Slashdot Mirror

FreedomFighter writes "Since the release of Windows Vista, Creative has promised their Sound Cards as being 'Vista Ready'. Unfortunately, as many unlucky customers did discover, this is not true. What the users actually found were buggy, feature crippled drivers. Creative insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on windows Vista. With Creative releasing less than one new driver a year, things seemed bleak. Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to 'fix' many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers."

SpaFF writes "Today Amazon started shipping the shipping the Zen Micro, Creative's answer to the Ipod-mini and one of several touted 'ipod-killers' due out for the holiday season. Sporting 5GB of space, a form-factor similar to the Ipod-mini, built-in FM radio, and a REMOVABLE battery, the Zen Micro looks quite promising. Does anyone know if this thing will work with Linux?"

An anonymous reader writes "After months of speculation and hype, the first Portable Media Center based on Microsoft's 'Windows Mobile software for Portable Media Centers' has finally hit store shelves. The Zen Portable Media Center, from Creative Labs, is now available at Best Buy and Fry's Electronics, priced under $500. That money basically buys a 3.8-inch color LCD screen, ultra-fast USB 2.0 port to transfer video, music, and digital photos from your PC, and an internal 20 GB hard drive."

flyingember asks: "I am considering purchasing an iPod, since they are so cool looking. I then came across the new Nomad Zen NX. Size isn't an issue, my current MP3 player being a MP3-CD player. The big thing is price. In the US the 30GB Zen costs $300, the 30GB iPod costs $500. Or you can get a 10GB iPod for $300 or a 20GB Zen for $250 on the low end. Has the iPod got better design and layout of controls to make the price difference worth it?"

nhahmada writes "The Muvo MP3 player/storage device from Creative has been out for awhile, but some have complained of its lack of a display or equalizer. Well, now Innogear has released the 128MB Duex mp302 with a backlit LCD supporting ID3 tags, a "multi-category" equalizer and a timer (Why?). The mp302 also has the ability to record/playback voice via its built-in microphone. It can be used for storing any type of file and plays MP3/WMA/WAV. Both the Muvo and mp302 run on one AAA, giving 12 hours of continuous playback. Running at $179, it's a little more expensive than the $169.99 128MB Muvo, but I am willing to shell out ten bucks for an LCD. Go here for a better look at the display."

Slashback tonight brings you a response to Declan McCullagh's approach to political activism (and tangentially related, evidence of Bruce Perens' very different way of doing things), a link to a few more VOIP Blasters, tantalizing news from the Blender front, and more -- all below.

Until we know how to get to Stallman's Gulch ... sbrown writes: "Public Knowledge responds to Declan McCullagh's call for less activism, more code. Don't fool yourself geeks, political participation is absolutely necessary to maintain the freedom to write code. Public Knowledge has a plan to make geek political participation easy and effective."

Speaking of activism, Roblimo reported yesterday that Bruce Perens might be leaving HP. Today, IDG reporter Matt Berger confirms the break, writing that "Perens says he is leaving HP to pursue political activism. His protests against the DMCA and other legislation that Perens says threatens the open source community, apparently, were too much for HP to handle. So he is becoming an independent consultant and will work with HP as a consultant. He also plans to follow through with a presentation of a DVD player cracking software that he says is in violation of the DMCA. HP stopped him from doing the demonstration at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention last month."

Might these be the basis of a long-distance relationship? AndersBrownworth writes "After Creative nixed their VoIP Blaster, ($20 USB to "plain old telephone line" converter with free software available) ebay prices eclipsed the $200 mark. Now, it seems Creative has found some VoIP Blasters still hanging around and is selling them as refurbished units for $29.99. Ebay prices have reflected the move in Internet time."

Much more fun than a PBS pledge drive. Kodi writes "In case you haven't been watching, Blender's campaign to become open source by raising 100,000 is almost complete, with about 85,000 raised. If you were holding back, perhaps a little doubtful that they would make it, now's the time to chip in and push it over the top."

