No, it wasn't. Creative has continued to license the Sensaura technology to 3rd parties since they purchased them. Nvidia chose to halt development based only on the cost of development, as the drivers for the Soundstorm and Nforce APU were developed by Nvidia using Sensaura IP. They did not rely on Sensaura for future developments and even if they did, Creative has taken no steps to prevent anyone from licensing the technology.
The #1 feature of the SoundStorm branding/Nvidia APU was that it did direct Dolby Digital Live encoding which produces a low quality Dolby Digital compatible bitstream. Due to the heavy processing overhead and the fact that much of the processing was handled in software the quality of the sound was sacrificed in order to improve processor overhead.
It's odd that I have never had a popping problem with any of my Creative cards.... perhaps it is because I purchase high quality motherboards and know how to configure them to help diminish the possibility of overloading the PCI bus. My Audigy, Audigy 2, EMU 1212M, EMU1616M, and X-Fi all sound wonderful and are noticably better than the sound output from soundstorm (even when using the optical jack).
Well the way I see it, their moral victory in the courts led to their ultimate demise so yeah they should have settled. Creative was justified in defending their patents as whether or not Aureal was infringing was not very clear. To not defend their patent would be to forfit it. Whether or not the patent system is flawed is not the issue here, Creative was taking the proper steps to defend their patent within the system as it is.
As far as the headphone positioning Creative has in fact gone way beyond that at this point. I have that very thing with my Audigy 2 and with my X-Fi it is nearly perfect with the ability to tell how high something is in reference to my location. As with most people who bemoan the fate of Aureal, you ignore the progress that Creative has made in recent years and still point to limitations from their cards from over 5 years ago.
No...Aureal destroyed Aureal. They could have settled with Creative several times during the process but instead wanted to make this into a marketing ploy. It ended up costing them everything in the end.
From Creative's perspective, Aureal was marketing their product based on support of their recently developed EAX standard based on licensing that they weren't even sure was enforcable. Aureal was looking for a fight and Creative had to defend their patent or risk losing it altogether so they took them to court. At almost any point Aureal could have settled but they wanted to invalidate the EAX patent so A3D would have a leg up on it. Instead they ended up costing their company all of it's capital and eventually had to sell. Of course because it had been portrayed as a David V. Goliath story the sympathies lie with the David of the story, Aureal.
For all the talk of how advanced the Vortex 3 was going to be, you would think they would have planned to put a full fledged DSP on it. Also I don't know if you realize it but most of the promise of A3D 3.0 was realized with EAX 3.0 aka: Advanced HD.
EAX is dead post Vista (as Vista killed "non-standard" audio driver support). The new standard is OpenAL which means that your EAX games that don't support OpenAL won't be able to use anything but the basic features of the card.
It just hit me where you would get that Creative was involved in Soundstorm. Soundstorm did use Sensaura technology which is a company that Creative purchased. This was however well before they purchased them. The main part of the Soundstorm feature wise was the DD Live support which IMHO is crap.
The "headphone jack issue" in which the headphone jacks were less robust than they should be (on any product with a headphone jack the headphone connection is one of the top points of failure with the HDD being the only one more common) with the Zens was specific to only two models, The ZEN Xtra and the ZEN Micro (not the photo). Both were fixed by Creative within the production life of the product and any affected players that were made with the flaw were fixed whether or not the person was in the warranty period. A horrible problem I would agree but their response was very fair.
Notmad was created to provide Linux drivers for the propriatary PDE driver that Creative used for the earlier Jukebox/Jukebox ZEN Models (basically anything up to the original Micro...before the move to MTP). This was possible because Creative made opensource drivers available to the community. Most would say that the PDE driver from Creative was pretty good and in some ways mroe robust than even the new MTP driver (which has been known to have connection issues).
Creative had nothing to do with Soundstorm. That POS is from Nvidia with help from Dolby Labs (with the craptastic DD Live which gives you 5.1 channels of low quality compressed audio that is Dolby Digital compatible). In fact Creative to this day does not place a real time Dolby or DTS encoder into their cards because for it to be affordable they would have to make it a software dependent solution and this means worse lag and CPU overhead.
My two sets of Creative Speakers (FPS 2000 and Gigaworks S750) have served me well for a long time (since '99 on the FPS 2000's and 2002 on the Gigaworks). I have friends who have dropped more money on "better" speakers from logitech or others only to have to get them repaired (or they later find out that all the bells and whistles they paid for won't work with games because they are only enabled for the optical jacks).
I must have you confused with someone else. I am still on those forums, although now as an "expert" and not an employee (since I am not anymore).
