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Creative Vista Driver Modder Speaks Out
hol writes sends a followup on Creative Labs shutting down the modder who made their drivers work with Vista. Wired is running daniel_k's response to the contretemps."
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what is everybody busy reading the article or something?
I never know whether to bother with /. on April 1. The fact that TFA is on Wired is no help. April fools is no longer funny.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Shoot down the guy that's making your product work. That's a brilliant strategy.
Kawakami probably should have not solicited donations, but that's the only questionable thing he's done here. He should make out a cashier's check for the total amount of donations he's received, mail it to Creative Labs, and refuse any further donations. That should shut them up.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Thats the solution. You have it from Creative's mouth. They purposefully are positioning themselves to cripple your hardware to make the actual cost of your card higher if you have Vista.
This is not a problem with Vista, it is a problem with Creative if they do that.
So, do not buy Creative sound cards and let them go out of business.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
The guy tried to fix the drivers for Creative products, that worked in XP, but didn't work in Fista.
:-)
Creative censored & censured him.
Shame on Creative.
Shame on Daniel for making Fista work
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
My understanding of the situation is that Creative had to license some IP for the ability to decode/output some types of data streams. They licensed this for their XP drivers, but have not yet licensed it for their Vista drivers. Until they do so, they can't enable their Vista drivers to offer the full range of support that their XP drivers had.
Hardware makers, especially those that make drivers for their gear, don't understand a hacker's mentality, or even the rebuke they get from not listening to customers. I applaud the guy; did what he needed to get the Vista Not Ready gear working. They should hire him after they throw out their software contractor and their VP of whoever thought that killing the driver was a good idea.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Creative are attempting to be the new Mcirosoft ; crippling stuff to extract more money from their users.
The only thing that amazes me more than Creative's behavior in this sorry affair is daniel_k's naïveté. Why do work for free for a commercial entity with a known track record of psychopathic behavior, especially when it's a job they should have done themselves so he was stepping on their turf? Did he honestly expect not to get screwed over? What's more, did he not realize that he was simply enabling their bad behavior by fixing the consequences of it for them?
So while I understand Creative's beef about messing with their software, the reason this is a firestorm issue is that since the software in question is a driver the hardware becomes an inseparable part of the equation.
And this leaves aside the whole other issue of crippling.
A-Bomb
Except for that the drivers appear to be broken on purpose. The installer checks to see if it is on Vista, and if so it turns off certain features or replaced working drivers with buggy ones. All he did was disable the checks and replace the Vista drivers with the XP ones. According to TFA, the company has said "that whether or not it cripples its Vista drivers is a 'business decision that only we have the right to make.'"
Looks to me like they are trying to cash in on the Wintel upgrade cycle for no good technical reason: "Oh, if you want to enable all of Vista's advanced features, you need to buy this card over here."
Bastards, but probably bastards who will make lots of money.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
So the real moral of the story is stay away from Creative.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Windows are very difficult to write. If this guy modded someone else's, they should hire him.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Well, as much as I despise Vista and Microsoft in general, they can't be faulted for some greedy hardware manufacturer trying to scam more money out of people that have already bought their stuff. It's part of the good faith agreement between consumer and manufacturer that the hardware, for a reasonable amount of time, will work on modern common operating systems.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's way at the bottom of TFA but
"Alchemy: My last ALchemy release (1.00.08) was completely unlocked and could be used with any sound device from any vendor."
So the reason why they shut him down was he released a version of their software that would enable advanced creative only (software) features to say, work on an integrated sound driver. His bad, and he did that as a result of creative 'removing' all links on their support forms to his (working) vista drivers.
According to his words in TFA he's still modding but 'not the forbidden mods' that creative really was upset at him for doing.
He's lucky he's in Brazil, I guess.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
No, the real moral is to stay away from both Creative AND Vista.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The person "modding" the driver has a license to use that driver. The person receiving the driver must have a license because they have a creative labs card.
So, there is no "infringement" here.
Daniel should phrase what he does better, he isn't getting donations for the "driver," as this is a free download and already licensed by creative. He is getting donations for the "work" of modding. In other words, he is being paid for support not the driver.
Thus he is not running afoul of any IP laws. He is lawfully applying his expertise to private customers running third party hardware and and software, which they have the right to use.
No, the real moral of the story is that knowledge is power and thinking for yourself is freedom.
Fista? You gotta be kidding me. That, and you, is really lame. Shame on you.
Well, why didn't they just say that? With the benefit of hindsight I say that it couldn't possibly be a worse PR fiasco, but they have people paid several times what I make in a year every month to think of these things for them.
I didn't recognize the name but "Braziliantech" did ring a bell. He did some pretty good mods for Asus's A7V BIOSes.
Could these recent discoveries about crippled or buggy drivers be due to a conspiracy against Microsoft?
Seeing as how there won't be any Creative products in my future systems, which alternatives have people had success with? I'm not even aware of competitors in sound cards because I've always bought a Creative card since I started with my SB16, it was always a foregone conclusion that my next system would use the most advanced Creative card I wanted to pay for. Now that Creative is in the same do-not-consider bin as things like Sony and Belkin, what am I left with as alternatives?
Software crippling is standard practice. I am a professional embedded software engineer and I guarantee that the majority of model sperated features are all only a few bits of cleverly coded SW to tell them apart. Hell most of the jobs I have ever had in consumer electronics or industrial applications are implemented this way - ie. one standard set of HW and a configuration file and different stickers to tell the top of the range from the basic model.
...BUT...
This is really all Creative were doing, attempting to force enough of a difference between bottem end products and older products and the new top of the range technologies to ensure sales stay up. You cannot really blame them this this commercial decision.
what I take exception to is the fact that they have made none of this clear to the consumers. and worse, they have actively degraded the functionality of hardware people have already paid for by means of drivers for a new operation system.
In other words it is as though you purchased a car hifi and used it for a year in your Ford. Then you purchased an Mercedes and fitted the same car hifi and found the audio output was at half the resolution in your new car. If you have wanted to spend the money and pay for double the resolution then nobody would of batted an eyelid - but you would reasonably expect that the original performace would of been preserved. At the very least you would of expected some notification or warning.
And thats why Creative are in hot water - apart from their shockingly rude and arrogant behaviour that is.
How are they trying to scam more money out of people? None of Creative's drivers can decode DTS in Vista, not even their newest cards.
Oh yeah, let's stay away from Vista because Creative is an insanely greedy company and purposely crippled their drivers. That's definitely the fault of the OS.
Creative has replaced the original threatening post on the forum with a very defensive one http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332 Chunks of the original post are still available on the Wired.com article. Here's a smart guy who archive the original post http://www.woyano.com/view/7839/Archive-of-Creative-Labs-Letter-To-Community-Modder .
Were any of these drivers for the older SB Live pci card?
And if so where would one find them?
I thought they must be under some sort of contract restrictions with Microsoft (who is under restrictions from the media companies) that has harsh legal fines for enabling things like that. That's the only sane reason I can think of that Creative would do something like sue a guy who was pretty much fixing their drivers for free. Likely part of the contract is that they're not allowed to speak publicly about the restrictions in it, nor are they allowed to let third parties bypass them.