If your donation happens to be The Last Straw (and the Blender folks can verify it), I will provide you with your choice of ThinkGeek T-shirt ;)

And such pretty campuses, too. guttentag writes "Several weeks ago, Slashdot ran a story about the Princeton admissions dean who used applicant information to hack into a Yale Web site. Today Princeton announced it will remove the official from his position; however, it will offer him another, undisclosed job. It also revealed that Princeton and other Ivy League schools were aware of the break-ins as early as May 15.

MIT's The Tech adds Princeton officials previously said they were unaware of the incident prior to July 24 when Yale's president informed Princeton's, and that Yale notified the FBI the next day (President Bush's niece was among those students whose privacy was violated). It was not until that point that Princeton placed the official on administrative leave.

Apparently, misusing applicant information to commit identity fraud is not a serious offense at Princeton unless the public learns of it (or a member of the president's family is among the victims), and even then it's not serious enough to warrant dismissal. Princeton's president also said other school officials will be disciplined, but declined to provide details, presumably to protect the privacy of those officials or the university."

Slashback -- another round of updates and errata for your reading pleasure follows. So read on for more information on spambots, Flash memory for your slightly-outdated Apple systems, Linux (not quite) running on the GP32, publicity (including a security problem) from Mozilla, and more.

Let's find the spamsters and turn them over to Hormel. Neil Gunton writes: "Further to my previous article about stopping Spambots with Apache, Perl, MySQL and ipchains, it appears that the spambots have evolved somewhat. They seem to come in using a search engine to find promising pages, and then spoof the User-Agent field and generally try to behave as much like a real person as possible. Here is an update to my original article. This is something that anyone who runs a website and dislikes spambots should be aware of..."

If I ever have children I might let it go at that. jamie writes: "'If I ever have children,' says Rich Dreher, 'I would want them to see and touch one of the very first 'real' personal computers, not some simulation of an Apple in a window on a Pentium VIII running Windows 2012.' Over the last few months he's put together a CompactFlash/IDE adapter card for the Apple //e and IIgs, and now he's taking orders. The largest hard drive that ProDOS supports, as flash RAM, costs $14! Seeing the card really brought back memories..."

We mentioned this a while ago, before the pressing need of Apple ][ owners was quite so evident.

What's a little $80 million mistake among friends? Sinjun writes: "In what is believed to be one of the first prison sentences given to the creator of a virus, David L. Smith of the infamous Melissa plague recieves 20 months in federal lockup. I would have thought he would recieve more, seeing the massive amount of money lost by corporate America resulting from Melissa. Oh well, this is the precedent that has been set."

Smith should be grateful that his victims weren't allowed to each pluck one hair from his body per Melissa message received.

But what about the GBA? bobbydigitales writes: "A while back someone suggested porting linux to Samsungs GP32 handheld games console. As I own one, I did a bit of 'googling' and found a post from a guy at Samsung about a problem he was having with his linux port to the s3c2400x chip (this constitutes most of the GP32's hardware). It seems he finished his port as he sent me all the patches and instructions needed to compile the kernal for the s3c2400x.

As I dont have any experience porting linux i thought I'd share this information with the world and see if anyone could offer help and/or suggestions on how to proceed. Here are the files and info.

Samsung have completed the following drivers:

• LCD
• Serial
• USB Host (with mouse driver),
• Sound
• Keyboard
• Network (not actually on the GP32 chip)

Things that are missing:

• bootloader,
• SmartMedia Card driver"

I knew I should have ordered a few. Alex Law writes "Only days after Slashdot's article about Creative Labs great deal on VoIP Blasters, it appears that they are no longer in production or available from Creative's web site. Shame; mine arrived yesterday, and we were all quite impressed."

