thats a might interesting business tactic there:- hose the horrible customers who pay the comcast wages.
running on the assumption that Comcast is not run by brain dead half arsed idiots, then there must be some logical explanation for such bizzare moves recently.
top of the list is the assumption that the majority of their users will not be affected by this and that they will no doubt happily lose the users that are. this is the kind of logic I have heard before from ISPs.
1. sell unlimited internet connection that due to the powers of obfuscated and cunning advertising is actually limited to XGb a month
2. limit the users that dare use more then they deem is reasonable for everyday use
3. quietly ban, drop or otherwise lose the 5% of horrible users who take 95% of the bandwith
4. ??
5. ??
6. too obvious
but in todays media rich net such tactics are not really viable. and such underhand tactics (by which I mean undeclared, unacknowledged throttling and limiting) are always going to be caught and trumpeted around the 'net. Comcast *must* know this, so therefore there is some rationale behind their moves that seems reasonable from their point of view. But for the life of me I cannot see it.
Eee Pc opened the floodgates - the future looks to be low power, SSD, minimal RAM long battery "laptop" style devices that will never run Vista in a million years.
This is about containment of Linux - as this is the OS of choice for this new breed.
I bet MS is shitting bricks over this, I have an Eee and the Linux flavor on it is very nice indeed. I still have not put Ubuntu on it.
I keep hearing that 70% of PCs in a year or so will be laptops, if 50% of them are low power devices then that 1/4 to 1/3 of PC in a few years that will not run Vista - you can kinda see why they are doing it.
However, when customers are told that they can only have Vista on their desktop or XP on their laptop they will be annoyed. Even more when XP is being phased out but new SPs are available for the "laptop" version of XP. I can understand what MS is doing, but I think it can (and will) go wrong for them in many ways. Interesting times ahead.
Well I don't read that an appeal has been filed yet.
But it will be.
To not appeal as this point is tantamount to agreeing to the decision to make it a standard. It is demonstrable that a great many people, companies and organizations do not agree (in fairly strong terms) as we can assume an appeal is inevitable.
At this point, an appeal makes a stand and casts doubt on OOXML as a standard - so win or lose in the appeal, the mere fact that there is one will help our case.
Lastly, I state again - if OOXML passed the agreed consultations and tests for a standard, was approved in the conventional standard, and brought a demonstrably superior implementation to ODF then I would accept it in a heartbeat.
(2) they won the ISO process then they lost as it forced a deep examination of the standard, and raised critical questions and caused them more problems then it solved.
(3) if nobody else implements this flawed standard then they lose as some Goverments are now also specifying cross platform implementation as well as open standard (perhaps in response to this mess)
(4) if (and this is real unlikely) there are other implementations of this standard (eg OO) then they lose as MS Office is no longer required to be ubiquitous on the desktop
This is NOT really a win for MS the way that I see it. They can spin this how they want and surely get away with it for a large amount of the population - but big business and govermental contracts (where the real money is) are already looking for an escape from propietry formats and have been for a while.
I'm really fucked off about the perversion of the ISO system, the bad practice, the lack of any "technology morals" in decisions that needed to be unbiased. But I am not that upset about OOXML being passed - I really do not think MS has won this one.
The important thing to watch now is how MS spins this and where the important money goes (big contracts, goverment).
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.
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.
...BUT...
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.
great, bloody typical. another/. story to make me feel stupid. FTFA:
"We generate indistinguishable photons from a semiconductor diode containing a InAs/GaAs quantum dot. Using an all-electrical technique to populate and control a single-photon emitting state we filter-out dephasing by Stark-shifting the emission energy on timescales below the dephasing time of the state. Mixing consecutive photons on a beam-splitter we observe two-photon interference with a visibility of 64%"
snooze. snooze. snort. no mention of stun, kill, slicing, death ray, x-ray specs or photonic propulsion, so there is nothing there for me.
if some obliging, and more informed/. reader could supply us all with an explanation why this is a big deal then on behalf of the others I'll be thanking you in advance.....
and like a jumper that has been badly washed, the ISO system will never be the same. trust takes a long time to build, but can be destroyed in an instant.
groklaw did a superb (as normal) run down on the appeals process, and this will be so inevitably roundly condemned that an appeal will almost certainly happen.
but really I'm quite OK about this being voted in, I always predicted a Pyhrric victory for MS. Here's my logic - if they did not manage to force this through then they lost. But they did manage to force it through and in the process created such scrutiny, condemnation, criticisms of OOXML and contempt from the industry that they still lost. OOXML is widely regarded as a flawed, massive, unimplementable standard, an evolved jumble of legacy components with little clarity. It will be fascinating to see if any other implementation will ever be implemented. Already moves are underway to specify cross platform implementations as required for many, many governments - and I think we can all see where that leaves MS.