Or they are just lawsuit happy jerks. That is a nonzero possibility as well. I thought it was funny that the Creative exec was basically saying "It's our right to release broken drivers if we want to". Clearly Creative knows a lot about broken drivers.
I read the internet for the articles.
Terratec and M-Audio both make quality sound cards, and I much, much prefer those companies to Creative.
Could someone please clarify me on what the terms mean in this context? I thought modders made cases out of plexiglass, typewriters, and and such things.
I went through SB live and incompatibilities with very popular VIA chip sets.
I bought a Audigy (1) and never got the firewire port working or any drivers to work since XP SP2.
For years I had been annoyed at the rubbish that installs with the drive CD's and how the GUI is totally at odds with Windows.
I switched to Diamond (with DDL optical output) and Via sound cards (24bit / 96kHz) for a fraction of the price. I haven't looked back, updates are available for vista and they work just fine.
Due to my bad experiences with Creative and driver support I actively steer clear of *any* product they make for over 5 years and advise family and friends to do the same.
Driver issues are one of the primary reasons why people stay away from Linux. Why, precisely, should Vista be any different?
When I purchased my first Vista computer I was amazed at the hardware that I had that didn't work with it. My printer had sub par drivers, and my scanner had no drivers at all. If you follow the email trail from Microsoft's current class action Vista lawsuit several executives at Microsoft had similar problems.
The fact of the matter is that Vista doesn't have nearly the level of hardware support that Windows XP does. This may change in the future, but it is certainly the case right now. Creative's drivers are merely one example of many of companies that have far better Windows XP drivers for its hardware than Windows Vista drivers.
I haven't used a Creative product since they long ago proved they couldn't write drivers. Anyone remember the bug that killed hard drives and had been documented and reported to them for years and it was still unfixed? Yeah, I had a HDD die to that.
Have you forgotten that it is Micro$oft's doing that Vista drivers are incompatible with XP drivers thanks to the whole signing of the drivers thing? At least in that way, they do carry some of the burden.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
I believe the situation is that Creative licensed certain technologies from Dolby for use in Windows XP, but they haven't ponied up for the licenses for use in Windows Vista. Since the guy is posting the drivers in Creative's forums, Dolby could go after Creative. Creative took the steps necessary to stop a possible lawsuit.
None of this would be an issue though if Creative would just pay for the licensing though. Jerks.
Dear Phil O'Shaunessy, We, the public, have heard your comments and belief that 'whether or not it cripples its Vista drivers is a "business decision that only we have the right to make." ' and we would just like to say we fully agree with and support your belief: any company has the complete and total right to be an absolute asshat and fuck over it's customers. The public, on the other hand, has the complete right to do anything and everything to put your sorry ass out of business, and to tar and feather your sorry ass and run it out of town on a rail. Now that you and your company has shown its colors, it is up to us, the public, to cut off your balls and run with them. Therefore, we have decided to not buy your lousy products, ever. We will do everything in our power to spread the word to our customers, friends, family, strangers on the street, on what a sad, pathetic bunch of fucktards you really are, and anything else imaginable to steal your sales and lessen your profit margin. Oh, and Phil, be careful when you are crossing the street, because none of us will bother braking for your evil, moneygrubbing, worthless ass, and will claim a temporary overwhelming need to do the world a solid after running it over. We don't need you, Phil, or your bullshit products. What you need, dickless, is our money, and we're putting an end to your shit now. Fuck you, and have a great day. There you have it, folks. This should be copied by each and every computer owner in the country, put into practice, and copies mailed to our friend Phil at Creative Labs. All it takes is ONE SHOW OF STRENGTH BY THE BUYING PUBLIC. LET'S SEND A CLEAR MESSAGE OF 'FUCK YOU FOR TRYING, YOU PIECE OF SHIT' TO THESE BASTARDS! Or you can sit on your asses and get what you deserve. Your choice.
You should already be doing that after they fucked over Carmack and stole / patented his 3D audio idea.
I'm hoping that China, filesharers and hackers like Daniel violate our IP laws so thoroughly and ceaselessly as to make them useless. At that point, we can start thinking sensibly how to approach the issue.
And don't tell me that innovation will disappear if there were no IP laws. That is simply not true.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Shame on Daniel for making Fista work
"Fista"? Don't you mean "Fester", as in "Windows Fester". Sounds right to me.
Bitter and proud of it.
Personally when I am building a new machine I almost always take the sound card from the old machine because it is one of the few things that isn't going to offer much improvement by upgrading... I would guess that this is pretty typical and that Creative is trying to give people an artificial reason to buy another sound card rather than recycle an old one.
It's a shame Creative bought E-mu. I sold my upgraded Proteus 2500 the day they sold out.
My experience with Creative (post-SoundBlaster 16) has been nothing but horrible. The Extigy was one of the worst abortions in computer hardware history. It was marketed as a pro-level 24-bit external sound card, but really was no better than the junk sound cards you can find sitting on a pile at a flea market. And while one version of the driver (also unofficial at the time) was capable of offering the 24-bit capabilitiy the box so boldly proclaimed... I believe the hardware secretly only ran at 16-bit. And it would have constant dropouts any time the host computer would do any disk or network activity... and it was a new computer. This was because there was basically no capabilties in the box -- it was all just host-based. There wasn't even a significant buffer onboard, so all it took was a tiny bit of lag on the USB bus and it was stutter-city.
A friend also had an Audigy back around this time, but didn't know where the driver disc was. Creative had only driver updates available online -- you had to purchase CD copies if you wanted at the original. I guess this makes sense considering their idea of a sound card driver is bloatware too big to download.
Don't get me wrong... they allowed me to hear speech for the first time on my 486 in Wing Commander III, but they haven't made a difference since then. I'm really glad they're getting all of this well-deserved negative publicity. They just plain suck. The only reason they're still around is because of brand recognition. Hopefully now they'll start to be recognized for what they really are... crap.
I guess if all you listen to is taco farts played through a kazoo, they're probably right for you.
Move all sig!
Heh no, but I like your thinking.
"Fisting" is apparently what homosexuals refer to as inserting a hand up another's arse.
"Fista" vs "Fester" - Which do you think is most appropriate for the shite that Redmond have produced ??? {:^)
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Yes. I will no longer buy any sound-cards from Creative. That's the only way they'll learn.
The real lesson is that tuna and mackarel should never be mixed.
Shame on Creative indeed! They should be making him a job offer instead of what they did!!
when the new Sound Blaster X-Fi 2 or Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 hit the shelves.
But things have changed; the iPod has made Creative's portable music player largely irrelevant - and on-board sound is a standard feature of motherboards these days.
So what is poor Creative to do? They could take the honorable path; see that their market has dried up and either innovate in another market or close down their business. But no; they're used to getting those dollars coming in on a regular basis and decided to try something less-than-honorable.
But they got caught at it. Too bad; Creative is in a worse position now. Not only are they still faced with sharply declining revenues, they've also got a public relations nightmare to deal with too.
Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch; here's payback for all those crappy drivers you dumped on your customers. Die in a fire, OK?
Driver issues are one of the primary reasons why people stay away from Linux. Why, precisely, should Vista be any different?
Because one of the major reasons Linux has driver problems is the refusal of the kernel developer to settle on a stable ABI so companies have something to develop for.