From the Mozilla front: Lots of good reports and an oops. The good stuff -- reaper20 writes "With 1.0 around the corner, it seems like the folks over at Mozilla.org have their hands full. Between interviews and last minute security bug fixes, it seems like the Mozilla is poised for the big push to 1.0. David Hyatt brings up the IE Advantage, and the death of user-experince based browsers. Mozilla.org itself has stood firm on some of these marketing driven issues - yet some changes have caused some interesting developments in the Mozilla community. The recent context menu revisions and personal toolbar recommendations by Netscape have caused a bit of controversy. (Bugzilla entries ommitted for obvious reasons)

Recently, the mozilla/browser and Chimera projects have been started to address certain usability problems and the desire for OS X native widgets. With Galeon and other Mozilla derivatives getting better and better, it seems that Mozilla 'proper' will serve as a platform for derivative browsers customized for the target platform. Lots of standards-compliant clients each tailored to user needs, sounds like what web was originally designed for."

And the oops -- An Anonymous Coward writes: "An Israeli software firm has discovered a flaw in Netscape and Mozilla software that allows code hidden in a Web page to read files from the user's PC. The bug is a more serious variant of one patched in Microsoft's Internet Explorer in February."

AndersBrownworth writes: "Creative has released what they are calling the VoIP Blaster, a $15 USB device (2 for $20) that lets you plug in a normal POTS type telephone and make Voice-over-IP calls to anyone on the Internet. Creative has some closed source software with it that they manage to sneak per call charges in with, but ignoring that one can install the open source fobbit software and do point-to-point unmetered VoIP calls to anyone else with a G.723.1 codec VoIP phone. I just got off a NC to CA call placed from behind a firewall and the quality rocked. It sounded far better than a cell phone. The Fobbit software is fairly solid on FreeBSD and Windows with a couple bugs in the Linux port." This device has been out for a while now, with mixed reviews, at least with the included software, but it's nice to see this effort to turn off the meter.

An anonymous reader sent in a review of Creative's Digital VCR, a TV tuner card supposedly offering functionality similar to a Tivo or ReplayTV dedicated box. From the review, it seems like there are still a few bugs to be worked out.

"Two weeks ago, I dropped by my Local Frys Electronics to pick up the Creative Labs Video Blaster Digital VCR. I picked up the card for the lovely price of $99. I felt at the time that the days of a PVR was upon me. I hooked it up into my modest system and got started right away. My modest system includes:

• Pentium III 1Ghz System
• 512 MB of PC-133 SDRAM
• 1 40 GB 7200 WD Drive, on ATA-66
• 1 60 GB 7200 Maxtor Drive, on ATA-100
• ATI Radeon VE
• LG 24x CD Burner, on ATA-66
• Running Windows XP Pro

My Maxtor Drive was a new purchase that was going to be dedicated to my Digital VCR Experience, hence my marooning the drive on my onboard HighPoint HPT370 controller card. The installation of the card was a snap, and the drivers were quick and painless.

Now, at home, I don't subscribe to any digital video services: I get pretty good reception over an old-fashioned antenna. I primarily wanted the card so I could capture my tape collection of Enterprise episodes to MPEG-2, so I could burn VCDs for my DVD player. I also wanted to begin my trek down the PVR road, and eventually do away with VHS forever.

I spent an evening a couple of days ago, playing with settings on screen-size, capture quality and file sizes. One thing I noticed quite quickly is that the Digital VCR system does not encode directly to MPEG-2. Creative sets up many segment files on your system, each in 32mb blocks, to store your recorded shows and timeshifting buffer. It is essentially a filesystem on top of a filesystem. In order to get the MPEG-2 files out of the Digital VCR, you use a 'File Converter' that they provide in the Creative Menu. The results of this setup is that when you setup the system, you specify how long you want to record (19 hours in my case) and it takes up the appropriate harddrive space (45 GB in my case) for use for future recording. The tool works pretty well overall, even going so far as to create new MPG files every 650 MB. The problem with this is that its possible that your recording could be sliced mid-sentence in your show. The other problem though, didn't occur until last night.