I would say that the Creative Labs Sales and Support center in Oklahoma (where all North America support and sales are based out of....along with much of the testing and tools development) was an incredible place to work. I don't know how it is today as I've been gone for almost a year now, but when I was there the entire facility had this odd sensitivity to the what the customer's wanted. When Tech Support people first became capable of selling products and were being asked to do so, the initial pushback from the techs were that with call time goals being set low that they couldn't give adequate support and also make product suggestions. Local management recognised this and rather than doing what I have seen elsewhere (namely saying "focus on making the sell") the team began taking steps to streamline the call process so that less time was spent saying things like "I'm trying to pull up your information" and solutions were easier to find. Still as is with any net cost department money is constantly being trimmed and support options seem to be getting less and less. I've never been a fan of the "90 days of phone support" that even Creative has begun doing but at least in their case they also have email and the forums.
It's a little sad, when I first started there it was the place for Techies in our little college town to work. When I left, a lot of that atmosphere had disappeared (mostly because they were taking about 5X the calls that we were when I began and staffed with the same if not less people....so long 45min tech support service calls) but you could still see that some things hadn't changed (The last thing I heard as I was leaving on my last day was an advisor pleading a customer's case to their manager trying to get a special bit of service...which they probably got).
As I mentioned elsewhere (I think) the problems with the company are almost 100% a product of poor communication between the regions and a general cultural unwillingness of the Singapore management to take inititive. Drivers weren't on the website because that is how they always were and no one thought to question it. Flaws in one product might carry over to another because the same techniques were always used. The sad part is that most of the people in the Singapore management are wildly intelligent and capable at their jobs, they just were raised in a culture in which it is not right to question the way things are done. In the markets as cutting edge as the ones Creative is in, this can be a deadly problem.
I really hope they manage to fix things this time around.
You should really update your data.
The EMU 1212 is not clock locked. It will run @ 44.1, 48, and 96 Khz at least.
The SB Live! 24bit is not an EMU10K1 based card and thus is not frequency locked (well as far as a card working within the standard Windows Driver Model can be called not frequency locked).
The X-Fi runs at 48Khz in Entertainment and Game Modes, but can be changed in Audio Creation Mode. The 44.1 to 48Khz conversion is also a dedicated function of the X-Fi Chip for Entertainment and Game Modes and the conversion is seemless. There are reasons that some might not like the X-Fi, but the old 44.1 to 48Khz problem found with early Live! and Audigy cards is not one of them.
"Creative would have to be one of, if not the most evil of PC hardware manufacturers."
Nah I think a truly evil company would be all smiles and say black mock sweaters while they set you up to be totally locked into their hardware model. Creative is a poorly organized international company, not evil.
"They are driven purely by their marketing Joes, and not by customer demands, or innovative tech."
Well actually see, they aren't. I worked there in several departments and at some point in my employement have touched and seen just about every part of the process in which the sausage is made. The real problem with Creative is this: No one knows who is driving. If the marketing people were in charge, the company certainly wouldn't have released the X-Fi in the way they did (dribble out at too high cost to have general market acceptance) and if the Tech Guys did the driving then we would not be seeing all of the low end cards and odd devices they put out. Instead the people in the US have to rely on the Singapore offices for leadership and unfortunately there are few in Singapore that will take any inititive. It's a cultural issue in Singapore that Mr. Sim wrote about called "No U Turn Syndrome" or NUTS and it's something that they just can't seem to break.
"You only need to read up on the happenings with Aureal to see the lengths they will go to."
If for one moment you think Aureal didn't bring that lawsuit upon themselves you must be kidding yourself. In the end the courts did rule that Aureal was not infringing, but Creative had to defend their patent lest they lose it. The problem was that Aureal tried to turn the whole thing into a marketing campaign of David V. Goliath and didn't realize that they could not afford to take the litigation all the way. Creative saw the opportunity and bought them.
"Even after Creative bought out Aureal, none of Aureal's the superior tech made it into Creative products."
You might want to read up on the X-Fi. It was in production for almost 5 years and most certainly includes technology derived from Aureal's technology just improved upon by incorperating a real DSP (and a ton more) into the equation.
Hi Martin... that was actually me from a couple years ago that made that suggestion on the forums I believe. I don't work for Creative anymore but I do remember a bit about that issue. If I recall correctly it was an OEM model of the Audigy 2 ZS and I couldn't say it at the time (being an employee and all) but it was one of the few OEM models of the 2 ZS that was locked out completely from using the standard drivers (at the behest of the SI as is usually the case....this was a much bigger issue with the Live 5.1 but still showed up with some newer cards as well). Personally I know that a large portion of the company fought to try to get as many cards on the website with full drivers due to the fact that it was stupid that they weren't. Eventually a policy was inacted that all new products have full driver downloads made available and an effort be made to do the same for the older ones. Last I checked most had gotten these downloads.