AND DOLBY!!!!
Oddly, doing the same orally is typically only done to oneself and not considered sexual.
Care to point out how Microsoft have any part in this, other than releasing an operating system that Creative makes drivers for?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I have a patent on sound waves and I'm pretty sure Creative is infringing on that. I was just going to let it go, but after this. Forget it. Time to call the lawyers..
Anyone that has worked with Vista over the past year usually know one thing. Creative is screwing its customers...
There is no reason that the same hardware level of support is being provided by Intel and even generic Realtek drivers and yet the sound industry leader, Creative, has been unable to deliver working drivers.
Vista new sound model is designed around an agnostic system that allows for more options than was ever available under XP, and Creative continues to tell people that they can't get the Vista drivers to work properly. If this is true, then Creative has horrible driver developers working on these products.
Look at generic drivers from Realtek, on Vista they support as many of the new Vista features as they are capable of, even on old Audio hardware.
Virtually every game out there, has also made adjustments to easily work with Vista's sound system, making it even EASIER for sound card manufacturers. Several games even have their own additions for EAX and other features, but you have to use non-creative cards for these features, which is freaking insane at best for Creative to let their cards be the only ones to consistently have problems and fail.
XP's sound system was barely in the range of industry standards, not supporting a lot of features becoming standard for music professionals and even gaming enthusiasts. XP's sound had no idea of multi-channel (5.1,7.1,etc) had limits on sampling rates, and combining multi-application streams at high quality sampling rates.
Microsoft's revamp in Vista was known a LONG time ago and was necessary to bring the Vista sound system up to the industry current standards, and also give Microsoft some design headroom to extend beyond what Apple and OSS was doing with Audio. (For example the self optimizing speaker technology, the basic realtime filtering of levels and noise, unlimited channels and sample rates, etc.)
- In Vista you can use a crap internal microphone on a laptop and with it processing for feedback and background sound from the laptop, get ok recordings for meeting notes, and even handle the sound well enough that speech recognition works well on low quality input like htis.
- Vista also handles internal processing and mixing of sound far beyond what XP did and even past Apple and other core technologies in the OSS world. Play any type of sound, same sound device, same speakers, and the Vista clarity is surprisingly there - making even high compression audio stretch back to levels that is borderline impressive.
- MS did kill off the older version of DirectSound, because of the problems with it, and its dependance on the XP sound system, which was severely limited.
10.1 DirectX replaces DirectSound for the hardware audio layer, and even prior to 10.1 sound in Vista is not 100% CPU bound, even though people try to scare people with this, as Vista is agnositic at what is processing the audio, but defaults to the CPU for advanced processing if the features are not inherent of the Audio hardware.
This is where Creative messed up, and instead of working 'within' the new API and driver model provided, are trying to work around Vista's audio and driver model, implementing things in good old XP fashion, so there is no wonder why their drivers are crap on Vista.
XP with basic API you could play sound, letting the format and output quality be handled outside the basic application level of understand. In Vista you can jam 20% of a sound to the RL speaker if you have Quad or higher speaker configuration. This is a good thing, and the right way audio should be handled from both a user and a developer standpoint.
Creative continues to dig themselves into a hole with the whole Vista mess, especially starting out by not even having drivers during the beta process for Vista, tell all testers to wait until Vista was released, and then losing all that tester and developer feedback and time, and releasing crap drivers AFTER Vista RTM'd, in fact waiting until after Vista was shipping at the retail level in 2007.
How are we all going to avoid buying creative soundcards for gaming? Since Gravis went out of business they have a monopoly on high end sound cards for gaming. They can behave as badly as they like and just sell more product.
This is clear example of how market based principles do not always benefit consumers.
I dont read
Any evidence of that?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
So what good alternatives to creative sound cards are there? Should have a digital out and be fully supported on linux.
How are they trying to scam more money out of people?
they didn't release a new Audigy driver and were charging Audigy owners for a software that runs on top of bugged drivers
Creative purposedly modified the Audigy drivers to disable some features when Vista is detected and also purposedly introduced some bugs to prevent some XP utilities from running.
They purposedly ruined the Live! support in Vista: 2.1 speakers setting resulted in distorted sound.
wish i could mod parent up!
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
Has everyone just forgotten the DRM "features" in Vista? That Microsoft insists that all data sent to MM cards of any kind be encrypted, else they (M$) disable the full resolution features to prevent copying or screen scraping via adding another driver module to the "stack" of them? Guess there aren't too many driver writers here.
I am thoroughly pissed, not because of this directly, but it makes hardware for my Linux boxes more expensive, as it has to have the extra stuff to do the decryption. We now ALL pay a Microsoft tax -- clever if you're them, I suppose.
Also an embedded programmer, now retired. I can second most of the above as a result.
Doug Coulter, not logged in.
are there any? There are plenty of low end cards, and plenty of high end cards for musicians. But If you're a gamer or on a budget, Creative pretty much owns you.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
April fools day is confusing me.... are you pretending the Creative drivers for XP don't suck?
(As if it was necessary to sink Creative...) (Como se fosse necessário para afundar a Creative...)
See, they should not have chosen the company name. What else did they expect? Of course people will hack on their drivers so they can be called "creative hacker" or something. If they had chosen a name like "egghead" I bet no one would have touched their code.
Especially the comments about their offspring and what can be done with genetic manipulation were inspired. Just the bit of screwing hedgehogs was in bad taste (for the hedgehogs), so I'm glad he toned it down considerably.
Insert
Interestingly enough, Microsoft doesn't offer a stable ABI either. It just releases new versions of its operating system kernel so slowly that it *seems* that there is a stable ABI. The fact that Vista has problems with hardware compatibility is proof of that. What's more, Microsoft's "black box" model is clearly at least partly to blame for Windows' stability problems. As part of the discovery in its Windows Vista class action lawsuit Microsoft was forced to reveal that 30% of Windows crashes in 2007 were the fault of nVidia's drivers.
If you include old but perfectly serviceable hardware that is never likely get a usable Windows Vista driver then a modern Linux distribution almost certainly supports more hardware than Windows Vista, and it does so without having to load questionable black-box drivers. In fact, if it weren't for a few companies that create popular hardware and seem to have an aversion to Free Software (nVidia and Broadcom being the most well known) it would be pretty clear that Linus' insistence on source code has paid off well for Linux users. After all, once a piece of equipment has Free Software drivers these drivers tend to work well with Linux even when new versions come out. Most other hardware manufacturers have basically decided to give the Linux developers what they need. These days you don't even have to be particularly careful in your choice of hardware to get hardware with Free Software Linux drivers. Heck, you can even order a laptop from Dell.
Not that any of this has anything to do with my original point. Hardware compatibility is a real problem for Windows Vista. Tons of perfectly good hardware doesn't work (or work very well) with the operating system. That's a real concern for people with investments in existing hardware. This Creative example is only one of many in which hardware that works perfectly well under Windows XP doesn't work or works poorly with Windows Vista. Microsoft pundits often use similar hardware compatibility problems as a reason to stay away from Linux. However, when Windows Vista has some of the exact same problems it apparently gets a pass.
