I'm just worried that things will get out of hand.... how many millions are we talking before source is released?
Oh, infinite, definitely. This is a proposal coming from programmers, not businesspeople.
Sun and Apple don't have to make money selling their respective operating systems. They can happily make money on "related services" and hardware.
The problem is that every time developers try to deal with legalese, they take this basic humans-are-honest philosophy that works pretty well in development groups and would never, never work in the business world.
The only really reasonable approach is a flat time limit. Basing it on installed seats is a tough call, even, and that's much more straightforward than "money made". Who's going to do the counting -- Sun?
he actually was one of a few politicians actively promoting the internet.
Simply rephrase it so that Slashdotters can appreciate it: without Gore, there very likely would have been no public school Internet access, and far less infrastructure available to higher education institutions. Imagine Dubya in the driver's seat all those years [shudder] -- lots of guns, lousy network.
I've never been a gadget freak. I don't spend much on my computer, and I don't have any gizmos like a laptop, PDA, cell phone, etc. However, I would *love* to have something like this. I started thinking that it might have to be a thin client, to reduce costs and increase life -- but that doesn't do you any good, since Vietnam isn't covered by 802.11b.
I'd be happy with a lesser device:
Small and durable (I was packing three and a half weeks of clothes and stuff in a moderately large backpack)
Small is nice, though a typeable keyboard, aside from a few less-than-usable oddities like projected or flexible keyboards, makes the entire device rather large. There's the collapseable Palm keyboard, but that seems to be rather fragile. I could see subnotebook size being okay. Durable is good, but doesn't have to be much more so than a laptop.
Long battery life (able to get in a good 8-hour programming session without interruption)
Amen. The more the better. Eight hours is definitely a minimum.
Able to use a keyboard (I can't write C code from Grafitti)
Yup. And making the keyboard *too* weird can make the thing unusable.
Reasonable screen resolution (I need to be able to see at least 80 columns by 40 lines)
I'd be fine with a text terminal and the associated circuitry.
Ability to run a wide variety of programming tools (at least a good editor, C compiler, and probably several common scripting languages as well)
"Good editor" for me implies emacs, which won't run on a small client. An editor with emacsable keystrokes and source so that it can be modified is pretty reasonable. And a single compiler is all that's necessary.
External mass storage of some kind (I'd settle for SD or CF cards)
Nice, but I could see living without it. Needs to have at least one form of high-speed output (USB 2, ethernet, something).
Relatively inexpensive: $200-$400 is a good range (I don't want to be too upset if it gets lost, stolen or dropped off of a cliff)"
Yup. Unfortunately, I don't see it doing so. Not enough geeks in the world, so engineering costs are significant (decidedly unusual device, very limited market).
What would you have to do to do something like this in Windows land? Some sort of.DLL monkeybusiness? Registry hacking?
You've got excellent PDF support on any general purpose Linux distro.
I can't figure out exactly why you'd want a "PDF and Email" option. I mean, I'm sure that there are a few people that might want this, but it seems that it's not that common of an application.
It requires the DGPS station to be fairly close to the handset as it needs to be using the same satellites - and therefore to be receiving the same information.
I'd imagine that if you have three nodes on a wider area where each one only recieves data from one of the satellites in question, and the nodes have precisely synced clocks, you're also okay.
This is fine for civilian use, but military units that wanted to radio home for the current reference offset would need to break radio silence.
One of the nicest things about GPS is that you *don't* have to have any other sort of telecom systems up and running -- GPS just works everywhere.
Bush is a jerk. If he thinks that GPS is going to help Iraqi troops worth a damn, he's in for a surprise. They can tell just fine when there's a plane overhead and shoot at it. In the meantime, it screws over civilians everywhere. I suppose doing otherwise would be to break Bush administration traditions -- screwing over civilians to benefit the military.
Uh...I've used Red Hat for years. I download updates when they come out via apt-get, yum, manually when advisories come up on securityfocus...and the problem is that I don't get an email from Red Hat personally?
The subscription may be more than worth it to a business, but the consumer is hardly under any onus to purchase it.