Even if another portable implementation is ever implemented, then once again MS loses as their cash cow is no longer required on the corporate desktop.
I mourn for a once respected standards body, of course. But I think ISO has allowed this to happen to itself - it has lost its impartiality and technical clarity and I do not know where the future lies for it. In in ideal world only technical merit should of won out, and only one standard should ever of been introduced to meet a this requirement. If OOXML was demonstrably better then ODF should of been deprecated.
what I want is its big brother that can project HD image on the opposite wall, bright enough for normal viewing and about the size of a large book so I can hide it in the bookshelves on one side of the room and have a discreet drop down on the other. a small wireless remote could control the whole shebang.
or maybe what I want is the projector built into the lid or case of my laptop so I can project an image for 21" use in my hotel room or presentation, why would I want to carry another gadget?
or maybe I want the low resolution table top clock that can also project information, headlines, travel and weather onto my bedroom ceiling on a spoken command.
perhaps I want the discreet projector that can shine instructions or notes onto the smoked glass door in my hi tech corporate office. or airport. or train station.
why would I not want my sat nav to project onto my windscreen HUD like and stop me dangerously craning my neck to look at a 3" screen when I should be driving. while its at it, it can show key dashboard information as well.
what I absolutely do *not* need is a phone that can project images when hooked up to a matchbox - its a phone, thats all.
I like the tech, I really do - but I think they could do more with it!
anybody else got any cool ideas about what to do with a dinky little laser projector........?
Hope this is not an Aprils Fool, its about time somebody tried to roast those fuckers.
And I right that this is one of those situations that she was one of the few people who had a chance of doing this as she already had them in court and could add it in as an amendment?
If Joe Public tried this they would probably be able to block it before they got to court, no?
I just love the irony that they originally tried to block the complaint because it was not detailed enough, and that backfired when it came back as 100+ pages of **AA damming dirty laundry in their faces. Heh Heh.
whats that you say? a large company many years ago sought to corrupt the standards body and use the system for its own nefarious profit schemes? Thats outrageous.
Thanks heavens you could not get away with it these days!
Is anybody realized surprised that a panel of jurors could not understand the purpose and nature of a standards body? - if you treated it as a straight patent dispute Rambus were always going to win all the way. In fact I find it hard to see exactly what laws they were alleged to of broken, maybe something on bad faith or misrepresentation? Don't get me wrong - I am NOT defending those weaselly SOBs, that was a dirty trick - but they clearly saw a loophole and exploited it.
I would like to say that their name is MUD and their profit will be short lived - but we all know that the corporate ecosphere does not work like that and money talks.
thank fuck. I just checked the submission date to ensure this was not some vile and tasteless April fools from MS.
ahhhh. perhaps that why they moved the date of announcement? they did not want to annouce the OOXML was an approved international standard on April 1st...?
Seems like everything is on a precipice right now.
The ISO vote on OOXML, and in fact the ISO credability as an organization hangs in the balance. There will be other challanges to YES votes coming in soon as predicted by Groklaw - will the right thing happen? will ISO step back from the brink and do the right thing?
This is not the battle over, not by a long chalk, but it is a very commendable move indeed on behalf of Mr. Pepper.
May this strands of rationality and clear thinking grow strong and firm into a solid foundation of dissent and persuasion.
a large proportion of us were all tech kids and geeks at young ages and did this sort of thing - thought for me it was on a Commodore Pet, and then BBC B's at school.
but, never, not once would I of considered blocked my entire school from MySpace - I bet he gets a wedgie once an hour for that. dear god, he may be smart with computers but he's nothing about getting on with the other kids.
"This is kind of a small school, and I'm known as the computer whiz," - gad! he even sounds like an insufferable little whiny, snot.
