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Creative Goes After Driver Modder
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."
From how I read the post, Creative licensed code from third parties only for XP, not Vista. Since this code is needed to use certain functionality, this functionality is disabled on Vista. In other words, Creative's bad negotiating comes to bite their customers in the ass. How could they be this stupid -- "oh, we only licensed this stuff for Windows XP? Too bad, let the customers suck it up"
We, at Creative, are unable to mass produce chips that differentiates themselves by its design as we used to do. A few years ago we throw all of our money making a single chip design and our bussines since then has been to ship it with a simple eeprom saying what version of our card had you bought, and enable/disable features only at driver level. So please please please stop hacking our drivers to allow the advanced functionalities work in the low level cards, because in that way nobody will buy our multihundred bucks cards.
Sincerely yours.
The PK means the stock is traded off the pink sheets. Companies wind up there, and not on a legitimate exchange like the NASDAQ, because no CPA will sign off on their financial statement.
Must be a real open company.