If you are going to spend that much on a 2496 why not spend less on an EMU 1212 which has better specs and features. Of course if you are just looking for a plain jane sound card, neither of these would fit...I would just get a Live! 24bit which produces nice clean sound (nothing like an X-fi, 1212, or M-Audio 2496 but if they want a plain card...) and costs $30.
Incorrect on several levels. As a former employee of Creative Labs I was there when the Live! first came out. The Live! was built around the EMU10K1 processor which was designed by EMU whom Creative purchased. Ensoniq was purchased prior to EMU and was done specifically for their PCI card development, however that tech was leveraged in the Soundblaster PCI 16 (or 16 PCI) and the Ensoniq branded cards.
Secondly although I will not defend Creative's drivers very heavily (although I do think they are better than most give them credit for), their hardware is far from crap. The only bad hardware I have ever seen them produce were some of their mice which had flaws in the hardware itself (this was later fixed).
You might be surprised to learn that Creative won several customer service awards due to their quick adoption of support Knowledge Bases and their phone services. I do feel that service has gone down lately (from my sources this is mostly a result of triming costs) but they still remain one of the few tech companies that does not outsource customer service (US service is in the US, Europe in Europe, and Asia in Asia).
I assume you are refering to Aureal when you say they "squash" competition. There were bad steps taken on both sides of the issue, but it was all started when Aureal began selling their products based on EAX support. Creative took them to court over it and rather than making the correct business decision and settling out of court, they chose to fight it out. This bankrupted the company and Creative purchased their assets. I don't see where Creative was "squashing" them rather than giving them enough rope.
Is this why Apple settled out of court by paying creative 100 million dollars? Sorry but your whole Apple playing nice comment has no standing in the actual facts of this matter (or their approach to legal dealings on other matters). Not sure if you followed the story but prior to the ipod's release, Apple approached Creative about a joint product based on the Jukebox design. It fell through and amazingly the Ipod comes out a few months later with a remarkably similar UI design. Had Creative been awarded the patent in 2001 or 2002 you would have seen a lawsuit then but as it took several years for the patent to be awarded it was delayed until last year.
Creative had other reasons to not like Apple (many stem from Apple's mostly ignored torpedoing of the Live! Macintosh card around the time of their backout of the joint MP3 player overtures) other than just the Ipod and there is no doubt that Creative was out for blood. Also there is no doubt in my mind that Creative was ultimately hurt by their so called war on the Ipod. I think they would have done much better had they just introduced their players which are generally regarded as well designed and feature rich. Instead they turned it into an us vs. them mentality against a company that specializes in us vs. them marketing (Apple is so good at this that they even manage to have a huge backing on/. despite the fact that their policy is to close their OS to any non-apple hardware).
I know it's fashionable to bash on Creative on/. due to this lawsuit, but I do feel that they had a reason to feel infinged upon. I read the patent when it was initially posted that it was awarded and my reaction was that it was pretty obvious then in 2005 but maybe not so in 2000/2001 when it was applied for. At that time most music files on MP3 players were sorted by folder levels and ID3 tags, but this system used a database and flat file system. This was novel enough that Apple also filed for the same patent some time after Creative. I don't feel that Creative was litigating to overcome a lack of R&D or inginuity but rather their management felt that Apple was profiting from something they had (in the eyes of the law at least) developed. The settlement I think supports that view (as true patent trolls would probably hold out for more especially if they had the kind of cash position Creative had at the time...low debt and quite a bit of money in the bank). Instead they settled and other than a few statements do not appear to have gone after anyone else.
Well you learn something new everyday. I honestly hadn't seen either of these but that's likely because I don't program in python or ruby.
I would say that both of these programs would be innovative however I don't know if it takes away from the innovation of the.net framework in the same regard. It certainly does destroy my argument (as apparently there are other options to java bytecode rather than just the java language which is the opposite of what I said) but I still see it as innovative. When Sun created Java they had only the one language in mind but obviously left it open for the community to develop other options. This is innovative. What MS did was take existing languages (C++, VB, and C# mostly) and modify them into functioning on a single platform which is similar to what the jpython and jruby people did but diverges when it comes to actual end user implementation. For the most part, when someone talks about programming in.net they are using Visual Studio no matter what language they are using. MS has had the single programming tool approach for a long time (before.net even) but prior to.net there were major differences between the languages. With.net there is a unified look, feel, and approach to programming (perhaps the wrong approach in some cases IMHO) that I haven't found elsewhere. Even the documentation is unified which I have seen as a big advantage for a long time. I still think the way that Visual C++ was nettified was sad but what we are talking about with innovation is the introduction of "new" ideas. I would say there was a lot of new to.net and it is perhaps the only non-gaming MS product that I really find all that interesting.