The Microsoft Office document formats are not viral, because they affect nothing other than themselves. If you install Microsoft Word on your computer, all of your SurfWriter documents remain in SurfWriter format; nothing changes.
No -- I have to disagree here. There's a two-phase propagation mechanism. It's a pain to deal with other people's Word documents if you don't have Word, and the easiest thing to do when you're working in Word is save in.doc format. Documents take over applications, which then produce more documents. That sounds fairly viral to me.
The GPL, on the other hand, spreads. If you link GPL-licensed code in with your project, poof! Your project is now GPL-licensed as well, for better or for worse.
No. Nothing in the world can force your code to suddenly be relicensed, except for perhaps a document you sign (without reading) or someone who you gave power of attorney to.
You cannot *legally* link GPL code to non-GPL code. The assumption is that, at build time, people implicitly create a derived copy that is GPL-licensed. Most of the time, this is fine -- they follow the rules of the GPL for that binary build, and there's no problem. However, that is simply a convenient assumption. Someone who built a piece of BSD-licensed software for KDE, for instance, could be sued, and the author claim that they did not implicitly relicense the code. Of course, the person would simply say that they had, and the lawsuit would be dead. However, the act of linking is not legally sufficient, in and of itself, to relicense a piece of software.
Compare to a more obvious example -- if you take a piece of code from a GPLed program, and then use that code in a propriatary product, the product does not immediately become GPLed. It *is* infringing on a copyright, but the infringer can pay damages in a cout case and stop using the code.
Okay, fair enough. As I posted below, I was going on an article in a 1986 edition of World Book that I read some years ago. It didn't state what date the tribal environment was still in place -- but if you move a few years back, you have people doing the same thing.
Unfortunately, it's getting rather hard to find a society that *isn't* deeply influenced by the Victorian ethics that I mentioned. Well, move a few years back to when they *were* running around, and you have an example of a society that didn't have a problem with nudity. My point -- that the nudity/child pornography ban is more a byproduct of a (widespread) meme than an actual, carefully considered beneficial decision -- should still stand.
The "tribes" you refer to are known here as "iwi", and are also technologically advanced and largely western in lifestyle.
Fair enough. I read about them in a 1986 edition of World Book some years back, so I certainly suppose that the article could be out of date. The article did not say that the information was current, either.
My point, I think, still stands, though you might have to use a different people or move a few years back to get a really good example.
I think your argument has many merits, but your definition of what constitutes "child pornography" is flawed.
I was using the US legal definition. It's pornography if the material is intended to "incite lust", and child pornography if a subject is under eighteen years of age.
a photograph of a naked child is not "child pornography," "kiddie porn" or whatever.
Not necessarily. But if the resultant work is intended to "incite lust" then it is pornography.
If that were true, then there would be parents who've taken photographs of their children in the bath, naked on the beach or running around in the garden who were by that definition child pronographers.
I mentioned nudity to give an example of the only thing that directly affects the child, not with the intent to define the legal boundaries of the crime.
That a four year old is shown being raped in it's anus, is. I do not believe that this is a cultural issue; it is a humanitarian one.
But in this case, my point about physical harm caused by the actual rape stands.
I find it hard to believe that "the true test" of Freedom of Speech means tolerating child porn.
I think it's pretty reasonable. They take an absolute position of freedom of speech, including allowing things like libel to be placed on Freenet.
And it's technically silly to even care. The point of Freenet is that it treats all data the same, and only cares about popularity. Is chunk of data id # af325a15b7791fc13b really popular? Then regardless of the content, it's going to spread around. Freenet tries to reduce network load, and ignores artifical attempts to prevent it from doing so.
In essence, it enforces the much-talked-about common carrier status on everyone. No one knows what's passing through their computer, because it just doesn't matter. It's data, someone wants it, and caching it gets it to them more efficiently.
I find it vaguely odd that you, a network engineer, are unable to isolate the transmission of data from attempts to censor it. Do you believe that the networks you build aren't used for things that you would consider immoral?