We -- and I think I speak for the majority of Linux users here -- don't want binary drivers in Linux. You can't fix a binary driver, nor can you make sure it's not doing something evil. You can't migrate the code to future versions as the kernel is modified. You can't optimize it. We don't want an endless stream of support for old pieces of hardware, or a fixed-in-time ABI that keeps things from maturing. An ABI freezes progress.
Part of the open source movement is transparency with code, and you certainly don't get there with binary drivers.
What happens when the vendor goes out of business, or decides not to continue support for your device for whatever reason? Where is your support then? Tech vendors die or are absorbed all the time. Do you want to be prevented from upgrading your system because the closed-source, binary driver cannot be updated? With an open-source driver anybody anywhere in the world can continue working on it. That's a tremendous amount of added value.
The only reason we don't have drivers for some pieces of hardware is the unwillingness of certain manufacturers to cooperate -- they hide behind binaries and refuse to work with the community. Only with binary drivers can a vendor decide to cripple the devices we bought just because we changed OS's.
Creative lost a customer today with this behavior.
Nope. Just stay away from Vista. :)
You're confusing me... are you saying that Creative hardware doesn't suck?
Creative is an insanely greedy company and purposely crippled their drivers.
Agreed.
That's definitely the fault of the OS.
Nobody said it was but Creative being evil doesn't change the fact that Vista sucks. It sucks without Creative's help, they just add to its suckage.
I just have to ask this because no one apparently has yet in this thread...did you actually use XP when it came out? I mean honestly, did you? It took FOREVER for XP to have good driver support and that's only because newer stuff came out. Try and get that old ISA sound card you had working in 98 to work with XP...I'll tell you this...it's a hell of a lot of fun. Old hardware always gets phased out in every single version of Windows. That's how it always has been and how it always WILL be. Microsoft makes as many drivers as it can native and tells the manufacturers to take care of their own legacy stuff. It's simply not Microsoft's job. They have many more things to worry about. Vista isn't perfect but god damn, you people will find anything you can to whine about it. As I've said before...it's pretty much the exact same story we heard when XP came out. "Luna slowed everything down! They changed stuff! Wah, boo hoo, world's smallest violin, etc. etc." Never changes.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
Please, nerds, for the love of all that you hold dear, please stop making up "clever" names for things until you check with me. I will tell you, honestly and without rancor, if it sucks.
I mean Fista? That doesn't even make sense. Come on!
... for work that wasn't completely his, then Creative has a point.
Fisting can refer to anyone getting wrist-deep in any suitable orifice, their own or anyone else's. It's by no means a solely homosexual activity. [/pedant]
I think either's appropriate, since Vista's getting worse over time (viz., SP1), but is also the result of Microsoft trying to insert something unnececessarily large into their customer base.
It isn't lame. Vista is garbage.
Yep, that will teach them. Hey, do me a favor and stop buying Microsoft products while you are at it ;-)
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
No, stay away from Creative, AND VISTA.
I used Windows XP when it came out, and the fact that most Windows 2000 drivers would work in XP helped quite a bit. Besides, there is little doubt that upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP was a truly worthwhile upgrade, even if you had to chuck your crappy ISA sound card.
I suppose that I am a little bitter because both my scanner and my expensive printer didn't come with workable Windows Vista drivers. I'm not the only one that feels this way. If you read the Microsoft email from the class action Vista lawsuit you'll see that several Microsoft VPs had similar experiences. We aren't talking about ISA sound cards either.
On the bright side my wife hated Vista so much that I was finally able to get her to switch to Ubuntu (where the printer works flawlessly). That's worth the price of Vista for me, right there.
What I find truly curious is that so many Windows users apparently don't mind if their hardware doesn't work with Microsoft's new operating system. You paid good money for this software and there basically is no good technical reason that this hardware shouldn't be supported. After all, Linux manages to support ridiculously old hardware.
Either way, it's more than somewhat hypocritical to dismiss Linux for hardware compatibility issues, and then fail to point out that Microsoft faces many of the same problems with new versions of its software.
"I mean Fista? That doesn't even make sense. Come on!"
/.. much less worthy of vetting the used terms here.
Where have you been?
Fisting(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisting) + MS Vista(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms_vista)=Fista
Crawl back to your hole, you stupid git...you are not worthy of
Have yourself castrated before you breed, then crawl back in your mom's basement and resume your LOLcats posts.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcats)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Its not a clear example at all. Its actually a very myopic and incorrect statement all around. While not exactly a gaming rig, the onboard audio in my Gateway GM5424 delivers 7.1 HD Audio via optical cable to my surround sound console just fine. I don't know how you get more high-end than that. If you are talking about expansion cards specifically, then I would suggest that you consider getting yourself a bona-fide gaming rig with decent onboard audio instead. Other posters have mentioned that there are other companies that provide less-costly, high quality expansion cards if that is more your bag. ;-)
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Oh, come on! You're really stretching it.
Just for some cheap humour too. Tsk tsk... *shakes head*
Don't people pay a shit ton of money to the guys who do this to cars?
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Clickity
good article, short read. enjoy
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
EMU was a really cool synth company in Scotts Valley creative bought out a few years back. The EMU line became the "Professional" series of cards from creative.
Well, Creative never really marketed them to the right people, and the entire EMU line is about to be dropped from Creative. They've shut down the scotts valley office completely, let at least 40 people go, and at some point in the not too distant future they're going to get out of the sound card business completely and stick to stuff like making speakers, Ipod docking stations, etc.
Now I know a ton of folks from the EMU side. One of the things that ticked off a lot of them was the EMU10k chip and the driver support. EMU10k was used in just about every creative product before the Xfi chip. With the EMU line of cards though you got some really enhanced drivers, and a awesome mixing application called patchmix.
From the folks i've talked to there's no reason Patchmix couldn't have run on lets say a SBLive card. The 1820m and the SBlive both use the same EMU10k chip. The only difference between the interfaces was the EMU has nicer mic pre-amps and A2D converters. EMU folks wanted it. Creative decided it would be better to make a split between "Home" and "Pro" use then charge a premium for the pro version.
Which is really sad because if creative had included patchmix support on the lower end cards, it would have lead to more home studio use. If everyone is using patchmix at home on a SBLive card, every pro studio out there would have bought a EMU card just for patchmix, since it would have been a home standard.
I don't know anyone currently employed by creative. Everyone I know has quit or been fired in the last year. My guess is the people at creative bitching about this guy breaking thier copyright by making the drivers work on vista are just doing some "make busy" work to avoid the inevitable which is creative is getting out of the sound card business.
People might wonder why this is happening. Bunch of reason, mostly on board sound has killed them. M-Audio is kicking thier ass in the "Pro" line of sound cards, which is why EMU in scotts valley got shut down.
Supposidly the company is doing thier best to become a logitec. Really sad, seeing as how creative was the company that gave birth to sound on the PC.
I wish I could get my nice new printer to work with Ubuntu - honestly I have both Vista and Ubuntu systems and the Vista ones print to the Lexmark C530dn just fine, but I can't get the Ubuntu ones to print to it at all. I am a bit of a noob on Linux, although I have done admin work on older hp-ux in the past. So far I have not figured out how the hell to get the drivers that are on the Lexmark site (red-hat and Suse) to work.