Still doesn't fix that my argument was wrong though. Oh well.
So exactly what other languages other than Java can I write in and have it compile into Java byte code? Last I checked it was just one.
One of the major innovations of the.net platform was its language independence. You can write in several different languages depending on preference and task.
As for Xbox Live, I can't really think of any PC services that came before Live that offered the original features. Part of the innovation of Live is that your name is the same on all games (this just can't be done on PCs right now and wasn't done on consoles until the Xbox). The 360 expands this even more.
It is obvious from your post that your conclusion (that MS is not an innovator) was arrived at prior to any of your reasoning. It would be better to concede these rather small areas as that is all they are, small areas of innovation from a rather gigantic company. It doesn't look good when compared to companies like IBM or Sun. I understand that you feel like Microsoft is the big evil (and in some ways I would agree) but you can't just dismiss everything they do just because it's Microsoft. You end up sounding more like a tool of the opposition rather than the thinking person I am sure you are.
I like OSS software as much as anyone (I just forgot to drink the Microsoft Haterade at the last meeting) but in all honesty if these kids are being trained for business work then all those wonderful programs are pretty non-relevant. They just aren't used in business all that often and the uses that you do see them in are really more likely to be college fodder as opposed to primary school fodder. I mean an IT person may encounter these everyday, but your average joe business guy uses Word, Outlook, and Excel in Windows XP SP2.
In my industry (process control systems integration) the front end software is almost always running on Windows. The how and the why of this could be debated for years (although I bet a good case study would be the whole Debian cdrtools fiasco. Not exactly an arguement for the advantages of having free (as in how speech used to be) software). Still despite what/. says, oss is on the outside looking in for the vast majority of business applications.
Amen to that. No coworker has been harder to work with than those who have had "20 years of experince" because in several (of course not all) cases they just will not do it any other way than what they think is correct.
One thing to consider would be the fact that standards exist for a reason. Sure it may be that there are more efficient answers to a commonly addressed problem, but perhaps those standard approaches work in 100% of the cases as opposed to the less standard "more efficient" approach that works in like 75%. Also unless you are at a small company, your code better be easy to read and understand by all of the programming staff. Hence the encouragement of standard time tested approaches as opposed to more esoteric ones. Despite common knowledge saying that what you learn in school is not applicable, I have found that I use those foundations in my programming much more than I do any little tricks I've picked up along the way.
As an American myself I can point out where this all or nothing attitude comes from. As you said, a good government requires care and observation; however too many Americans are so focused on being consumers that they do not have the desire to actually pay the attention required to have a responsible government. Instead they tend to take one of three general political stances Conservative/Libritarian, Moderate (aka: apathetic), or Liberal. These are all easy choices and require very little independant thought you just watch or listen to the news source targeted for you occasionally (Fox News, Air America, New York Post, MSNBC) and regurgetate what you hear. Now these sources do have some redeamable qualities (well except for Fox News...I still haven't heard anything on there not specifically designed to bypass critical thinking and push for emotional response) but mostly they are just personalities designed to put add a human face to what is ultimately another product being sold.
I would say that the attitude that says "well it's Government they are supposed to be corrupt" is a direct result of both the fact that government is now knowingly corrupt and people are too lazy to really worry about it too much (easier to dismiss) and the fact that a lot of the canidates have been campaigning on the "Government is bad" ticket for the last 30 years and it has entered into the collective wisdom as a "fact". I guess it's a chicken and egg question... which came first the corruption or the indifference?
All of those are Apple software products right? Of course the generic Windows box can't do that due to their monopoly status (they may try but they do eventually either get stopped or so harried that they change their stance). This is why Apple is dangerous. I agree that there will not be a sudden colapse of Microsoft and rise of Apple, but I guarantee that if Apple becomes anything like what Microsoft is now then the industry will be in horrible shape (assuming the Steve Jobs way of doing business persists). I hope that the powers that be would break up or prevent such a monopoly from happening again, but with Apple being so waterproof due to the almost religious adherance of its fans coupled with the unwillingness of psudo-independent media (such as slashdot) to criticize a competitor of Microsoft (the enemy of my enemy) makes one wonder if they might be more capable of true monopoly.