Freenet, by virtue of some features of it and its popularity, provide some services that are unavailable elsewhere. There are few other places that you can get really truly anonymous email that you can *trust* to be anonymous.
Actually, I find Freenet a good example of the simple impracticality of attempting to censor data today, with the ease of transmission and storage available. I'll be amazed if any broad class of data can be censored.
Finally, a comment on your morality complaint. You find child pornography distasteful, and want to choose not to serve it. That's fine. However, the common condemnation of child pornography is based more upon attempts to prevent violation of a particular social code than out of interest for children's welfare (contrast this with actual sex with children, which certainly does have potentially severe negative physical effects). There are some tribes in New Zealand and Africa that do not wear clothing (well, aside from some ornamentation). If a photographer went there and took pictures (ignoring for a moment whether the tribals would have any issues with the picture-taking itself), these people wouldn't really think anything of being seen in the nude. The photographer may well have been producing material designed to "incite lust", which would make said material pornography. However, to argue that there is any form of damage being caused to the subject is ludicrous. Now, in the United States and much of the world, Victorian ethics have had an enormous impact. There's a general nudity taboo, and the concept of child pornography is generally unaccepted. However, that is very much a product of the society, an artifact of religious and social pressures, not an obviously beneficial thing.
Actually, while I'm complaining about common views of child pornography, how well do your views on it approximate the actual, legally enforced definition used in the United States? People very frequently claim that they find child pornography utterly repulsive. And yet, legally, "child pornography" includes people that most would hardly consider children. Would a nude seventeen year old be repulsive, whereas suddenly an eighteen year old not be?
I really shouldn't have to put this disclaimer here, but child pornography is so commonly disliked that it's necessary to be taken seriously. I don't find child pornography appealing, though I don't have this ridiculously overblown hatred of it and the people involved in its production that many people culture. There's also a not unreasonable chance that I'd find a nude seventeen-year-old to be attractive, so I'd enjoy some of the material that the US has made illegal.
Essentially, I'd say that someone taking nude pictures of an American child is doing about the same thing as feeding beef to a Hindu child or pork to a Jewish child. They're violating social norms, and probably piss off some people, but I don't see a
I don't know how your boot sector got trashed, but it wasn't the NIC hardware.
I'm *not* familiar with the design that appears on the web page, and I *still* could have told the guy that "the NIC ate my boot sector" is definitely the most improbable diagnosis I've ever heard.
The software on the Creative website (soundblaster.com) are only updates. You CANNOT download full applications or drivers (that only work if you have the card, mind you). So if you lose your original install CD, you're hosed unless you poly up the $25 they want for a new CD
I don't believe people are making clones, so I can't figure out why they'd have any justification to do this. I mean, so someone downloads the damn driver. Do they really think that that person *doesn't* have the card? Or is it just that their installer is so bloated that they don't want to pay for the bandwidth.
2. The software that gets installed (the mixer, EAX control panels, speaker calibrators, etc.) is a) a HUGE memory hog (we're taling > 92MB on XP Pro with all the bells & whistles loaded) and b) slow, because they chose not to use the standard Windows toolbox to build it. All kinds of unnecessary stuff is in there - transparent drop downs (like OS X), etc...
I've always wondered about this. There seems to be this big trend in "utility" software to hacked-up bitmapped interfaces. Why, why do companies do this? It looks tremendously unprofessional, it's a pain to use (Well, this menu works sort of like in Windows, and on this one you can't read the text well...).
There's also a move towards huge installers. For chrissake, it's a drive. All people want is for the damn thing to work. Creative feels like it hired a ton of programmers, and couldn't find anything for them to do except write low-quality pack-in software. People want the 200KB driver. A control panel? Maybe another 200KB on top of it, if a logo is included, etc, etc. There shouldn't be any reason for anything else.
Creative does this. The Razor Boomslang guys do this. Matrox doesn't do the bitmapped thing, but does pack loads of extra crap in with their drivers.
Any company that dupes the customer into thinking they are getting one product when they are getting another is just bait and switch at the factory. I bought those drives on reviews I read, I will never buy a creative product again. I like this phillips siesmic edge is doing just fine in my windows box, and my linux box gets by with ac97.