I recorded the episode of Enterprise last night, as well as I had some previous shows of 'Friends' in my 'Saved Shows' menu. After watching the episode again, I pulled up the file convert tool to convert Enterprise to MPG, and flipped onto Live TV, so I could watch the news. Then, the unspeakable happened. Digital VCR froze. I tried to kill it from the Task Manager (which worked perfectly well), but to no avail. There was no killing this app at all. This crash spread like a bad flu across the rest of my system and I was forced to hard reboot. Returning to Windows, I brought up the convert tool to start again, this time not to make the mistake of watching television at the same time. There was only one problem: All of the shows recorded in the last 2 days were wiped out. No data on disk, nothing.

In the end, there were very few positive points that I would give to the Digital VCR product: it just doesn't seem ready for primetime. All in all, the issues I found were as follows:

• Jerky on startup
• Processor Intensive during playing (I'd recommend at least a 1.5 Ghz)
• Menu System is slow
• No Linux Drivers
• Instability in proprietary filesystem
• Mpeg Splitting (what about 700mb CDRs or DVDS)

In the end, I'd give this product a 2.5 out of a possible 5 score. The unit has a lot of potential, but it seems far from it. Dedicated PVR equipment seems a much better choice, even if pricey."

(startx) writes: "Well, it looks like creative has done it again. This time they've created an external sound"card" that connects through usb to your computer or laptop. It's called the Extigy, and looking at the specs, it appears as though it's got every possible audio connector you can possibly think of, along with the standard ir port with remote control. With this, a usb HDD, and a usb cd-rw, it looks like I can have most of my box, outside the box, just for the geek factor :-)" I don't think it's quite as cool-looking as the Stereolink 1200 (which I've never actually heard), but for a few bucks more the Creative crams in a lot of features.

zonker asks: "Now that nVidia has picked up 3dfx is there still want or need for glide on other cards? I have a TNT2 card and have some old games that require glide. I can't run them natively, so I either have to use software rendering mode or a wrapper (they all kinda suck, though). With the new 3dfx purchase, and the current state of affairs with DirectX, etc., is there any warrant for asking nVidia to release Glide drivers for their nVidia chips? Or is this something that will forever be relegated to Glide wrappers? I know Creative was working on one. I personally would like native drivers, but..."

A number of people pointed us to a help wanted form on Creative Labs website. I wouldn't normally post helped wanted, but any situation that includes duties such as "...for the implementation of Linux applications that build on the opensource drivers currently for our DVD's, Sound Cards, Nomad, as well as other products in development. This includes bug fixes, optimizations, kernel tweaks, working with our Open Source team, and individual contributors from the Linux community," looks good by me. The word-use is a bit strange - it looks like they will be Open Source drivers, correct?

A number of people pointed us to a help wanted form on Creative Labs website. I wouldn't normally post helped wanted, but any situation that includes duties such as "...for the implementation of Linux applications that build on the opensource drivers currently for our DVD's, Sound Cards, Nomad, as well as other products in development. This includes bug fixes, optimizations, kernel tweaks, working with our Open Source team, and individual contributors from the Linux community," looks good by me. The word-use is a bit strange - it looks like they will be Open Source drivers, correct?

The Dakota Kidd writes "Just saw this on Linuxgames today - Creative has released the drivers for their dxr2 DVD decoder card. It isn't listed yet on Creative's Open Source page but it is in the CVS repository. " Kinda lost in the excitment of their open sourcing the drivers for SB Live!, but yet more good news on the hardware support front.Credit where it's due: Andrew deQuincey and Lucien Murray-Pitts actually wrote the code - it's nice to be able to get it now.

The Dakota Kidd writes "Just saw this on Linuxgames today - Creative has released the drivers for their dxr2 DVD decoder card. It isn't listed yet on Creative's Open Source page but it is in the CVS repository. " Kinda lost in the excitment of their open sourcing the drivers for SB Live!, but yet more good news on the hardware support front.Credit where it's due: Andrew deQuincey and Lucien Murray-Pitts actually wrote the code - it's nice to be able to get it now.