....and of course slashdot is the place to find an accurate consensus on what Microsoft is.
I think it's more likely that the consensus on this thread would be that Microsoft is an Evil company, but once again this would also being inaccurate and skewed.
Like it or not, any company that develops as much techonology as they do is a technology company. If Apple is a tech company then so is Microsoft (I mean few companies have been as guilty as Apple of the blatent marketing of old tech as some kind of new thing...nor found as much success).
There is in fact a good deal of crying that takes place over the governments allowing such things to happen it just isn't as big of a news story. The problem with your logic here is that you seem to think that we live in a world in which there is an actual seperation between corporations and the bodies that govern them. At least in the U.S. those that represent us in government require money to run and for the most part this is coming from these transnational coorperations.
You ask why isn't their a good deal of complaining over the fact that we have normal trade relations with the countries which is a good question. A better question however would be to ask why we actually have normalized trade relations with these companies and who it is that is pushing for such things. Who was it that pushed for things like NAFTA or normal trade relations status for China? For the most part it was several transnational coorperations that pushed for it knowing that it would improve their bottom line signifigantly. This isn't because coorperations are evil, but because their main goal is to make money for their shareholders. A coorperation will almost always seek whatever available legal option that they feel will make them the most money. A smartly run coorperation will seek to have the laws changed as to improve its ability to make money. All of that "shut up" money you mentioned is just as useful in getting legislation passed and signed. Of course the morality of the individual board members and managers does help hold them back a bit, but the fact that the shareholders in general just vote on the bottom line tends to offset this pretty well.
IMHO the problem here isn't that coorperations are evil but rather that they are amoral and are being allowed too great an influence on our governing process.
Well it's still an economy of sorts it's just not an economy that supports the gathering of wealth. Instead you use your skill points as a sort of "one shot" (well unless you unlearn things) type of money to purchase upgrades that you felt you wanted or needed. What might be interesting to see would be to see what would happen if the price of learning the skill in points was directly set by the number of people using this skill. That is those skills more in demand cost more than those that were not. This could serve to balance the game and encourage the use of less popular skills (kind of like magic in Asheron's Call).
I think the answer to Gold Farmers (if they are indeed a problem, they have never bothered me at all) is to implement a system that does not deal in accumulation of wealth. The MMORPG that I see having the easiest time working this into the story will be the upcoming Star Trek MMO. I pray to the heavens that they stay true to the idea that there is no money in the 24th century. If that game manages to be both fun and money free then perhaps it will provide insight into how to best avoid having gold farming in an MMO.
Planetside does not have a currency system and I do not think they suffer from it (but rather from other things). The equipment available to you is detemined by where you spend your skill points. Now in this case the available equipment is a lot more limited than on something like WOW but I still think it could apply. Story wise this concept would be hard to fit into a fantasy RPG though.
He is only "giving stump speeches on how important it is to keep doing this" because of the leak.
Anyone who is intellectually honest will see that this has nothing to do with Terrorists any more than the war in Iraq had anything to do with 911. This is all about the consolidation of power from within the executive branch and their ability to keep the public in check through the use of fear.
As has been said time and time again, the government has 72 hours to obtain a warrant after wiretapping a line. There is no reason to wiretap without obtaining a warrant with the 72 hours rule, so one must wonder why they didn't? If these wiretaps were in fact on suspected terrorists or terrorist activity then there would be no way that they would be refused the warrant. No, this is a case of the executive branch trying to expand its powers by setting a precedence during a time where there are no effective checks or balances in place (after all, Congress certainly isn't doing their duty in overseeing these things).
Clue: Illegal search and seizure laws have been rules to cover phone conversations, which is why there are laws requiring warrants for these kinds of things. It is naive (or dishonest) to claim that new technology is not covered by the constitution.
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No, it wasn't. Creative has continued to license the Sensaura technology to 3rd parties since they purchased them. Nvidia chose to halt development based only on the cost of development, as the drivers for the Soundstorm and Nforce APU were developed by Nvidia using Sensaura IP. They did not rely on Sensaura for future developments and even if they did, Creative has taken no steps to prevent anyone from licensing the technology.
The #1 feature of the SoundStorm branding/Nvidia APU was that it did direct Dolby Digital Live encoding which produces a low quality Dolby Digital compatible bitstream. Due to the heavy processing overhead and the fact that much of the processing was handled in software the quality of the sound was sacrificed in order to improve processor overhead.