I'm not knocking him for getting on with stuff, sorting out the network and helping the stupid teachers out, I'm knocking him because nobody likes a smart ass little kid.
Still, if it gets him into college and looks help gets him his first real job then I guess the last laugh is on him.
after re-reading the entire thread for my amusement, I think this is not a simple case of ineptitude from Creative.
after all they have the original source code and we have to assume some partway competant SW engineers.
it seems that some of what Daniel K did was reactivate some features that had been intentionally crippled from older cards.
this seems more to be nefarious decisions on backwards compatibilty and forward roadmap taken on profit grounds not technical grounds. after all, we of the/. community are more aware then others that there is no compelling reason at all why HW from XP should not work on Vista - but there might be commerical reasons why.
follow the logic here. a brand new and shiny OS hits the market and you need to release drivers for it. would it not be tempting to cripple some of the older cards and hence try and tease people to upgrade to the latest HW? even better you could hold back some of the features of the later versions and try to gain additional income for them in the form of top range drivers. its an insane tactic but one that is used in the field quite alot.
the bad thing is that somebody then dissassemles that code for the driver realises what has happened and then patches the removed functionality back in.
this tactic is very prevalent in the industry - by attempting to artificially shorten the product life cycle you try to force repeat purchace and then profit. when there are no more additional features you can dream up then you attempt to deprecate the original in order to force purchase of the new. Creatice make no money at all from people using old sound blaster tech on vista so they will do everything they can to halt it.
maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I see this sort of thing all the time and it make a more logical explanation to me then "large multinational cannot write new drivers even when they have the source code".
that really does seem a little petulant and/or puerile.
a more enlightented company might of examined what he did to see why it worked.
a more customer focused company might of actually listened to their customer complaints in the first place.
and a company with a serious long term investments in this technology might of actually installed some QA systems and ensured the drivers were fit for purpose in the first place.
there seems to be no effort, willing or investment from Creative at this point.
and, wheras there is some truth to Creative protecting their IP, and beign disgruntled about anybody else possibly releasing unsupported patched, I believe Daniel_K summed it up quite eloquently on his response. "The funny thing is that you are faster "protecting" your technologies and intellectual properties than providing improved drivers and softwares for your customers."
How we get out is simple, we don't be the irrepsonsible parents yours were and put our children out there in dangerous situations, but we also learn that sticking them into a bubble and locking them up for 18 years isn't healthy either.
that's your opinion and you are welcome to it, mine however is different. it's not that my parent were unique its that all parents were like that were I was. we were not in a city, there were no obvious threats and we were judged old enough and sensible enough not to do stupid things. of course, we still did some stupid things but only because we did not know better. we'd always tell them roughly what we were doing and where, and we always had change for a public phone box and we all knew enough phone numbers off by heart to be able to call people. also, in a small village - everybody knew everybody for any conceivable distance we would walk. perhaps I was priviliged to be raised in such an enviroment.
the end result is the same though, and one one thing we agree - putting kids in a soft, comfortable, safe jail for 18 years is not the answer either. so it boils down to the question of balance.
i do think that society has changed since the 70s though, and I'll give another example. before we moved to a village in the country we lived in the suberbs of London. now I remember that even at the age of 6/7 I could name most of the people in my street and they all knew who I was. I fell over once and hurt my leg and a passerby stopped, called to another neighbour he knew and she phoned my parents - just like that. I have lived where I am for nearly 15 years now and I know two people that live on my street and even then not so very well. in many ways we are more connected then ever, and in many others we are more seperated then ever.
this lack of "community" I think is one of the many reasons parents are afraid to be seperated from their children.
when I was younger (and no, I'm not that old) me and some friends would regularly meet up in the morning, raid respective parental kitchens for a pack lunch and vanish for 9-10 hours. We'd walk >5miles, make swings from old rope and swing out over the water cress beds, get soaked, throw stuff at each other and generally behave like children. This was before sat nav, gps, mobile phones and our parents had no way of contacting us. We all had small change for the public phones and the one time we needed help (someone broke a coller bone) we managed on our own to organise things.
It was simply how children behaved.