This, incidently, is par for the course for their entire product line. Creative constantly puts in cheaper parts over the lifetime of each of their products. When you get a Sound Blaster Live Value, say, you have *no* idea what's in there. They went through a ton of revisions and parts. Once they've got their good reviews, they can start cheapening the thing up.
First off, USB speakers have indeed been created (Microsoft had some), but the problem is the inherant issues with USB itself. High resource usage, bandwidth usage with multiple devices on the same bus, etc...
The problem is that USB 1 didn't support bandwidth allocation. Which saved 2 cents per device, and made life suck for everyone else. USB 2 and Firewire both allow bandwidth allocation.
Creative has good business sense, but their products are pricy and not particularly impressive.
The last real "innovation" in the soundcard market was the tech war war that started to pick up between Aureal and Creative. Then that died, and wavetracing (which looked really interesting) went away. And now we have reverbs. Whee.
Most of the functionality on a modern soundcard is pretty useless. MIDI? Anyone still using MIDI can do it on a modern computer in software much better (and use far higher quality soundfonts). "Spatializer"? Makes audio distorted and sound awful. Hardware mixing? *Only* useful to Linux users, and *only* because the sound systems suck under Linux and there's no good software mixing system (esd sucks, artsd sucks more, and JACK isn't general-purpose). Mixing several audio streams is cheap, cheap, cheap on a modern processor. Hardware reverbs? Mostly a gimmick.
There's a reason integrated sound motherboards are becoming the norm. Almost no one needs anything else.
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I'm just worried that things will get out of hand.... how many millions are we talking before source is released?
Oh, infinite, definitely. This is a proposal coming from programmers, not businesspeople.
Sun and Apple don't have to make money selling their respective operating systems. They can happily make money on "related services" and hardware.
The problem is that every time developers try to deal with legalese, they take this basic humans-are-honest philosophy that works pretty well in development groups and would never, never work in the business world.
The only really reasonable approach is a flat time limit. Basing it on installed seats is a tough call, even, and that's much more straightforward than "money made". Who's going to do the counting -- Sun?
Dollars to dimes it's IE.
You seem to like Soviet Russia and Natalie Portman well enough...
he actually was one of a few politicians actively promoting the internet.
Simply rephrase it so that Slashdotters can appreciate it: without Gore, there very likely would have been no public school Internet access, and far less infrastructure available to higher education institutions. Imagine Dubya in the driver's seat all those years [shudder] -- lots of guns, lousy network.
I've never been a gadget freak. I don't spend much on my computer, and I don't have any gizmos like a laptop, PDA, cell phone, etc. However, I would *love* to have something like this. I started thinking that it might have to be a thin client, to reduce costs and increase life -- but that doesn't do you any good, since Vietnam isn't covered by 802.11b.
I'd be happy with a lesser device:
Small and durable (I was packing three and a half weeks of clothes and stuff in a moderately large backpack)
Small is nice, though a typeable keyboard, aside from a few less-than-usable oddities like projected or flexible keyboards, makes the entire device rather large. There's the collapseable Palm keyboard, but that seems to be rather fragile. I could see subnotebook size being okay. Durable is good, but doesn't have to be much more so than a laptop.
Long battery life (able to get in a good 8-hour programming session without interruption)
Amen. The more the better. Eight hours is definitely a minimum.
Able to use a keyboard (I can't write C code from Grafitti)
Yup. And making the keyboard *too* weird can make the thing unusable.
Reasonable screen resolution (I need to be able to see at least 80 columns by 40 lines)
I'd be fine with a text terminal and the associated circuitry.
Ability to run a wide variety of programming tools (at least a good editor, C compiler, and probably several common scripting languages as well)
"Good editor" for me implies emacs, which won't run on a small client. An editor with emacsable keystrokes and source so that it can be modified is pretty reasonable. And a single compiler is all that's necessary.
External mass storage of some kind (I'd settle for SD or CF cards)
Nice, but I could see living without it. Needs to have at least one form of high-speed output (USB 2, ethernet, something).