It's odd that I have never had a popping problem with any of my Creative cards.... perhaps it is because I purchase high quality motherboards and know how to configure them to help diminish the possibility of overloading the PCI bus. My Audigy, Audigy 2, EMU 1212M, EMU1616M, and X-Fi all sound wonderful and are noticably better than the sound output from soundstorm (even when using the optical jack).
Well the way I see it, their moral victory in the courts led to their ultimate demise so yeah they should have settled. Creative was justified in defending their patents as whether or not Aureal was infringing was not very clear. To not defend their patent would be to forfit it. Whether or not the patent system is flawed is not the issue here, Creative was taking the proper steps to defend their patent within the system as it is.
As far as the headphone positioning Creative has in fact gone way beyond that at this point. I have that very thing with my Audigy 2 and with my X-Fi it is nearly perfect with the ability to tell how high something is in reference to my location. As with most people who bemoan the fate of Aureal, you ignore the progress that Creative has made in recent years and still point to limitations from their cards from over 5 years ago.
No...Aureal destroyed Aureal. They could have settled with Creative several times during the process but instead wanted to make this into a marketing ploy. It ended up costing them everything in the end.
From Creative's perspective, Aureal was marketing their product based on support of their recently developed EAX standard based on licensing that they weren't even sure was enforcable. Aureal was looking for a fight and Creative had to defend their patent or risk losing it altogether so they took them to court. At almost any point Aureal could have settled but they wanted to invalidate the EAX patent so A3D would have a leg up on it. Instead they ended up costing their company all of it's capital and eventually had to sell. Of course because it had been portrayed as a David V. Goliath story the sympathies lie with the David of the story, Aureal.
For all the talk of how advanced the Vortex 3 was going to be, you would think they would have planned to put a full fledged DSP on it. Also I don't know if you realize it but most of the promise of A3D 3.0 was realized with EAX 3.0 aka: Advanced HD.
EAX is dead post Vista (as Vista killed "non-standard" audio driver support). The new standard is OpenAL which means that your EAX games that don't support OpenAL won't be able to use anything but the basic features of the card.
It just hit me where you would get that Creative was involved in Soundstorm. Soundstorm did use Sensaura technology which is a company that Creative purchased. This was however well before they purchased them. The main part of the Soundstorm feature wise was the DD Live support which IMHO is crap.
The "headphone jack issue" in which the headphone jacks were less robust than they should be (on any product with a headphone jack the headphone connection is one of the top points of failure with the HDD being the only one more common) with the Zens was specific to only two models, The ZEN Xtra and the ZEN Micro (not the photo). Both were fixed by Creative within the production life of the product and any affected players that were made with the flaw were fixed whether or not the person was in the warranty period. A horrible problem I would agree but their response was very fair.
Notmad was created to provide Linux drivers for the propriatary PDE driver that Creative used for the earlier Jukebox/Jukebox ZEN Models (basically anything up to the original Micro...before the move to MTP). This was possible because Creative made opensource drivers available to the community. Most would say that the PDE driver from Creative was pretty good and in some ways mroe robust than even the new MTP driver (which has been known to have connection issues).
Creative had nothing to do with Soundstorm. That POS is from Nvidia with help from Dolby Labs (with the craptastic DD Live which gives you 5.1 channels of low quality compressed audio that is Dolby Digital compatible). In fact Creative to this day does not place a real time Dolby or DTS encoder into their cards because for it to be affordable they would have to make it a software dependent solution and this means worse lag and CPU overhead.
My two sets of Creative Speakers (FPS 2000 and Gigaworks S750) have served me well for a long time (since '99 on the FPS 2000's and 2002 on the Gigaworks). I have friends who have dropped more money on "better" speakers from logitech or others only to have to get them repaired (or they later find out that all the bells and whistles they paid for won't work with games because they are only enabled for the optical jacks).
I must have you confused with someone else. I am still on those forums, although now as an "expert" and not an employee (since I am not anymore).
I would say that the Creative Labs Sales and Support center in Oklahoma (where all North America support and sales are based out of....along with much of the testing and tools development) was an incredible place to work. I don't know how it is today as I've been gone for almost a year now, but when I was there the entire facility had this odd sensitivity to the what the customer's wanted. When Tech Support people first became capable of selling products and were being asked to do so, the initial pushback from the techs were that with call time goals being set low that they couldn't give adequate support and also make product suggestions. Local management recognised this and rather than doing what I have seen elsewhere (namely saying "focus on making the sell") the team began taking steps to streamline the call process so that less time was spent saying things like "I'm trying to pull up your information" and solutions were easier to find. Still as is with any net cost department money is constantly being trimmed and support options seem to be getting less and less. I've never been a fan of the "90 days of phone support" that even Creative has begun doing but at least in their case they also have email and the forums.
