I am quite glad I came across this. I had Creative on a purchasing blacklist for 5+ years now, and was just thinking about giving them another chance...
How did they get onto this list? By pulling the EXACT SAME STUNT you guys are talking about for Vista and Audigy and I experienced with XP and Live. The strategy to "support" the customer was pretty much:
"Send us $20 to get a CD with new drivers on it, which... by the way, won't work either"
Leaving the user to try and find hacked up drivers on the web that actually worked worth a damn.
So... I see now that some things will never change. And I extend my blacklisting of Creative's products another 5 or more years.
I refuse to purchase anything from a vendor which, as a matter of policy, holds the paying customer hostage for more money just to use the item for it's most basic purposes.
I was immediately reminded of this story, pasted from: http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/~bilke/pub/FreeBSD/texas _daemons.html
----------------------
Last week I walked into a local "home style cookin' restaurant/watering hole" in Texas to pick up a take-out order. I spoke briefly to the waitress behind the counter, who told me my order would be done in a few minutes.
So, while I was busy gazing at the farm implements hanging on the walls, I was approached by two "natives." These guys might just be the original Texas rednecks.
"Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?"
Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.
"Are you a Satanist?"
Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.
"Uh, no, I can't say that I am."
"Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?" they asked.
I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said,
"No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo."
"Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there."
I was this close to slapping one of them and causing a scene -- then I stopped and noticed the shirt I happened to be wearing that day. Sure enough, it had a picture of a small, devilish-looking creature that has for some time now been associated with a certain operating system. In this particular representation, the creature was wearing sneakers.
They continued: "See, ma'am, we don't exactly appreciate it when people show off pictures of the devil. Especially when he's lookin' so friendly."
These idiots sounded terrifyingly serious.
Me: "Oh, well, see, this isn't really the devil, it's just, well, it's sort of a mascot."
Native: "And what kind of football team has the devil as a mascot?"
Me: "Oh, it's not a team. It's an operating -- uh, a kind of computer."
I figured that an ATM machine was about as much technology as these guys could handle, and I knew that if I so much as uttered the word "UNIX" I would only make things worse.
Native: "Where does this satanical computer come from?"
Me: "California. And there's nothing satanical about it really." Somewhere along the line here, the waitress noticed my predicament -- but these guys probably outweighed her by 600 pounds, so all she did was look at me sympathetically and run off into the kitchen.
Native: "Ma'am, I think you're lying. And we'd appreciate it if you'd leave the premises now."
Fortunately, the waitress returned that very instant with my order, and they agreed that it would be okay for me to actually pay for my food before I left. While I was at the cash register, they amused themselves by talking to each other.
Native #1: "Do you think the police know about these devil computers?"
Native #2: "If they come from California, then the FBI oughta know about 'em."
They escorted me to the door. I tried one last time: "You're really blowing this all out of proportion. A lot of people use this `kind of computers.' Universities, researchers, businesses. They're actually very useful."
Big, big, BIG mistake. I should have guessed at what came next.
Native: "Does the government use these devil computers?"
Me: "Yes."
Another BIG boo-boo.
Native: "And does the government pay for 'em? With our tax dollars?"
I decided that it was time to jump ship.
Me: "No. Nope. Not at all. Your tax dollars never entered the picture at all. I promise. No sir, not a penny. Our good Christian congressmen would never let something like that happen. Nope. Never. Bye."
I was in Grade 11... like 13 years ago... and we had these wierd Unisys Icon machines running QNX. The hardware was roughly like a PC w/ CGA graphics, were 80186 based, and could emulate a PC (abiet agonizingly slowly... took 5 minutes to load WordPerfect 4.2)
Anyways... I had discovered these books which were basically printouts of the man(2) pages. I'm learning C at the time, and find the function to do..... basically the same thing as a 'net send', which would broadcast a message to all machines.
I wrote a 5-line program, that would take a message from argv, and plug it into the function, boom... every console in the lab displayed it.