Relatively inexpensive: $200-$400 is a good range (I don't want to be too upset if it gets lost, stolen or dropped off of a cliff)"
Yup. Unfortunately, I don't see it doing so. Not enough geeks in the world, so engineering costs are significant (decidedly unusual device, very limited market).
And what better way to help those poor, starving, oppressed people than to deny them income from tourism!
What would you have to do to do something like this in Windows land? Some sort of .DLL monkeybusiness? Registry hacking?
You've got excellent PDF support on any general purpose Linux distro.
I can't figure out exactly why you'd want a "PDF and Email" option. I mean, I'm sure that there are a few people that might want this, but it seems that it's not that common of an application.
It requires the DGPS station to be fairly close to the handset as it needs to be using the same satellites - and therefore to be receiving the same information.
I'd imagine that if you have three nodes on a wider area where each one only recieves data from one of the satellites in question, and the nodes have precisely synced clocks, you're also okay.
This is fine for civilian use, but military units that wanted to radio home for the current reference offset would need to break radio silence.
One of the nicest things about GPS is that you *don't* have to have any other sort of telecom systems up and running -- GPS just works everywhere.
Bush is a jerk. If he thinks that GPS is going to help Iraqi troops worth a damn, he's in for a surprise. They can tell just fine when there's a plane overhead and shoot at it. In the meantime, it screws over civilians everywhere. I suppose doing otherwise would be to break Bush administration traditions -- screwing over civilians to benefit the military.
Uh...I've used Red Hat for years. I download updates when they come out via apt-get, yum, manually when advisories come up on securityfocus...and the problem is that I don't get an email from Red Hat personally?
The subscription may be more than worth it to a business, but the consumer is hardly under any onus to purchase it.
The Microsoft Office document formats are not viral, because they affect nothing other than themselves. If you install Microsoft Word on your computer, all of your SurfWriter documents remain in SurfWriter format; nothing changes.
.doc format. Documents take over applications, which then produce more documents. That sounds fairly viral to me.
No -- I have to disagree here. There's a two-phase propagation mechanism. It's a pain to deal with other people's Word documents if you don't have Word, and the easiest thing to do when you're working in Word is save in
The GPL, on the other hand, spreads. If you link GPL-licensed code in with your project, poof! Your project is now GPL-licensed as well, for better or for worse.
No. Nothing in the world can force your code to suddenly be relicensed, except for perhaps a document you sign (without reading) or someone who you gave power of attorney to.
You cannot *legally* link GPL code to non-GPL code. The assumption is that, at build time, people implicitly create a derived copy that is GPL-licensed. Most of the time, this is fine -- they follow the rules of the GPL for that binary build, and there's no problem. However, that is simply a convenient assumption. Someone who built a piece of BSD-licensed software for KDE, for instance, could be sued, and the author claim that they did not implicitly relicense the code. Of course, the person would simply say that they had, and the lawsuit would be dead. However, the act of linking is not legally sufficient, in and of itself, to relicense a piece of software.
Compare to a more obvious example -- if you take a piece of code from a GPLed program, and then use that code in a propriatary product, the product does not immediately become GPLed. It *is* infringing on a copyright, but the infringer can pay damages in a cout case and stop using the code.
Okay, fair enough. As I posted below, I was going on an article in a 1986 edition of World Book that I read some years ago. It didn't state what date the tribal environment was still in place -- but if you move a few years back, you have people doing the same thing.
Unfortunately, it's getting rather hard to find a society that *isn't* deeply influenced by the Victorian ethics that I mentioned. Well, move a few years back to when they *were* running around, and you have an example of a society that didn't have a problem with nudity. My point -- that the nudity/child pornography ban is more a byproduct of a (widespread) meme than an actual, carefully considered beneficial decision -- should still stand.
The "tribes" you refer to are known here as "iwi", and are also technologically advanced and largely western in lifestyle.
Fair enough. I read about them in a 1986 edition of World Book some years back, so I certainly suppose that the article could be out of date. The article did not say that the information was current, either.