It's a little sad, when I first started there it was the place for Techies in our little college town to work. When I left, a lot of that atmosphere had disappeared (mostly because they were taking about 5X the calls that we were when I began and staffed with the same if not less people....so long 45min tech support service calls) but you could still see that some things hadn't changed (The last thing I heard as I was leaving on my last day was an advisor pleading a customer's case to their manager trying to get a special bit of service...which they probably got).
As I mentioned elsewhere (I think) the problems with the company are almost 100% a product of poor communication between the regions and a general cultural unwillingness of the Singapore management to take inititive. Drivers weren't on the website because that is how they always were and no one thought to question it. Flaws in one product might carry over to another because the same techniques were always used. The sad part is that most of the people in the Singapore management are wildly intelligent and capable at their jobs, they just were raised in a culture in which it is not right to question the way things are done. In the markets as cutting edge as the ones Creative is in, this can be a deadly problem.
I really hope they manage to fix things this time around.
You should really update your data. The EMU 1212 is not clock locked. It will run @ 44.1, 48, and 96 Khz at least. The SB Live! 24bit is not an EMU10K1 based card and thus is not frequency locked (well as far as a card working within the standard Windows Driver Model can be called not frequency locked). The X-Fi runs at 48Khz in Entertainment and Game Modes, but can be changed in Audio Creation Mode. The 44.1 to 48Khz conversion is also a dedicated function of the X-Fi Chip for Entertainment and Game Modes and the conversion is seemless. There are reasons that some might not like the X-Fi, but the old 44.1 to 48Khz problem found with early Live! and Audigy cards is not one of them.
"Creative would have to be one of, if not the most evil of PC hardware manufacturers." Nah I think a truly evil company would be all smiles and say black mock sweaters while they set you up to be totally locked into their hardware model. Creative is a poorly organized international company, not evil. "They are driven purely by their marketing Joes, and not by customer demands, or innovative tech." Well actually see, they aren't. I worked there in several departments and at some point in my employement have touched and seen just about every part of the process in which the sausage is made. The real problem with Creative is this: No one knows who is driving. If the marketing people were in charge, the company certainly wouldn't have released the X-Fi in the way they did (dribble out at too high cost to have general market acceptance) and if the Tech Guys did the driving then we would not be seeing all of the low end cards and odd devices they put out. Instead the people in the US have to rely on the Singapore offices for leadership and unfortunately there are few in Singapore that will take any inititive. It's a cultural issue in Singapore that Mr. Sim wrote about called "No U Turn Syndrome" or NUTS and it's something that they just can't seem to break. "You only need to read up on the happenings with Aureal to see the lengths they will go to." If for one moment you think Aureal didn't bring that lawsuit upon themselves you must be kidding yourself. In the end the courts did rule that Aureal was not infringing, but Creative had to defend their patent lest they lose it. The problem was that Aureal tried to turn the whole thing into a marketing campaign of David V. Goliath and didn't realize that they could not afford to take the litigation all the way. Creative saw the opportunity and bought them. "Even after Creative bought out Aureal, none of Aureal's the superior tech made it into Creative products." You might want to read up on the X-Fi. It was in production for almost 5 years and most certainly includes technology derived from Aureal's technology just improved upon by incorperating a real DSP (and a ton more) into the equation.
Hi Martin... that was actually me from a couple years ago that made that suggestion on the forums I believe. I don't work for Creative anymore but I do remember a bit about that issue. If I recall correctly it was an OEM model of the Audigy 2 ZS and I couldn't say it at the time (being an employee and all) but it was one of the few OEM models of the 2 ZS that was locked out completely from using the standard drivers (at the behest of the SI as is usually the case....this was a much bigger issue with the Live 5.1 but still showed up with some newer cards as well). Personally I know that a large portion of the company fought to try to get as many cards on the website with full drivers due to the fact that it was stupid that they weren't. Eventually a policy was inacted that all new products have full driver downloads made available and an effort be made to do the same for the older ones. Last I checked most had gotten these downloads.
If you are going to spend that much on a 2496 why not spend less on an EMU 1212 which has better specs and features. Of course if you are just looking for a plain jane sound card, neither of these would fit...I would just get a Live! 24bit which produces nice clean sound (nothing like an X-fi, 1212, or M-Audio 2496 but if they want a plain card...) and costs $30.