I didn't get suspended, but once the program got around to others, and people started blasting expletives across the network... they wound up banning me from the lab for a week.
*sigh* This unfortunately was just one of many ways in which experimenting with computers in high school got me into trouble.
It seems pretty rough... the begining attempt to reverse engineer the format, definately not a definative spec, but maybe a good start for writing a converter?
I once got modded down for saying this, and I'll risk it again. SPEWS rots... good riddance... their policies have always been irresponsible, and offer no reasonable notification or means to dispute a listing.
I'm a happy user of many other RBL style lists... but this one I would never have touched with a 10 foot pole, and I always advocated others do likewise.
Hopefully this final anti-social act of theirs ensures their complete demise.
I remember a long time ago, at a company I worked for, we were having an issue with someone poking into someone else's mailbox.
I mean, what we did was no big deal at all really, all we did was have a script run out of cron that would report a change to the mailboxes atime to an outside address.
The idea was that the person whose mailbox was being violated would KNOW when they accessed it, and a notification that happened at a time they didnt expect would alert them to someone poking around.
Speaking of hardware issues, VMWare doesn't like some of the ways FreeBSD performs some operations now. You need to recompile the kernel with an option to disable use of CMPXCHG to get it to run ok.
Basically it'll just keeeep sloooowiing doooown.
But you can fudge through the install easily enough by suspending/resuming the VM, which will bring it back to speed. You need to do it a few times mind you as it keeps slowing down.:/
Interop between 802.11b cards can be sketchy enough as is.
I really wish the vendors would concentrate on getting the existing 'standard' working well enough first before going faster. Things like support for real security (TKIP, EAP), and Ad-Hoc
Even just basic WEP is sketchy on a lot of cards, causing serious throughput issues, or worse, crashing the card.
They've got ODB-II support as part of the project.
For those who don't know it's a 'standard' way to interface to the car's onboard computer that most newer (~1995+) cars support. I don't recall all the specifics right now, but there's three different flavors (sort of the physical layer) of ODB-II. It roughly (but not quite) breaks down into North American, Asian, and Eurpoean makes. (i think)
You can easily query all kinds of things in realtime, view logs/alerts, and probably a ton more.
I've briefly looked into this for someone who likes to tinker with cars, and I sense I'll be looking into it much more soon.:)
I'd missed the original article, so I don't know the whole story. But if there IS any truth to the Java port, I feel the need to point out Corel's failed venture to port the Wordperfect suite over to Java.
Why would it be any better to try such a thing now?
I caught this one on LWN last week and gave him my 2 cents. I quiped that they must be taking Microsoft's money to write such drivel, and he felt the need to mention 'people's hate for Microsoft is irrelevant'. I only really threw the Microsoft thing at him, as it's funny this comes out JUST after Microsoft tried similar BS in court.
His reasoning seems to be follow a 'need to keep it secret' train of though which is absurd on a number of levels. (including the ability to have open code and secret, internal-only stuff co-existing, private branches, yada yada)
The funniest thing he said, I'll quote verbatim for you:
"True patriots will come to grips with the reality that really bad people want more information about our nation's computer systems; and giving any bad people indiscreetly any information about our systems is reckless."
I love the 'yer-not-a-patriot-if-you-dont-agree' brainwash attempt, coupled with the kiddie talk about the 'really bad people'.
I'm immune to flag-waving patriotism pressures though, since I'm not American.:P
I specifically mentioned NSA's secure Linux as sort of a proof that, well... this guys ARE in the security business after all, they've likely weighed out the risks involved, and saw little.
In fact if you have a look at their FAQ, they specifically say they don't quite have things with Linux to the point they could use it for some of the most demandingly secure needs. But they seem optimistic that at some point they might.
Anything NSA (or whoever) does to harden software, and give back to the community, helps harden everyone elses systems too. The sharing is not a bad thing for anyone involved really.