Do you have a source for that? The distorted sound problem is why I stopped using vista about 3 hours after I installed it. I was considering googling it but when I took into account that my old sblive worked out of the box on both winxp and linux, I decided it wasn't worth the effort.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
I have recently become aware (through the power that the internet grants to the average person) of your company's attitude and treatment of the Brazilian programmer, Daniel Kawakami. As far as I am concerned this person is not in the United States or covered by US law and thus can tinker and fiddle with his computer and HIS hardware - yes when he purchased it from you it became HIS, whatever your legal department would have you believe - in any manner he sees fit.
I have owned several products from Creative in the past, from the original "Sound Blaster" products up to and including your "Audigy" product line. However I was not aware of the immaturity with which your company was prepared to deal with this situation. A situation where a talented individual empowers me to optimize the use of MY (yes, if I buy it it becomes MY) hardware on MY computer.
It's as if Ford suddenly objected to the color I decide to paint my car, or the company that made my mouse objected because I use it to control a robot I built.
I have to inform you that because of this decision of yours I frankly will no longer be doing business with your company. Your "rights" under the DMCA stop at the US border, and patent protections are designed to prevent someone reverse engineering your products and rebuilding them to compete with you. Someone writing a driver that enhances your products, activates features (without warranty) which you "chose" to cripple is not HARMING your company they are HELPING.
Now you may not care about the paltry hundred or so dollars I may have spent on Creative products in the future, but do ask yourself if ONE person can feel strongly enough to be moved to write to you over this issue, exactly how much business are you going to lose through this bad press?
I hope that your company can remember that people don't exist simply as statistics, demographics, and consumers of your products. We will tinker with things. We will alter things. If your products are flawed those flaws WILL be discovered. And if your products can be improved - they will. You might think about hiring this obviously brilliant guy, instead of threatening him.
Sincerely,
An ex Creative customer.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Any company that depends on a mechanism like this to control their revenue will be mighty pissed at anyone that bypasses the mechanism and turns on all the features.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Umm, why would I? That's not part of the comment.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The real lesson is that intellectual property is a completely bullshit and made-up concept that only works in countries that want to prop-up such industries. And, that if this were not immediately and obviously wrong human behavior, those who implement software DRM like this would not feel so much shame when it was later realized that they are charging large monetary sums for changing a single bit of data in their product..
You're referring to Vista's lack of (now "legacy") DirectSound support.
Creative created an "ALchemy" program to emulate DirectSound in Vista at considerable expense and manpower.
They ported it to their older cards, but want $10 for the Alchemy program. Now, free drivers are great and all, but rewriting a part of XP lacking in Vista is a bit more than a driver update.
Besides, I haven't had any problems with "bugged drivers." Unless if you use their "auto-updater" program. Don't use it; find your drivers manually. Otherwise, you will have drivers bugged to hell.
DATABASE WOW WOW
What I did wrong
(...)
Reversing ALchemy was also wrong, I know. But I reiterate, what is the point of improving ALchemy and changing for it, when it requires an improved driver? It was my protest against Creative. Just to clarify a few things. Maybe Daniel doesn't even know that, but reverse engineering is completely legal in Brazil, so he hasn't broken any laws. What he did is completely OK and law abiding.
Actually things run even deeper. Copying stuff for personal use isn't illegal in Brazil, even if you don't have a license. It can be anything, books, movies, software, etc.
Actually, the sub-issue here is that Creative's Vista drivers for said hardware don't work properly at all. So this guy's drivers are the only useful Vista drivers for that hardware. The fact that he re-enabled Dolby is an interesting sideshow and the one Creative's using as a club here to beat him, but the real spotlight should be on what the hell is wrong with Creative that they can't have their team of day-job programmers make drivers that work in a year, but a lone hobbyist tinkerer can.
The OS they released broke existing drivers in order to provide a protected data path for media companies' products. Computer users don't want DRM and shouldn't have to pay for it.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Rather then distributing the modified driver, couldn't he have just distributed a patch for a specific driver version?
It's easy for me to stay away from Creative but harder when a device I want to buy comes with Creative onboard or as the only option. It'd be nice to get the industry into this movement as well.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
start the first sentence of their replies in the subject are annoying and should be shot.
I am already there. I no longer give any money to Microsoft, and I tell my friends to figure out other solutions. I am just tired of hearing about Windows problems. I need to focus on something else nowdays. Anything else. I am just tired to my bones of trying to help people avoid falling into the same old traps over and over. Its boring.
I sent Creative labs a nice missive informing them that their "advertisement" of
"vista capable" is false and that they should rectify it.
Considering that I have been a user of their products for more than 15 years,
I am rather irritated that they would choose to "deliberately" hobble their
product in windows vista.
I had to downgrade back to XP in order for the speech software (text-to-speech)
that I use to work properly.
I guess they don't care about the Americans with disabilities act either.
In any case, they are now informed they have a problem. I just hope they don't take the
short sighted way out.
Understanding is much like a 3-edged-sword. in this: there are always 2 sides and the truth.
Does it work properly with all games?
I have had major issues with on board cound being detected as EAX but not fully supporting everything so behaving strangely. The only example I can think of now is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas not working correctly with onboard sound cards.
I dont read
How is this insightful? You clearly didn't read the article at all.
Creative broke parts of their Vista drivers even though those parts would have worked fine. The modder re-enabled them and Creative threw a wobbly. This has nothing to do with DRM or media companies, and the only link to Microsoft is the OS the drivers were written for. It has everything to do with Creative forcing an upgrade path on their customers.
Good work on writing a comment with all the buzzwords necessary to look insightful, though.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I know I personally bought a ton of their products through the 80's and 90's and the only reason I hadn't bought one during the 00's was the fact that I got a ton of last years models when I was working repair shop. I still have a Soundblaster Live! 5.1 running in my XP box and would have seriously looked at an Audigy or X-FI next year when I build my new Quad Core. But after pulling this asshatery I will either get a barracuda or an Asus. While I ALWAYS thought Creative=stinky drivers there was always a nicely hacked driver on the net I could get which would make them really sing. Now any modders would have to be nuts to bother tweaking a Creative product, which means any cards passed the X-FI (which I snatched Dan K's drivers while I could) will be worthless to me
And now we find out their great idea for saving the company is IP crap running on onboard sound chips-WTH? While I admit for the most casual gamer or joe average onboard sound will work, for those of us who even occasionally work with music or like the maximum framerate in our games knows that onboard sound rarely if ever cuts it. Instead of accepting the fact that they are in a niche market and building up their portfolio with better hardware and drivers they just sppok off those that spend money on their cards to try and chase the OEMs. But I've got news for them--The OEMs don't need them. For those using onboard sound they are happy with things the way they are. As long as it has the number of speaker outs or connectors for their hardware they are happy campers. So I predict that 2 years from now Creative will be just another patent troll trying to milk their past for every nickel it is worth. Maybe then Asus will just buy them out and put them out of their misery. But that is my 02c,YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That sounds accurate to the extent I have followed the story, but there's an addition caveat. Creative has since licensed these technologies for vista but is charging extra for the ability to turn them on (in Vista that is).