Now mothers are frightened to let children out of their sight, and a whole generation is growing up mollycoddled and unable to think on their own or take risks. Worse, numerous studies show that without exposure to other people, children to play with etc., they grow up lacking many social traits they need to learn from their peers and with little immunity for many common viruses. And don't even get me started on education.
It's sad, and I wonder (a) how we got to this situations and (b) how to get out of it.
not quite true, it rather depends on the servo/decoder system at use.
yes a DVD drive CAN play an audio disc - but the method it uses to get there can vary quite alot. if it is - for example - a data player such as DVD playing an audio disc then it can be confused by disc damage (or deliberate copy protection coding) and either refuse to play, lock up or badly degrade the signal. on the flip side of the argument it will generally run much much faster and buffer the audio hence giving it alot more time to retry the data reading and get better data. in short it reads the disc faster, can go back and retry bad data in real time as it plays out of the buffer - but expects perfect data without errors.
a red book CD player on the other hand will run as a CLV system (spin the disc at a constant linear velocity according the data path, ie fast on the inner edge like a record player) and output the audio as it reads it at 1X. this means that it can play straight over faults that would cripple a data player without even realising that they were there trusting on the error coding to hide them. thats what the large record companies thought would happen when they designed the copy protection to stop audio discs being ripped in data players. of course in these days of MP3 >~60% of all CD players are data players so they were forced to stop implementing such protection schemes a few years ago.
and of course to muddle the waters there are portable battery systems that spin at 4X,8X or even faster (but still CLV) buffer the audio to memory and then spin down to conserve power for 50 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
Gah.
I strongly suspect this will end up like the "watercolour" and "oils" filters on photoshop - as in "interesting, but no substitute for talent".
Expect to see this IP in karaoke and sing along machines to convince gullible people they have talent (and less money).
I have this weird mental image of George Gerswhin arguing with his new electronic piano (yes, I know he's dead) before throwing it out of his window.
thats a might interesting business tactic there:- hose the horrible customers who pay the comcast wages.
running on the assumption that Comcast is not run by brain dead half arsed idiots, then there must be some logical explanation for such bizzare moves recently.
top of the list is the assumption that the majority of their users will not be affected by this and that they will no doubt happily lose the users that are. this is the kind of logic I have heard before from ISPs.
1. sell unlimited internet connection that due to the powers of obfuscated and cunning advertising is actually limited to XGb a month
2. limit the users that dare use more then they deem is reasonable for everyday use
3. quietly ban, drop or otherwise lose the 5% of horrible users who take 95% of the bandwith
4. ??
5. ??
6. too obvious
but in todays media rich net such tactics are not really viable. and such underhand tactics (by which I mean undeclared, unacknowledged throttling and limiting) are always going to be caught and trumpeted around the 'net. Comcast *must* know this, so therefore there is some rationale behind their moves that seems reasonable from their point of view. But for the life of me I cannot see it.
no great shock here.
Eee Pc opened the floodgates - the future looks to be low power, SSD, minimal RAM long battery "laptop" style devices that will never run Vista in a million years.
This is about containment of Linux - as this is the OS of choice for this new breed.
I bet MS is shitting bricks over this, I have an Eee and the Linux flavor on it is very nice indeed. I still have not put Ubuntu on it.
I keep hearing that 70% of PCs in a year or so will be laptops, if 50% of them are low power devices then that 1/4 to 1/3 of PC in a few years that will not run Vista - you can kinda see why they are doing it.
However, when customers are told that they can only have Vista on their desktop or XP on their laptop they will be annoyed. Even more when XP is being phased out but new SPs are available for the "laptop" version of XP. I can understand what MS is doing, but I think it can (and will) go wrong for them in many ways. Interesting times ahead.
Well I don't read that an appeal has been filed yet.
But it will be.
To not appeal as this point is tantamount to agreeing to the decision to make it a standard. It is demonstrable that a great many people, companies and organizations do not agree (in fairly strong terms) as we can assume an appeal is inevitable.
At this point, an appeal makes a stand and casts doubt on OOXML as a standard - so win or lose in the appeal, the mere fact that there is one will help our case.
