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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?
He should make out a cashier's check for the total amount of donations he's received, mail it to Creative Labs
must be the new 'american way'; to reward companies for bad behavior (multiple times over) with a CASHIER'S CHECK.
(sigh).
no, he should NOT send money to the company that caused the problem. good grief, man, what are you thinking?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
mailing it to a charity (for the deaf?) would be a better solution IMHO
I doubt $146 is really going to make Creative any richer. I think it's more of an insult than a profit.
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.
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
Well, since it's pretty obvious that what he was doing was un-crippling software that they had intentionally broken, I think it's understandable that they're pissed.
Normally I'd agree. But why should I lose features in Vista because Creative decided that the card I already bought shouldn't work in a new OS? I can only think it is to encourage people to buy new cards. That's slimey.
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.
I don't really follow law too much, but isn't there a law about making money off of somebody else's product without their permission? I don't know what he did, but if he added to their code without modifying the original parts, then I would think he probably didn't violate any copyrights. But if he made money off providing a driver for a device he did not engineer, then I think Creative has a claim against him. Basically he 'deprived' them of the right to sell their own solution. Not that they had a solution, but you get the gist.
Here's a couple similar situations: Microsoft has generic drivers that you can get through windowsupdate for many hardware vendors. Some are written inhouse at M$ and some are given to them by the vendors themselves. But they don't make extra money off providing these drivers, it's just an added service.
If company X takes a GPL'd program and repackages it with a different name and a few changed buttons and sells it without offering modified source or recognition, everyone here would be up at arms over it. It wasn't their's to mess with. Same deal here.
This guy did a great service to the community, but he undoubtedly did it by using some things that weren't his to use (code, hardware spec's, etc) and he got greedy and charged for it.
Now, I don't think he should go to jail or anything, but giving back the money he 'deprived' Creative of in the first place should hopefully be the end of the complaint.
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
but isn't there a law about making money off of somebody else's product without their permission?
IANAL, but there are limits (even today) as to what a company can do to STOP someone from applying their mods to works that are for sale.
if he 'sells' only his time and effort via the patch, that should be fine. if he includes the whole binary (which isn't his) then that's not ok.
but in terms of him making money on the effort he applied, what's wrong with that? if he sells only a patch he should be fine. the 'dont look at our code' is not enforceable. I believe its fair use.
of course, the actual law isn't important; what IS important is that creative is a SCUMBAG COMPANY and will threaten people just to get them to stop, law or no law.
creative: I will never ever ever buy your gear again; and I will try to influence all my peers and companies not to buy your stuff either. I hope you reap lots of what you sowed from this stunt of yours.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
He wasn't working for the company, he was working for the victims of the company's shoddy behaviour.... as you can see, from the company's response.
No, the real moral is to stay away from both Creative AND Vista.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
daniel_k's naïveté.
I wonder what his IP rights are to his mods? Could he turn around and sue Creative if the issue a Vista patch that fixes the drivers in the same way that Daniel-K's mods did? But from the sounds of his response, he would never try to pursue that line.
We are all just people.
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.
Why should he return donations? If people want to pay him for his TIME, there's nothing wrong with that. It's akin to someone paying me for my time to fix their car, or to mod their car. I'm not taking credit for engineering the car, I'm just providing my time and expertise. I think if he wants to provide a service for free, and well wishers want to help support him completely voluntarily, there's nothing wrong with that.
I didn't recognize the name but "Braziliantech" did ring a bell. He did some pretty good mods for Asus's A7V BIOSes.
Creative didn't seem so miffed about the donations. Pretty much the last line of TFA says that Mr. Kawakami is still allowed to receive them.
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.
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.
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'm not sure how we ended up down the path where just because a mod happens electronically it's suddenly possible for the manufacturer to win the same argument. It's important to note that he's in fact not "profiting off (Creative's) IP", he is actually profiting from his addition to their product, just like car modders of days gone by...
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
If you RTFA he wasn't charging, he was just accepting donations. He also states in Brazil hardware is about 3x more expensive than the US and he was going to use the donations to buy Creative hardware to test on (you don't have to believe him though).
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.
Modders modify things. Often cases, but sometimes drivers.
"Hacker" is often taken to mean someone who circumvents computer protections for nefarious purposes, but around here you're more likely to see it used in the original sense of "somebody who's a competent-to-excellent programmer with a knack and desire to solve problems."
In this case he's a modder because he was just making modifications to a driver set that he can't really claim to understand, while a hacker would've reverse-engineered the drivers and rewritten them in lisp, then included a module in them that runs the linux kernel on your sound card. Or something.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
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.
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.
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.
I purchased a santa cruz in 2000 or so and up until it was replaced, it had richer fuller sound than any other card I had tried. Previous to that I was using a soudblaster 512 which they discontinued in favour of bringing the EXACT same card to market under the title of "sb live", and costing IIRC double the price. You can see that creative has been pricks for pretty much their entire existence. The main reason to move away from creative is their god awful driver suite. I have never had a turtle beach card or driver crash, period. Not to mention that they dont install a fuckton of TSRs and spew crap all over the system.