My point, I think, still stands, though you might have to use a different people or move a few years back to get a really good example.
I think your argument has many merits, but your definition of what constitutes "child pornography" is flawed.
I was using the US legal definition. It's pornography if the material is intended to "incite lust", and child pornography if a subject is under eighteen years of age.
a photograph of a naked child is not "child pornography," "kiddie porn" or whatever.
Not necessarily. But if the resultant work is intended to "incite lust" then it is pornography.
If that were true, then there would be parents who've taken photographs of their children in the bath, naked on the beach or running around in the garden who were by that definition child pronographers.
I mentioned nudity to give an example of the only thing that directly affects the child, not with the intent to define the legal boundaries of the crime.
That a four year old is shown being raped in it's anus, is. I do not believe that this is a cultural issue; it is a humanitarian one.
But in this case, my point about physical harm caused by the actual rape stands.
I find it hard to believe that "the true test" of Freedom of Speech means tolerating child porn.
I think it's pretty reasonable. They take an absolute position of freedom of speech, including allowing things like libel to be placed on Freenet.
And it's technically silly to even care. The point of Freenet is that it treats all data the same, and only cares about popularity. Is chunk of data id # af325a15b7791fc13b really popular? Then regardless of the content, it's going to spread around. Freenet tries to reduce network load, and ignores artifical attempts to prevent it from doing so.
In essence, it enforces the much-talked-about common carrier status on everyone. No one knows what's passing through their computer, because it just doesn't matter. It's data, someone wants it, and caching it gets it to them more efficiently.
I find it vaguely odd that you, a network engineer, are unable to isolate the transmission of data from attempts to censor it. Do you believe that the networks you build aren't used for things that you would consider immoral?
Freenet, by virtue of some features of it and its popularity, provide some services that are unavailable elsewhere. There are few other places that you can get really truly anonymous email that you can *trust* to be anonymous.
Actually, I find Freenet a good example of the simple impracticality of attempting to censor data today, with the ease of transmission and storage available. I'll be amazed if any broad class of data can be censored.
Finally, a comment on your morality complaint. You find child pornography distasteful, and want to choose not to serve it. That's fine. However, the common condemnation of child pornography is based more upon attempts to prevent violation of a particular social code than out of interest for children's welfare (contrast this with actual sex with children, which certainly does have potentially severe negative physical effects). There are some tribes in New Zealand and Africa that do not wear clothing (well, aside from some ornamentation). If a photographer went there and took pictures (ignoring for a moment whether the tribals would have any issues with the picture-taking itself), these people wouldn't really think anything of being seen in the nude. The photographer may well have been producing material designed to "incite lust", which would make said material pornography. However, to argue that there is any form of damage being caused to the subject is ludicrous. Now, in the United States and much of the world, Victorian ethics have had an enormous impact. There's a general nudity taboo, and the concept of child pornography is generally unaccepted. However, that is very much a product of the society, an artifact of religious and social pressures, not an obviously beneficial thing.
Actually, while I'm complaining about common views of child pornography, how well do your views on it approximate the actual, legally enforced definition used in the United States? People very frequently claim that they find child pornography utterly repulsive. And yet, legally, "child pornography" includes people that most would hardly consider children. Would a nude seventeen year old be repulsive, whereas suddenly an eighteen year old not be?
I really shouldn't have to put this disclaimer here, but child pornography is so commonly disliked that it's necessary to be taken seriously. I don't find child pornography appealing, though I don't have this ridiculously overblown hatred of it and the people involved in its production that many people culture. There's also a not unreasonable chance that I'd find a nude seventeen-year-old to be attractive, so I'd enjoy some of the material that the US has made illegal.
Essentially, I'd say that someone taking nude pictures of an American child is doing about the same thing as feeding beef to a Hindu child or pork to a Jewish child. They're violating social norms, and probably piss off some people, but I don't see a
Note: some assembly required...
:-)
I don't know if that was deliberate, but it's funny to see "assembly required" in reference to a microcontroller.