Lastly, I state again - if OOXML passed the agreed consultations and tests for a standard, was approved in the conventional standard, and brought a demonstrably superior implementation to ODF then I would accept it in a heartbeat.
ahhh, another mighty fine piece of intelligent design there.
sorry mate, somebody beat you to it. the "toilet snorkel" is already patented..
http://www.totallyabsurd.com/toiletsnorkel.htm
Oh sir! that really is a cute concept. And I think it will appeal to our very own guardian angel and wielder of the sword of justice Neelie Kroes.
Its the Pyhrric victory to end all.
(1) if they lost the ISO process then they lost
(2) they won the ISO process then they lost as it forced a deep examination of the standard, and raised critical questions and caused them more problems then it solved.
(3) if nobody else implements this flawed standard then they lose as some Goverments are now also specifying cross platform implementation as well as open standard (perhaps in response to this mess)
(4) if (and this is real unlikely) there are other implementations of this standard (eg OO) then they lose as MS Office is no longer required to be ubiquitous on the desktop
This is NOT really a win for MS the way that I see it. They can spin this how they want and surely get away with it for a large amount of the population - but big business and govermental contracts (where the real money is) are already looking for an escape from propietry formats and have been for a while.
I'm really fucked off about the perversion of the ISO system, the bad practice, the lack of any "technology morals" in decisions that needed to be unbiased. But I am not that upset about OOXML being passed - I really do not think MS has won this one.
The important thing to watch now is how MS spins this and where the important money goes (big contracts, goverment).
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.
so where is my damned "Zardoz" ring?
great, bloody typical. another /. story to make me feel stupid. FTFA:
/. reader could supply us all with an explanation why this is a big deal then on behalf of the others I'll be thanking you in advance.....
"We generate indistinguishable photons from a semiconductor diode containing a InAs/GaAs quantum dot. Using an all-electrical technique to populate and control a single-photon emitting state we filter-out dephasing by Stark-shifting the emission energy on timescales below the dephasing time of the state. Mixing consecutive photons on a beam-splitter we observe two-photon interference with a visibility of 64%"
snooze. snooze. snort. no mention of stun, kill, slicing, death ray, x-ray specs or photonic propulsion, so there is nothing there for me.
if some obliging, and more informed
there will be condemnation.
there will be appeals.
and like a jumper that has been badly washed, the ISO system will never be the same. trust takes a long time to build, but can be destroyed in an instant.
groklaw did a superb (as normal) run down on the appeals process, and this will be so inevitably roundly condemned that an appeal will almost certainly happen.
but really I'm quite OK about this being voted in, I always predicted a Pyhrric victory for MS. Here's my logic - if they did not manage to force this through then they lost. But they did manage to force it through and in the process created such scrutiny, condemnation, criticisms of OOXML and contempt from the industry that they still lost. OOXML is widely regarded as a flawed, massive, unimplementable standard, an evolved jumble of legacy components with little clarity. It will be fascinating to see if any other implementation will ever be implemented. Already moves are underway to specify cross platform implementations as required for many, many governments - and I think we can all see where that leaves MS.
Even if another portable implementation is ever implemented, then once again MS loses as their cash cow is no longer required on the corporate desktop.
I mourn for a once respected standards body, of course. But I think ISO has allowed this to happen to itself - it has lost its impartiality and technical clarity and I do not know where the future lies for it. In in ideal world only technical merit should of won out, and only one standard should ever of been introduced to meet a this requirement. If OOXML was demonstrably better then ODF should of been deprecated.
Just my 2 cents.
bugger that.
what I want is its big brother that can project HD image on the opposite wall, bright enough for normal viewing and about the size of a large book so I can hide it in the bookshelves on one side of the room and have a discreet drop down on the other. a small wireless remote could control the whole shebang.
or maybe what I want is the projector built into the lid or case of my laptop so I can project an image for 21" use in my hotel room or presentation, why would I want to carry another gadget?
or maybe I want the low resolution table top clock that can also project information, headlines, travel and weather onto my bedroom ceiling on a spoken command.
perhaps I want the discreet projector that can shine instructions or notes onto the smoked glass door in my hi tech corporate office. or airport. or train station.
why would I not want my sat nav to project onto my windscreen HUD like and stop me dangerously craning my neck to look at a 3" screen when I should be driving. while its at it, it can show key dashboard information as well.
what I absolutely do *not* need is a phone that can project images when hooked up to a matchbox - its a phone, thats all.