This whole thing is just a new twist on Microsoft's 'OMG! The GPL ate my IP'.
Well, there's no convincing zealots that their way isn't the only way of dealing with a problem.
And it's amazing how once can't honestly express their frustrations with a poorly-managed organization without being tagged as flamebait.
My mail servers are just fine thank you very much, my issue is simply that there was never time allowed to repair before being listed. That's like being charged with a crime, and being forced to serve your time before your trial, regardless of whether you were found guilty or not.
Not only that, but the act of scaning someone's servers without their expressed permision to do so is no less a theft of service than spam is. Not only that, but to me, what they are doing is no less invasive than portscanning the networks, which is s seriously grey legal area.
Don't get me wrong.... I hate spam as much as the next guy.... but theres intelligent ways to deal with it, and theres assinine ways of dealing with it. I just happen to feel that ORBZ fell into the latter category.
It was never very good for anything but bouncing legit emails and causing uneeded headaches anyhow.
Automated blacklists are just simply a bad idea. Period.
They were never any better than the spammers themselves IMHO, employing the same kind of tactics to try and cram an email through your server, and then making your life miserable after suceeding.
Something like RBL is much better as there is actually some human thought involved before sinking that sources emails to/dev/null.
Slashdot Mirror
I am quite glad I came across this. I had Creative on a purchasing blacklist for 5+ years now, and was just thinking about giving them another chance...
How did they get onto this list? By pulling the EXACT SAME STUNT you guys are talking about for Vista and Audigy and I experienced with XP and Live. The strategy to "support" the customer was pretty much:
"Send us $20 to get a CD with new drivers on it, which... by the way, won't work either"
Leaving the user to try and find hacked up drivers on the web that actually worked worth a damn.
So... I see now that some things will never change. And I extend my blacklisting of Creative's products another 5 or more years.
I refuse to purchase anything from a vendor which, as a matter of policy, holds the paying customer hostage for more money just to use the item for it's most basic purposes.
That back in the day... Gnome was championed for it's openness over the "evil" KDE for choosing to using encumbered libraries? (Anyone remember FreeQT? Or RMS Making noise about the whole thing?) My how things change over time.
I was immediately reminded of this story, pasted from: http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/~bilke/pub/FreeBSD/texas _daemons.html
----------------------
Last week I walked into a local "home style cookin' restaurant/watering hole" in Texas to pick up a take-out order. I spoke briefly to the waitress behind the counter, who told me my order would be done in a few minutes.
So, while I was busy gazing at the farm implements hanging on the walls, I was approached by two "natives." These guys might just be the original Texas rednecks.
"Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?"
Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.
"Are you a Satanist?"
Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.
"Uh, no, I can't say that I am."
"Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?" they asked.
I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said,
"No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo."
"Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there."
I was this close to slapping one of them and causing a scene -- then I stopped and noticed the shirt I happened to be wearing that day. Sure enough, it had a picture of a small, devilish-looking creature that has for some time now been associated with a certain operating system. In this particular representation, the creature was wearing sneakers.
They continued: "See, ma'am, we don't exactly appreciate it when people show off pictures of the devil. Especially when he's lookin' so friendly."
These idiots sounded terrifyingly serious.
Me: "Oh, well, see, this isn't really the devil, it's just, well, it's sort of a mascot."
Native: "And what kind of football team has the devil as a mascot?"
Me: "Oh, it's not a team. It's an operating -- uh, a kind of computer."
I figured that an ATM machine was about as much technology as these guys could handle, and I knew that if I so much as uttered the word "UNIX" I would only make things worse.
Native: "Where does this satanical computer come from?"
Me: "California. And there's nothing satanical about it really." Somewhere along the line here, the waitress noticed my predicament -- but these guys probably outweighed her by 600 pounds, so all she did was look at me sympathetically and run off into the kitchen.
Native: "Ma'am, I think you're lying. And we'd appreciate it if you'd leave the premises now."
