainly to look into applicants ears at job interviews to see if there is something in-between. Have several of these monitors:
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All analog NTSC/PAL color.
I have a digitizer card for in the PC hardware MPEG2 encoding, excellent almost broadcast quality from these sort of cameras. To view the picture you need no computah at all though, only for recording, and that can be done with an old VHS for hours too.
Don't you know that Win7 is "superior" to all previous windows versions? It is supposed to do everything you need without the fuss of finding programs to run. That is why the "find" function is so crappy. That is why almost all programs,etc are hidden and/or locked behind system folders (some of which are hidden). Don't you know that (visual) simplicity is superior?
Yep, did that back in the early 70's when I worked at a video sales and service company. Only difference, some of the camera's we had took up almost 2 cuft. 3 vidicon color cameras. How times change, vidicon comes up Vicodan in spell check.
And windows 7 is showing no signs of being more secure than XP - it is just newer and has some lessons from XP incorporated into it. Microsoft is still pumping out critical patches every month for 7
I use XP on two of my development machines. Works like a champ! The idea of having to reinstall *all* that code and get back on the weekly MS "update" bandwagon is not how I care to spend my time. And, discard tools that I've already been successfully using just for... hmm, what exactly DOES Vista, W7, W8, W10, etc. *give* me for that effort??
OTOH, neither of those machines are exposed to the outside world. (I don't trust any "OTS" OS that much; history proves that case!)
Anything from MS is doomed to just KEEP repeating the same old mistakes over and over again. How many times do you encounter a "buffer overrun" error before you sit down and say, "Gee, guys, what are we doing WRONG that we keep encountering the same flaws in the code??" Obviously, there's something wonky in their "process" (about which books have been written praising how EFFECTIVE it is!) if they keep making the same sorts of mistakes over and over again.
As to Linux? Dunno as I don't run it. OTOH, you have to wonder about all the releases (even if you are pedantic and refer to ONLY the kernel as "Linux"). I have friends who work at large (financial, etc.) institutions who don't rave about *any* of the software they maintain (much being FOSS).
The problem with most modern "systems" is that there are too many subtleties in their overall configuration. Even if the core components are "rock solid", setting a file permission incorrectly, putting an executable in the wrong part of the hierarchy, having a search path set wrong, etc. are all opportunities for exploit.
And, the push to keep adding features (of dubious value to THE ENTIRE USER POPULATION) doesn't leave me with a comfortable feeling that the code is getting *more* robust! :-/ ("Well, the system isn't really very reliable, but, if we ad all these other features..." WTF?)
None of these "popular" OS's were really designed with security in mind. They can *claim* to have it as a "high priority"... but, they didn't sit and consider security from the ground up (wanting to leverage existing code, etc.). You can't retrofit that attribute with *any* degree of success (unless the line of code at the processor's restart vector is "HALT")
Yes, appears the gripe is just one of "I don't know how to do this so I'll piss and moan about it" *or* "why can't things just stay the same so I don't have to figure it out?".
Each time a colleague pressures me to "upgrade" one of my systems (hardware, software, etc.), I politely ask, "And what will that allow me to do that I can't already do? And, what guarantees can you provide that this isn't going to turn into a 'project' in itself? What will 'stop working' -- only to be discovered some time down the road when I try to use a tool that *appeared* to work but, when actually calling on it to *perform*, i discover that it isn't working properly (and the old tool/system is long gone?)
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