I like the tech, I really do - but I think they could do more with it!
anybody else got any cool ideas about what to do with a dinky little laser projector........?
Hope this is not an Aprils Fool, its about time somebody tried to roast those fuckers.
And I right that this is one of those situations that she was one of the few people who had a chance of doing this as she already had them in court and could add it in as an amendment?
If Joe Public tried this they would probably be able to block it before they got to court, no?
I just love the irony that they originally tried to block the complaint because it was not detailed enough, and that backfired when it came back as 100+ pages of **AA damming dirty laundry in their faces. Heh Heh.
whats that you say? a large company many years ago sought to corrupt the standards body and use the system for its own nefarious profit schemes? Thats outrageous.
Thanks heavens you could not get away with it these days!
Is anybody realized surprised that a panel of jurors could not understand the purpose and nature of a standards body? - if you treated it as a straight patent dispute Rambus were always going to win all the way. In fact I find it hard to see exactly what laws they were alleged to of broken, maybe something on bad faith or misrepresentation? Don't get me wrong - I am NOT defending those weaselly SOBs, that was a dirty trick - but they clearly saw a loophole and exploited it.
more on the whole sorry episode here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Lawsuits
I would like to say that their name is MUD and their profit will be short lived - but we all know that the corporate ecosphere does not work like that and money talks.
thank fuck. I just checked the submission date to ensure this was not some vile and tasteless April fools from MS.
ahhhh. perhaps that why they moved the date of announcement? they did not want to annouce the OOXML was an approved international standard on April 1st...?
Seems like everything is on a precipice right now.
The ISO vote on OOXML, and in fact the ISO credability as an organization hangs in the balance. There will be other challanges to YES votes coming in soon as predicted by Groklaw - will the right thing happen? will ISO step back from the brink and do the right thing?
This is not the battle over, not by a long chalk, but it is a very commendable move indeed on behalf of Mr. Pepper.
May this strands of rationality and clear thinking grow strong and firm into a solid foundation of dissent and persuasion.
ok, enough! yes its bad, its annoying, its down right underhanded.
BUT WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT?
it there any body that can be complained to?
will the countries whose votes have been hijacked have any recourse to complain?
what is the correct procedure to strike down an ISO standard?
how can this be stopped?
will it, actually, make any difference if it is a standard?
is there any appeal procedure?
what is the next step for the ODF backers?
has ISO got any credibility left?
we are engineers, we should waste less energy on complaining (though I'll admit we do that well) and actually attempt to do something about this.
oh come on, this is /.
a large proportion of us were all tech kids and geeks at young ages and did this sort of thing - thought for me it was on a Commodore Pet, and then BBC B's at school.
but, never, not once would I of considered blocked my entire school from MySpace - I bet he gets a wedgie once an hour for that. dear god, he may be smart with computers but he's nothing about getting on with the other kids.
"This is kind of a small school, and I'm known as the computer whiz," - gad! he even sounds like an insufferable little whiny, snot.
I'm not knocking him for getting on with stuff, sorting out the network and helping the stupid teachers out, I'm knocking him because nobody likes a smart ass little kid.
Still, if it gets him into college and looks help gets him his first real job then I guess the last laugh is on him.
heh. you must be new here....
after re-reading the entire thread for my amusement, I think this is not a simple case of ineptitude from Creative.
/. community are more aware then others that there is no compelling reason at all why HW from XP should not work on Vista - but there might be commerical reasons why.
after all they have the original source code and we have to assume some partway competant SW engineers.
it seems that some of what Daniel K did was reactivate some features that had been intentionally crippled from older cards.
this seems more to be nefarious decisions on backwards compatibilty and forward roadmap taken on profit grounds not technical grounds. after all, we of the
follow the logic here. a brand new and shiny OS hits the market and you need to release drivers for it. would it not be tempting to cripple some of the older cards and hence try and tease people to upgrade to the latest HW? even better you could hold back some of the features of the later versions and try to gain additional income for them in the form of top range drivers. its an insane tactic but one that is used in the field quite alot.
the bad thing is that somebody then dissassemles that code for the driver realises what has happened and then patches the removed functionality back in.