Fortunately, the waitress returned that very instant with my order, and they agreed that it would be okay for me to actually pay for my food before I left. While I was at the cash register, they amused themselves by talking to each other.
Native #1: "Do you think the police know about these devil computers?"
Native #2: "If they come from California, then the FBI oughta know about 'em."
They escorted me to the door. I tried one last time: "You're really blowing this all out of proportion. A lot of people use this `kind of computers.' Universities, researchers, businesses. They're actually very useful."
Big, big, BIG mistake. I should have guessed at what came next.
Native: "Does the government use these devil computers?"
Me: "Yes."
Another BIG boo-boo.
Native: "And does the government pay for 'em? With our tax dollars?"
I decided that it was time to jump ship.
Me: "No. Nope. Not at all. Your tax dollars never entered the picture at all. I promise. No sir, not a penny. Our good Christian congressmen would never let something like that happen. Nope. Never. Bye."
Texas. What a country.
No kidding, that site he's setup probably borders on slander, and if nothing else, is extremely creepy.
Yes, I'm still using an HP branded GDM, and have my dad setup with a Digital branded one. Paid $20 a pop for them.
The dang cable to hook em up cost more than the monitor actually.
I was in Grade 11... like 13 years ago... and we had these wierd Unisys Icon machines running QNX. The hardware was roughly like a PC w/ CGA graphics, were 80186 based, and could emulate a PC (abiet agonizingly slowly... took 5 minutes to load WordPerfect 4.2)
Anyways... I had discovered these books which were basically printouts of the man(2) pages. I'm learning C at the time, and find the function to do..... basically the same thing as a 'net send', which would broadcast a message to all machines.
I wrote a 5-line program, that would take a message from argv, and plug it into the function, boom... every console in the lab displayed it.
I didn't get suspended, but once the program got around to others, and people started blasting expletives across the network... they wound up banning me from the lab for a week.
*sigh* This unfortunately was just one of many ways in which experimenting with computers in high school got me into trouble.
There's a download at:
http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?page=5&s=misc
It seems pretty rough... the begining attempt to reverse engineer the format, definately not a definative spec, but maybe a good start for writing a converter?
I played this game mostly on my PC. Perhaps they should sue the maker of my mainboard, hard disk, and video card too?
I once got modded down for saying this, and I'll risk it again. SPEWS rots... good riddance... their policies have always been irresponsible, and offer no reasonable notification or means to dispute a listing.
I'm a happy user of many other RBL style lists... but this one I would never have touched with a 10 foot pole, and I always advocated others do likewise.
Hopefully this final anti-social act of theirs ensures their complete demise.
Mod away....
I remember a long time ago, at a company I worked for, we were having an issue with someone poking into someone else's mailbox.
I mean, what we did was no big deal at all really, all we did was have a script run out of cron that would report a change to the mailboxes atime to an outside address.
The idea was that the person whose mailbox was being violated would KNOW when they accessed it, and a notification that happened at a time they didnt expect would alert them to someone poking around.
Anyhoo... just popped into mind reading this.
Speaking of hardware issues, VMWare doesn't like some of the ways FreeBSD performs some operations now. You need to recompile the kernel with an option to disable use of CMPXCHG to get it to run ok.
:/
Basically it'll just keeeep sloooowiing doooown.
But you can fudge through the install easily enough by suspending/resuming the VM, which will bring it back to speed. You need to do it a few times mind you as it keeps slowing down.
A lot more polish than the 5.0 release.
Also a lot more of the new stuff on by default.
Interop between 802.11b cards can be sketchy enough as is.
I really wish the vendors would concentrate on getting the existing 'standard' working well enough first before going faster. Things like support for real security (TKIP, EAP), and Ad-Hoc
Even just basic WEP is sketchy on a lot of cards, causing serious throughput issues, or worse, crashing the card.
Get it together folks!
For the price of an IDE/ATAPI device plus converters, you could get full blown SCSI devices, and not deal with the added parts to break down.