I have a *very* old Mac mouse (pre-USB, pre-ADB...I think it uses a DB-9 port or something that looks very similar) that kills motherboards.
I don't know how your boot sector got trashed, but it wasn't the NIC hardware.
I'm *not* familiar with the design that appears on the web page, and I *still* could have told the guy that "the NIC ate my boot sector" is definitely the most improbable diagnosis I've ever heard.
The software on the Creative website (soundblaster.com) are only updates. You CANNOT download full applications or drivers (that only work if you have the card, mind you). So if you lose your original install CD, you're hosed unless you poly up the $25 they want for a new CD
I don't believe people are making clones, so I can't figure out why they'd have any justification to do this. I mean, so someone downloads the damn driver. Do they really think that that person *doesn't* have the card? Or is it just that their installer is so bloated that they don't want to pay for the bandwidth.
2. The software that gets installed (the mixer, EAX control panels, speaker calibrators, etc.) is a) a HUGE memory hog (we're taling > 92MB on XP Pro with all the bells & whistles loaded) and b) slow, because they chose not to use the standard Windows toolbox to build it. All kinds of unnecessary stuff is in there - transparent drop downs (like OS X), etc...
I've always wondered about this. There seems to be this big trend in "utility" software to hacked-up bitmapped interfaces. Why, why do companies do this? It looks tremendously unprofessional, it's a pain to use (Well, this menu works sort of like in Windows, and on this one you can't read the text well...).
There's also a move towards huge installers. For chrissake, it's a drive. All people want is for the damn thing to work. Creative feels like it hired a ton of programmers, and couldn't find anything for them to do except write low-quality pack-in software. People want the 200KB driver. A control panel? Maybe another 200KB on top of it, if a logo is included, etc, etc. There shouldn't be any reason for anything else.
Creative does this. The Razor Boomslang guys do this. Matrox doesn't do the bitmapped thing, but does pack loads of extra crap in with their drivers.
I think you mean "*Windows* drivers for Creative cards still stuck".
Any company that dupes the customer into thinking they are getting one product when they are getting another is just bait and switch at the factory. I bought those drives on reviews I read, I will never buy a creative product again. I like this phillips siesmic edge is doing just fine in my windows box, and my linux box gets by with ac97.
This, incidently, is par for the course for their entire product line. Creative constantly puts in cheaper parts over the lifetime of each of their products. When you get a Sound Blaster Live Value, say, you have *no* idea what's in there. They went through a ton of revisions and parts. Once they've got their good reviews, they can start cheapening the thing up.
First off, USB speakers have indeed been created (Microsoft had some), but the problem is the inherant issues with USB itself. High resource usage, bandwidth usage with multiple devices on the same bus, etc...
The problem is that USB 1 didn't support bandwidth allocation. Which saved 2 cents per device, and made life suck for everyone else. USB 2 and Firewire both allow bandwidth allocation.
because they figure that nobody will ever do a bit-for-bit copy of the disc...
Which gets you an encrypted copy of the disk. Which, in an RIAA-ideal world, would be unbreakable.
That drm crap is in the software and won't affect Linux users.
It certainly will affect Linux users. There simply won't be support for digital out at all under Linux, neatly solving the problem.
Creative has good business sense, but their products are pricy and not particularly impressive.
The last real "innovation" in the soundcard market was the tech war war that started to pick up between Aureal and Creative. Then that died, and wavetracing (which looked really interesting) went away. And now we have reverbs. Whee.
Most of the functionality on a modern soundcard is pretty useless. MIDI? Anyone still using MIDI can do it on a modern computer in software much better (and use far higher quality soundfonts). "Spatializer"? Makes audio distorted and sound awful. Hardware mixing? *Only* useful to Linux users, and *only* because the sound systems suck under Linux and there's no good software mixing system (esd sucks, artsd sucks more, and JACK isn't general-purpose). Mixing several audio streams is cheap, cheap, cheap on a modern processor. Hardware reverbs? Mostly a gimmick.
There's a reason integrated sound motherboards are becoming the norm. Almost no one needs anything else.