Currently I run a turtle beach montego DDL 7.1, and its simply flawless. The only problem I've ever had is getting their cheaper card (riveria) in canada. Its practically the same as the montego, but for half the price (30 bucks) and no 7.1.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
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!
But why should I lose features in Vista because Creative decided that the card I already bought shouldn't work in a new OS?
Because you're Creative's bitch.
Remember how we used to buy and "own" things? Well, now apparently companies are claiming the right to tell us how we may, or may not, use their products after "buying" them, even with physical hardware. Since the number of people who care about things like this enough to stop buying shiny gadgets is minuscule, I see no reason why this tactic shouldn't work.
After all, it's their product, why shouldn't they have complete control over how you "consume" it - there's money to be made, after all.
sic transit gloria mundi
However, it's now apparent in this case (and by this stage) that it wasn't simply a case of Creative being blase or cheap about fixing the bugs. On the contrary, they quite clearly and deliberately *didn't* want them fixed.
You know, I might have defended Creative on the basis that the guy modified their own drivers and got them to work on all soundcards. This would give non-Creative owners of other cards unpaid access to Creative's work, and possibly certain features (code or patents) which was licensed- i.e. not owned- by Creative for use with their cards alone. Possibly some of the features were only licensed (and paid for) for use with certain cards.
But that's the charitable view. In truth, Creative's behaviour smacks of deliberately breaking their older hardware under Vista so that people are forced to upgrade. I'm unclear whether they actually introduced deliberate bugs into the Vista drivers, but if so, this is reprehensible. I'd also be interested to find out how legal this is under various jurisdictions- probably 100% in the US (where they can get away with a 90 day warranty on a brand new laptop), not so sure about other countries, particularly within the EU.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The real lesson is that tuna and mackarel should never be mixed.
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.
I have read all of the threads here: http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
/. account many years ago while sitting at my desk at Creative Labs Inc. 1523 Cimarron Plaza, Stillwater, OK 74075. 405-742-6655.
and here: http://creative.edited.us/
Creative summarily wiped their VP's Original posting from their forums that started this whole epic saga. Good thing somebody mirrored it all here: http://creative.edited.us/page.php?start=1
In summary, here are a few key points (in no particular order):
(1) Creative may have licensed some software for Windows XP and NOT licensed it for Windows Vista. Thus that is *in part* why they crippled it. (and it helps promote new hardware sales for Vista) It seems this is true for the Dolby portions of the code.
(2) Creative stated they cripple their hardware (depending on what model it is) in their drivers based on the Operating System version and what the item was sold as. They state they have the legal right to do so.
(3) Creative stated that anyone re-enabling features (however it is done) is "stealing" from Creative.
(4) Apparently, the Windows XP drivers ignore the Vista "Protected Path" DRM killswitch flags and work quite well. (Recall that Vista is built on Windows XP technology and WinXP drivers *can be made* to WORK FINE in it. It is probably very likely that this violates some NDA from Microsoft to Creative as it likely bypasses their DRM mechanisms in Vista that were not included in WinXP (at least up to WinXP w/SP2).
(5) This is pissing people off in a major way. There are people planning on never doing business with Creative again: http://boycottcreative.com/BoycottCreative.html and http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/BoycottCreative
(6) Creative is not doing very well (at all) financially (Gee, I wonder why?): http://www.creative.com/corporate/investor/ and http://finance.google.com/finance?q=OTC%3ACREAF
(7) A Driver "Modder" known as Daniel Kawakami (AKA "Daniel_K") found ways to re-enable 'features' for certain product Creative lines under Windows Vista, notably restoring the Full functionality on the various Creative Hardware under Windows Vista.
(8) This modder also made their Alchemy software work on non-creative sound products too, likely pissing off Creative more.
(9) The modder asked for donations for his freely available work, he acknowledges that was dumb, and pretty much everybody dumps on him for it.
(10) Many Creative Forum posts have been deleted (redacted) and many are available here: http://creative.edited.us/deleted.html
Interestingly, I created my
Those of you whom also worked there probably knew me, you certainly know the above address and phone number all too well. You had the job while you were in college, learned skills, and happily left around graduation time.
I am not here to badmouth or flame, just to say that I was completely unsurprised when this came to light. I could not believe the VP's posting and how he is clearly so out of touch with the reality of Creative's die-hard customers, their motives, and their sense of loyalty and fairness. He has probably lost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars with that single post if not more!
IN some people's opinions, Creative has now firmly placed itself on the path to be considered as clost to "The customer is always right." as the likes of Microso
The original meaning is closer to manipulation of systems:
Personally, I prefer using it in the most expansive sense: "One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations." Hackers would, therefore, include engineers, surgeons, editors, lawyers, politicans and so forth. You can have interesting discussions with people when you start off making a connection between what they do and hacking.
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
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.
April fools day is confusing me.... are you pretending the Creative drivers for XP don't suck?
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.
You're confusing me... are you saying that Creative hardware doesn't suck?
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.
Clickity
good article, short read. enjoy
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
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
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.
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
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).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
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.
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
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.
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