I have been buying creative products back since I had to make the original Soundblaster run under dos 3.1 on a 4.7 Mhz 8086 clone with not enough ram to swing a cat, right through the SB16 and the SB Live! etc, and I have had creative MP3 players etc as well. At least I can choose not to give these asshats any money. I am buying the new MP3 player tomorrow (the 512MB Creative Rhomba has had its day) and am upgrading the PC in the next few weeks/months. I assure you that there will be no Creative products purchased. Creative's financial position is not great. Maybe if a consumner backlash bankrupts these pricks then their patents can get acquired by a firm that cares about releasing great products, with drivers that actually work, and realises the value of having a good customer experience.
...is the fact that many people are taking shots at Vista for being buggy or not having enough drivers while it is very clear that it just might be the hardware vendors themselves that are to lazy to provide support or that purposefully decide not to provide support because they can make a quick buck selling new hardware with new drivers.
A sad affair indeed.
As opposed to you just being a total moron.
The huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensive testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products.
yeah, well, except....
they had to DO WORK to COMMENT OUT features.
so there goes THAT story about how we "didnt' have enough time" to properly write vista drivers.
what a bunch of bollocks. creative, you blew it. you blew it big, you blew it hard and you blew it for the last time.
have fun in chapter 11, creative. it would serve you right. (really, it would. a stern lesson needs to be taught and I'd enjoy seeing creative go down in flames. I'd bring marshmallows.)
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Interestingly enough, Microsoft doesn't offer a stable ABI either.
Yes, they do.
It just releases new versions of its operating system kernel so slowly that it *seems* that there is a stable ABI.
Pretty much every Service Pack updates the kernel. Drivers don't break. Added to that, it's not unusual for drivers to continue working across major OS updates (and when they don't, it's usually with very good reason).
The fact that Vista has problems with hardware compatibility is proof of that. What's more, Microsoft's "black box" model is clearly at least partly to blame for Windows' stability problems. As part of the discovery in its Windows Vista class action lawsuit Microsoft was forced to reveal that 30% of Windows crashes in 2007 were the fault of nVidia's drivers.
I'm not sure how you get "Microsoft is to blame" out of a report clearly indicating the problems were with nVidia's driver, but this is Slashdot, so I suppose that's to be expected.
Incidentally, the "black box model" is hardly "Microsoft's", or unnique to them. Indeed, about the only mainstream OS that *doesn't* have a stable kernel ABI for developers to target drivers at is Linux.
Hardware compatibility is a real problem for Windows Vista. Tons of perfectly good hardware doesn't work (or work very well) with the operating system. That's a real concern for people with investments in existing hardware.
Hardly. Firstly, the proportion of people who upgrade existing systems to Vista, much like those who upgraded existing versions previously, is tiny. Most people using Vista get it with a new PC, just like they got XP. Secondly, anyone upgrading is going to have relatively recent hardware.
Microsoft pundits often use similar hardware compatibility problems as a reason to stay away from Linux. However, when Windows Vista has some of the exact same problems it apparently gets a pass.
Except they're not exactly the same problems, which was my point (to say nothing of the gross exaggeration of Vista's "hardware compatibility problems").
We -- and I think I speak for the majority of Linux users here -- don't want binary drivers in Linux.
I sincerely doubt you're speaking for even a sizable minority of Linux users, let alone a majority. Most people are far, far more interested in their hardware working than they are about idealism.
You can't fix a binary driver, nor can you make sure it's not doing something evil.
Nor can you, I'm willing to bet, with an open source driver. You have to trust someone else to do it for you.
You can't migrate the code to future versions as the kernel is modified.
Nor do you need to with a stable interface.
You can't optimize it. We don't want an endless stream of support for old pieces of hardware, or a fixed-in-time ABI that keeps things from maturing. An ABI freezes progress.
Tripe. Pretty much the only OS today that doesn't have a stable ABI is Linux. Solaris, Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, etc. All somehow manage to do it without "freezing progress".
The only reason we don't have drivers for some pieces of hardware is the unwillingness of certain manufacturers to cooperate -- they hide behind binaries and refuse to work with the community.
Or they're legally unable to due to licensing conditions.
Make no mistake. The biggest reason hardware vendors are reluctant to work on Linux drivers are because of problems in Linux and the zealotry of certainly parts of the Linux community.
How are we all going to avoid buying creative soundcards for gaming?
I think you gamers 'created' (heh) your own market. I find it hard to believe you 'need' a special card for 'games'.
sound is sound. the fact that some companies sell you on the fact that you need SILICON to do fancy sound these days (huh?) makes little sense to me, technically.
is your gaming experience really that bad if you use spdif out to a decent stereo amp and spkrs? why do you think you NEED 'features' in sound cards?
boggle...
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
so let me get this straight.
lets assume that creative is not the 'bad guy' here (just follow along, for now).
and lets assume that creative made business deals with the rotton stinking dolby-labs (yeah, they suck too) and DTS guys for their xp product offering. and lets assume that they chose to CHEAP OUT and not renew those deals for vista, on certain hardware models.
how can DTS or dolby sue creative on something creative had NO PART IN DOING??
creative did not violate any licensing. THEY did not distribute new functionality that was 'not paid for' to the industry groups.
why the fuck should they care what some user does once the card (and fees, btw) have been already paid for?
IANAL, but it seems creative is harmless here; the driver modder did not involve creative directly and so ANY issues at all would be between the industry groups (dolby, dts) and the driver modder.
creative clearly knows this. this isn't about license fees. this is about having egg on their face when the TRUTH comes out about wanting their business model (lame as it might be) to try to get more money from customers by making them re-buy hardware.
that was the ONLY issue. the licensing was a distraction. nice try creative, but no cigar.
their true colors were shown. they want you to re-buy hardware simply because they have run out of ideas! its just that simple.
don't buy this 'license fees have to be paid!' bullshit. its a smokescreen. its all about squeezing more 'upgrade money' from users and nothing more.
highly dispicable behavior. I'll never buy creative gear again. and I will take ever opportunity to convey that concept (with reasoning behind it) to every shop I work for (I often do sysadmin work and am consulted for machine purchases and hardware specs).
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
And don't tell me that innovation will disappear if there were no IP laws. That is simply not true.
that's right.
in fact, I don't even use IP anymore. I switched back to DECnet.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
After having read the articles I understand that the reason for Daniel_k asking for donations was the price of the Creative hardware in his country ... I believe this piece of information to be completely false and fabricated. I trust history will prove me right.
Historical revisionism:
1) Daniel_k observes the current state of (the) Creative (drivers) and begins to plan out the most diabolical takeover ever deviced.
2) Daniel_k improves the drivers for Vista using his vast intellect and allows the masses of Creative users to download them for free.
3) Daniel_k claims the price of new hardware to be excessive and asks for donations. He receives a grand total of $146.
4) Creative has no choice but to react and does so through Phil. (This does not go down well.)
5) The frustrated masses join together on message boards everywhere asking for Phil's head and/or parts of his neck.
6) Daniel_k ignores surge of cheap Creative hardware appearing on e-bay and the likes furthering his role as victim in this case.
7) Creative's stock prices drop significantly over the following days resulting in the firm's near bankrupcy.
8) Daniel_k buys Creative for $146.