Interesting. Yes.
Practical. Not so sure.
They've got ODB-II support as part of the project.
For those who don't know it's a 'standard' way to interface to the car's onboard computer that most newer (~1995+) cars support. I don't recall all the specifics right now, but there's three different flavors (sort of the physical layer) of ODB-II. It roughly (but not quite) breaks down into North American, Asian, and Eurpoean makes. (i think)
You can easily query all kinds of things in realtime, view logs/alerts, and probably a ton more.
I've briefly looked into this for someone who likes to tinker with cars, and I sense I'll be looking into it much more soon.
I'd missed the original article, so I don't know the whole story. But if there IS any truth to the Java port, I feel the need to point out Corel's failed venture to port the Wordperfect suite over to Java.
Why would it be any better to try such a thing now?
I caught this one on LWN last week and gave him my 2 cents. I quiped that they must be taking Microsoft's money to write such drivel, and he felt the need to mention 'people's hate for Microsoft is irrelevant'. I only really threw the Microsoft thing at him, as it's funny this comes out JUST after Microsoft tried similar BS in court.
:P
His reasoning seems to be follow a 'need to keep it secret' train of though which is absurd on a number of levels. (including the ability to have open code and secret, internal-only stuff co-existing, private branches, yada yada)
The funniest thing he said, I'll quote verbatim for you:
"True patriots will come to grips with the reality that really bad people want more information about our nation's computer systems; and giving any bad people indiscreetly any information about our systems is reckless."
I love the 'yer-not-a-patriot-if-you-dont-agree' brainwash attempt, coupled with the kiddie talk about the 'really bad people'.
I'm immune to flag-waving patriotism pressures though, since I'm not American.
I specifically mentioned NSA's secure Linux as sort of a proof that, well... this guys ARE in the security business after all, they've likely weighed out the risks involved, and saw little.
In fact if you have a look at their FAQ, they specifically say they don't quite have things with Linux to the point they could use it for some of the most demandingly secure needs. But they seem optimistic that at some point they might.
Anything NSA (or whoever) does to harden software, and give back to the community, helps harden everyone elses systems too. The sharing is not a bad thing for anyone involved really.
This whole thing is just a new twist on Microsoft's 'OMG! The GPL ate my IP'.
'OMG the terrorists saw our SCSI driver!'
Well, there's no convincing zealots that their way
isn't the only way of dealing with a problem.
And it's amazing how once can't honestly express their
frustrations with a poorly-managed organization without
being tagged as flamebait.
My mail servers are just fine thank you very much, my
issue is simply that there was never time allowed to repair
before being listed. That's like being charged with a crime,
and being forced to serve your time before your trial,
regardless of whether you were found guilty or not.
Not only that, but the act of scaning someone's servers
without their expressed permision to do so is no less
a theft of service than spam is. Not only that, but to me,
what they are doing is no less invasive than portscanning
the networks, which is s seriously grey legal area.
Don't get me wrong.... I hate spam as much as the next
guy.... but theres intelligent ways to deal with it, and theres
assinine ways of dealing with it. I just happen to feel that
ORBZ fell into the latter category.
'scuse me!
It was never very good for anything but bouncing
legit emails and causing uneeded headaches anyhow.
Automated blacklists are just simply a bad idea. Period.
They were never any better than the spammers
themselves IMHO, employing the same kind of tactics
to try and cram an email through your server, and then
making your life miserable after suceeding.
Something like RBL is much better as there is actually
some human thought involved before sinking that sources
emails to
They're at: http://www.rocklinux.org , They've been around a while, and much of the ideas are similar re: rebuilding the whole thing locally.
What if someone accidentally rips my laptop? :)
We just purchased licenses of this at work. Wonderful product IMHO. We managed to backup about 20Mb/s over 10BaseT network thanks to it's compression.
Very cool, and it supports the nifty tape library we just purchased too.