this tactic is very prevalent in the industry - by attempting to artificially shorten the product life cycle you try to force repeat purchace and then profit. when there are no more additional features you can dream up then you attempt to deprecate the original in order to force purchase of the new. Creatice make no money at all from people using old sound blaster tech on vista so they will do everything they can to halt it.
maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I see this sort of thing all the time and it make a more logical explanation to me then "large multinational cannot write new drivers even when they have the source code".
comments?
hmm.
that really does seem a little petulant and/or puerile.
a more enlightented company might of examined what he did to see why it worked.
a more customer focused company might of actually listened to their customer complaints in the first place.
and a company with a serious long term investments in this technology might of actually installed some QA systems and ensured the drivers were fit for purpose in the first place.
there seems to be no effort, willing or investment from Creative at this point.
and, wheras there is some truth to Creative protecting their IP, and beign disgruntled about anybody else possibly releasing unsupported patched, I believe Daniel_K summed it up quite eloquently on his response. "The funny thing is that you are faster "protecting" your technologies and intellectual properties than providing improved drivers and softwares for your customers."
that's your opinion and you are welcome to it, mine however is different. it's not that my parent were unique its that all parents were like that were I was. we were not in a city, there were no obvious threats and we were judged old enough and sensible enough not to do stupid things. of course, we still did some stupid things but only because we did not know better. we'd always tell them roughly what we were doing and where, and we always had change for a public phone box and we all knew enough phone numbers off by heart to be able to call people. also, in a small village - everybody knew everybody for any conceivable distance we would walk. perhaps I was priviliged to be raised in such an enviroment.
the end result is the same though, and one one thing we agree - putting kids in a soft, comfortable, safe jail for 18 years is not the answer either. so it boils down to the question of balance.
i do think that society has changed since the 70s though, and I'll give another example. before we moved to a village in the country we lived in the suberbs of London. now I remember that even at the age of 6/7 I could name most of the people in my street and they all knew who I was. I fell over once and hurt my leg and a passerby stopped, called to another neighbour he knew and she phoned my parents - just like that. I have lived where I am for nearly 15 years now and I know two people that live on my street and even then not so very well. in many ways we are more connected then ever, and in many others we are more seperated then ever.
this lack of "community" I think is one of the many reasons parents are afraid to be seperated from their children.
when I was younger (and no, I'm not that old) me and some friends would regularly meet up in the morning, raid respective parental kitchens for a pack lunch and vanish for 9-10 hours. We'd walk >5miles, make swings from old rope and swing out over the water cress beds, get soaked, throw stuff at each other and generally behave like children. This was before sat nav, gps, mobile phones and our parents had no way of contacting us. We all had small change for the public phones and the one time we needed help (someone broke a coller bone) we managed on our own to organise things.
It was simply how children behaved.
Now mothers are frightened to let children out of their sight, and a whole generation is growing up mollycoddled and unable to think on their own or take risks. Worse, numerous studies show that without exposure to other people, children to play with etc., they grow up lacking many social traits they need to learn from their peers and with little immunity for many common viruses. And don't even get me started on education.
It's sad, and I wonder (a) how we got to this situations and (b) how to get out of it.
not quite true, it rather depends on the servo/decoder system at use.
yes a DVD drive CAN play an audio disc - but the method it uses to get there can vary quite alot. if it is - for example - a data player such as DVD playing an audio disc then it can be confused by disc damage (or deliberate copy protection coding) and either refuse to play, lock up or badly degrade the signal. on the flip side of the argument it will generally run much much faster and buffer the audio hence giving it alot more time to retry the data reading and get better data. in short it reads the disc faster, can go back and retry bad data in real time as it plays out of the buffer - but expects perfect data without errors.
a red book CD player on the other hand will run as a CLV system (spin the disc at a constant linear velocity according the data path, ie fast on the inner edge like a record player) and output the audio as it reads it at 1X. this means that it can play straight over faults that would cripple a data player without even realising that they were there trusting on the error coding to hide them. thats what the large record companies thought would happen when they designed the copy protection to stop audio discs being ripped in data players. of course in these days of MP3 >~60% of all CD players are data players so they were forced to stop implementing such protection schemes a few years ago.
and of course to muddle the waters there are portable battery systems that spin at 4X,8X or even faster (but still CLV) buffer the audio to memory and then spin down to conserve power for 50 seconds.
hope that clears it up.