I wonder how C* would go in a English/European framework here, and if people who relied on 'Vista Compatible' can get their money back. I think the reasonable man in Clapham Junction would assume works the same. We have proof of deliberate crippling. I would like to see warnings on the box along the lines of 'Subset of features available in Fista' or 'Some features not supported in Fista'. Meantime, lets hope someone lodges a complaint, or RMA's start piling up.
As a business model, remember what happened to ROXIO when they pulled the driver trick card.
Too bad DECnet was a proprietary protocol.
Without the 2nd Amendment, the others are just suggestions.
I think the whole Hot Coffee affair has shown that you can be successfully sued for modifications made to your product by people outside of your control.
I read the internet for the articles.
Executives from the companies will get together over drinks and discuss how to maximise revenues going forward. Usually this happens in the dark and the consumer is none the wiser. In this case we found out because a very enterprising individual invested a huge amount of his own time, unpaid (TFA says he earn $150 in donations, I earnt more than that before lunch). He then published a solution that did not involve buying another creative sound card, thereby costing creative some sales.
The original example I mentioned of GTA San Andreas and Realtek on board sound drove the purchase of my current Audigy2 card as I had already spent money on the game and started playing before I noticed the bug. If when I upgrade to Vista (To get DirectX 10, to run next version of Unreal Tournament or something) I also have to buy a new sound card I might do that, although I will not be happy about it.
Anyone who followed my example through about Vista, DirectX and UT2008 will hopefully realise that these things happen a lot more often than not. Windows XP also drove a huge amount of hardware sales. I had to replace a Mustek Scanner and Voodoo2 card as there was no driver support in XP.
I dont read
Direct me to a sound card manufacturer, or ANY hardware manufacturer for that matter, who would be beyond such practices and I'll happily give them my business. Until then, I will be living in a cave and killing my food.
For further examples, look at every "Torrent tracker taken down" story posted. Trackers aren't hosting the files, but they're still allowing their users to do it.
Hmm, yeah, it has worked fine with all games I have played. I can't see why it wouldn't. Though I can see why crappy ports of console games might have a little more trouble with those sorts of things. That would be a software issue, not a hardware issue.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Not only can he, but he can do so in assembly by patching together bits of various existing drivers which he reverse engineered. This is a substantially more complicated and error-prone process from copying and pasting the appropriate source code, toggling the right defines, and compiling.
I feel pretty strongly that there must be a reason Creative hasn't released drivers in all this time - they are probably spending a ton of support time answering the Vista questions this will raise, especially since some of that hardware is labeled as Vista Ready. There's some licensing or patent issue under the hood here which they can't talk about because of ongoing legal issues. There's really no other reason to go hostile on a guy who is helping them for free (frankly they should be finding out if this guy wants a job or at least a part time contract), especially after they've let him do this for so long.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Can't really see the angry part of what I said... still, I'd rather be angry than unable to grasp two completely seperate concepts at once, wouldn't you?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I haven't bought a Creative product since 1999 or 2000, when they were flat-out denying their Live! drivers were buggy and exhibited race conditions . Everyone with a multiprocessor machine and a Live! card could demonstrably reproduce the issues very easily. An OEM had owned up to it and produced an updated driver for their workstation and high-end PC lines, but it wasn't until hyperthreading hit the market that they (creative) finally owned up to it-- because they HAD to. SMP and SMT were going mainstream and they finally realized it. Sorry, after spending >$200 for a sound card that had buggy drivers when a $69 Game Theater XP card (WITH BREAKOUT BOX!) card outperformed it and was STABLE -- I'll still not buy, recommend, specify, or sell Creative products to this day.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
it still didn't stop it from making its way into the linux kernel, plus some userland apps.
I've even seen a DCL interp (!) for linux.
DECnet phaseV was mostly pure OSI; but phase IV DECnet was DEC's own invention. quite a nice one, too (I spent my first 6 years in the computer field working at DEC in maynard, mass. actually doing DECnet stuff, there, too.)
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Isn't that part of what this hobbyist created simply by extracting the appropriate assembly from the XP driver and inserting it into the Vista driver? If someone can manage this in assembly, then for Creative to do it either didn't involve "considerable expense and manpower," or something is seriously wrong with their developers to be outdone by a hobbyist working without source code.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
My soundblaster live card has worked without problems for almost a decade, finally retired it last month, while getting drivers have sometimes been a bit of a problem I have faired just fine - It is some of the most stable hardware I've had.
"I sold my upgraded Proteus 2500 the day they sold out"
Made some money out of it too then, did ya?
hehe
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
The good news is that your printer has Postscript 3 emulation, so it is will work. You might have a bit of trouble getting the duplexer to do the right thing, but it will work.
In fact a quick perusal of openprinting.org shows that you've got yourself a very nice printer that is well supported by Free Software. It's just new enough that Foomatic doesn't include it in its database yet.
Good luck.
Reading the article, it sounds like all he did was hack the ALchemy driver so you wouldn't have to pay for it:
Well, I did manage to patch the latest version of ALchemy X-Fi to run on any card, without even removing Safecast, but I'm done with that.The driver hacker didn't write a DirectSound emulation program - he just hacked up Creative's drivers so they would:
He didn't hack together an ALchemy replacement; he just hacked it up so that it would run better on Vista, and so you wouldn't have to pay for it. It's more like writing a "no-CD hack" for a game, rather than writing your own game.
Developers weren't "outdone" by a hobbyist - they were the ones that wrote the XP code, and then disabled it in the Vista drivers. This hobbyist is just removing those checks, which it seems could get Creative in trouble.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Copyright is also an "IP law", a very old one. I guess lots of people wouldn't write books if they couldn't get any money for those. Why would companies write software if they can't copyright it?
Anyway, one set of extremists believes that software patents are next thing to 'sliced bread' (a bad 'invention' in first place). The other set of extremists, like yourself, would throw all protections away and give free rain for all bootleggers, scammers and thieves (eg. bring a book to a publisher, but he just pays you $20 for 1 copy, then copies and sells the rest).
IP laws are not all bad. Just like not all laws in general are bad because there are a few that are really fsked up. Laws give order to otherwise chaotic world.
Nope, the actual issue was because some on board sound cards do not support enough as many simultaneous channels as creative cards do. But my main point about competition and market forces was more about the way things used to be when Gravis were still in the game (I am kinda oldish).
They produced a damn decent card that had full Wave Table Synthesis support for general midi. This meant you could use General MIDI for the games sound track and it sounded good while not requiring the CPU to process all the sound samples as they were dealt with by the soundcard. As a result of this creative produced a card that did the same thing. Until then creative viewed it as a luxury feature so never included it in their product line.
I dont read
I spent days trying to set up a media PC just to find my $200 X-Fi doesn't support Dolby Digital Live, so no 5.1 sound. I even called them and they said to wasn't supported.
Now I learn they lied to me, and all X-Fis support DDL and it was crippled in the drivers.
How do I find fixed XP drivers? I went to his site and it was just a list of executables with gibberish filenames and no descriptions...
I can think of at least one successful composer who makes a good living even though he puts all of his work, every bit of it, in the public domain.
It's funny how people who value the idea of "Think(ing) Differently" except when it comes to intellectual property. Then they become blind to even the possibility of innovation.
For years, every single one of Adobe's flagship programs have been available in completely working, cracked versions for download from torrent sites. Yet, they are still making record profits. In fact, their stock price has rallied recently. How could that be?
You are welcome on my lawn.
RTFA and pay attention to what the modder says, he found diliberate bugs in the drivers which didn't exist in the Xp drivers (and with Xp driver tweaks were resolved) as well as a bunch of other things. By the looks of things Creative made the drivers work good enough to claim their fake "Vista Ready" logo but made sure the sucked enough that people would upgrade to Xi-Fi.
As an idiot who did just that I won't be buying Creative anymore.
Hey, now that you mention it, how are you mother and sister doing?
No, the real issue here is that Creative wants the ability to sell more cards based SOLELY on their support for Vista. And, as one of my co-workers pointed out, they could also not want to get customer calls for support of a product that they no longer support, but is being enabled by this guy's code.
As for me, I'm all for it! I think he should "go on with his bad self", and continue releasing code. And, if the sheet hits the fan, release it as open source.
Which is legitimate. They're not the first company to give a crippled product away for free and expect people to pay for the full featured product.
We can't assume Creative is protecting their own butts. Creative can't be held responsible for what some random guy does with their drivers, right? Dolby can't sue Creative just because Creative is holding up their end of the bargain(not releasing drivers). Dolby might be able to go after someone for making the feature available without buying a license. I'm not sure how the Dolby licensing works.
So your theory doesn't make sense. But, that doesn't mean there isn't a much more sinister look to all of this business between Creative, Dolby, and the consumer. I think everyone here agrees that Creative is clearly and deliberately not enabling these features.
I believe I read an article a few days ago which described that he cobbled together a new driver by combining parts of the Vista driver with parts of the XP driver. I can't recall where I read that now though, so I guess I'll just assume I dreamed it.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Actually, if you read TFA, you will see that Creative merely forbade him from modding their software so that you could buy a cheap version of their card and software-enable it to behave like a more expensive version, plus unlocking other parts of their software in a way that would directly impinge upon their legitimate software sales that weren't actually bug-fix driven. They have not only given him permission to continue publishing his bug-fix-related patches, he's even allowed to officially accept donations for his work.
Disappointing as it sounds, it seems like Creative merely stopped him from going to far into the realm of actually cannibalizing their legitimate business while giving him permission to continue fixing issues that represent actual problems for their users. Sounds like a win-win all around.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
"Creative threw a wobbly"
Haha, excellent expression, never heard of it.
Are you british by any chance??
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Heh, I remember the first time I heard an AWE32, a few months later, I got myself one, old HUGE card, could have used it as a handsaw.
:)
That was excellent technology.
Creative may be crap now, but back in the day, they were great
This is the sig that says NI (again)
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Heh, it sounded like a british expression, nobody in the US ever throws a fit for example, they get pissed :)
(and nope, not an US-ian here, just plain dutch)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I was about to say (slightly sarcastically) that I figured it out from the NL in your name, but I realised how annoying it must be to have to explain it to non-Europeans, so... no sarcasm here!
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I've even seen a DCL interp (!) for linux. I didn't know that. I wonder if $ set proc/priv=all, prompts for your password on linux. DECnet phaseV was mostly pure OSI; but phase IV DECnet was DEC's own invention. quite a nice one, too One day I was sending VMSMail to someone at an unfamiliar node and it took a long time for the Subject prompt to appear after I typed in the address. When I got a reply back, I discovered the person was located in France. No wonder it took a long time for VMSMail to verify the validity of the email address. (I spent my first 6 years in the computer field working at DEC in maynard, mass. actually doing DECnet stuff, there, too.) I worked in the field in Dallas, my wife worked at The Mill and MRO. At one time, DEC had the largest non-military network in the world. Sigh.
Without the 2nd Amendment, the others are just suggestions.
Explain this "Race condition" as I've never had an issue with my SBLive! 5.1 under a dual processor system running W2K Pro. Everything stayed in sync with rather low latency using their default drivers in Cool Edit. Never have I had a problem.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"how can DTS or dolby sue creative on something creative had NO PART IN DOING??"
Very fucking simple - the drivers were being posted on Creative's forums, which Creative has control over. That means that their site is distributing modified drivers that Creative has no license to distribute. It's the same principle as what comes with Child Porn on a network - if you can control what goes on inside your network, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE AND LIABLE.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As a former Creative Labs employee, Creative's actions are not surprising in the least.
I havent' worked for them in over 10 years, but I still recall this story. This was before Creative Lab's even thought about providing developer support.
Anyways, a game developer contacted Creative looking for some assistance. He was developing a new game, and wanted some insight with their drivers and the best way to interface with them. Well Creative spurned his request, dismissing him as a nobody. He was upset, but moved on and solved his problems without Creative's help. The developer's name was John Carmack, and he goes on to release Doom. The rest is history.
I remember the developer support department being created during that time in response to the whole thing. And then a year or so later Creative tries to capitilize on id's success by getting them to use Creative's new audio technology. Carmack remembering how fondly he was treated when he was a nobody, turns down every offer Creative threw at him. Classic!
Some things never change.
Sometimes this evil behavior it has unintended benefits. My boss gave me a free high-end AGFA scanner because AGFA didn't feel like writing drivers for XP (it was installed on a box with Windows 2000, but he wanted to re-install the OS to XP). Imagine my delight when I find out that Linux supports it, and supports it well. On a related note, learning about the Linux SANE project is a good exercise in coming up with creative swear words regarding vendors. (I borrowed my parents' scanner last year.) Writing a driver is not difficult, but many companies don't want to invest the time. What's really evil is they can't even be bothered releasing the specs so others can write them for them. Developers are left querying the hardware, making guesstimates, and risk ruining their scanner. Not only to they don't want to solve them problems themselves (which would be easy for them since they already have the specs), they are determined to make it extremely difficult for others. If someone has a system where they really want or need their scanner, scanner vendors just cut out Linux as an OS option in many cases.
Symptoms? the audio driver would just start looping, sometimes just freeze the system or bluescreen. It is generally the result of poor thread management.
/OneCPU made the problem unreproducible).
Back before SMP went mainstream and was limited to large enterprises, I worked for a company which produced a development and runtime environment for a knowledgebase solution. Lockups and 100% CPU utilization was reported in the field but no one in support could reproduce it - client was threatening to walk. I heard about the support issue and I knew what the problem was right away and had an idea of how to reproduce it, but on a single processor machine everything is serialized anyhow, making it difficult and sometimes impossible to reproduce thread management bugs. At this company I was Sr. QA Engineer (and acting QA director at the time. I HATE being in a director position, at least in QA) and insisted the company release an unused multiprocessor box to QA (it was just sitting in the server room unused). I set up a debug build of the runtime environment on the machine and got about 12 people to hit the machine concurrently with specific requests (previous sessions on a single processor box failed to reproduce it). First attempt, we reproduced it and identified where it was failing (and no it wasn't a machine issue - booting with
What is a race condition?
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci871100,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition
And a related topic, the deadlock:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlock
One workaround was intfilter, binding one or two libraries to a single processor, but that didn't solve all the problems with the Creative driver.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50