Incorrect on several levels. As a former employee of Creative Labs I was there when the Live! first came out. The Live! was built around the EMU10K1 processor which was designed by EMU whom Creative purchased. Ensoniq was purchased prior to EMU and was done specifically for their PCI card development, however that tech was leveraged in the Soundblaster PCI 16 (or 16 PCI) and the Ensoniq branded cards.
Secondly although I will not defend Creative's drivers very heavily (although I do think they are better than most give them credit for), their hardware is far from crap. The only bad hardware I have ever seen them produce were some of their mice which had flaws in the hardware itself (this was later fixed).
You might be surprised to learn that Creative won several customer service awards due to their quick adoption of support Knowledge Bases and their phone services. I do feel that service has gone down lately (from my sources this is mostly a result of triming costs) but they still remain one of the few tech companies that does not outsource customer service (US service is in the US, Europe in Europe, and Asia in Asia).
I assume you are refering to Aureal when you say they "squash" competition. There were bad steps taken on both sides of the issue, but it was all started when Aureal began selling their products based on EAX support. Creative took them to court over it and rather than making the correct business decision and settling out of court, they chose to fight it out. This bankrupted the company and Creative purchased their assets. I don't see where Creative was "squashing" them rather than giving them enough rope.
Is this why Apple settled out of court by paying creative 100 million dollars? Sorry but your whole Apple playing nice comment has no standing in the actual facts of this matter (or their approach to legal dealings on other matters). Not sure if you followed the story but prior to the ipod's release, Apple approached Creative about a joint product based on the Jukebox design. It fell through and amazingly the Ipod comes out a few months later with a remarkably similar UI design. Had Creative been awarded the patent in 2001 or 2002 you would have seen a lawsuit then but as it took several years for the patent to be awarded it was delayed until last year.
/. despite the fact that their policy is to close their OS to any non-apple hardware).
/. due to this lawsuit, but I do feel that they had a reason to feel infinged upon. I read the patent when it was initially posted that it was awarded and my reaction was that it was pretty obvious then in 2005 but maybe not so in 2000/2001 when it was applied for. At that time most music files on MP3 players were sorted by folder levels and ID3 tags, but this system used a database and flat file system. This was novel enough that Apple also filed for the same patent some time after Creative. I don't feel that Creative was litigating to overcome a lack of R&D or inginuity but rather their management felt that Apple was profiting from something they had (in the eyes of the law at least) developed. The settlement I think supports that view (as true patent trolls would probably hold out for more especially if they had the kind of cash position Creative had at the time...low debt and quite a bit of money in the bank). Instead they settled and other than a few statements do not appear to have gone after anyone else.
Creative had other reasons to not like Apple (many stem from Apple's mostly ignored torpedoing of the Live! Macintosh card around the time of their backout of the joint MP3 player overtures) other than just the Ipod and there is no doubt that Creative was out for blood. Also there is no doubt in my mind that Creative was ultimately hurt by their so called war on the Ipod. I think they would have done much better had they just introduced their players which are generally regarded as well designed and feature rich. Instead they turned it into an us vs. them mentality against a company that specializes in us vs. them marketing (Apple is so good at this that they even manage to have a huge backing on
I know it's fashionable to bash on Creative on
Well you learn something new everyday. I honestly hadn't seen either of these but that's likely because I don't program in python or ruby.
.net framework in the same regard. It certainly does destroy my argument (as apparently there are other options to java bytecode rather than just the java language which is the opposite of what I said) but I still see it as innovative. When Sun created Java they had only the one language in mind but obviously left it open for the community to develop other options. This is innovative. What MS did was take existing languages (C++, VB, and C# mostly) and modify them into functioning on a single platform which is similar to what the jpython and jruby people did but diverges when it comes to actual end user implementation. For the most part, when someone talks about programming in .net they are using Visual Studio no matter what language they are using. MS has had the single programming tool approach for a long time (before .net even) but prior to .net there were major differences between the languages. With .net there is a unified look, feel, and approach to programming (perhaps the wrong approach in some cases IMHO) that I haven't found elsewhere. Even the documentation is unified which I have seen as a big advantage for a long time. I still think the way that Visual C++ was nettified was sad but what we are talking about with innovation is the introduction of "new" ideas. I would say there was a lot of new to .net and it is perhaps the only non-gaming MS product that I really find all that interesting.
I would say that both of these programs would be innovative however I don't know if it takes away from the innovation of the
Still doesn't fix that my argument was wrong though. Oh well.
So exactly what other languages other than Java can I write in and have it compile into Java byte code? Last I checked it was just one.
.net platform was its language independence. You can write in several different languages depending on preference and task.
/.
One of the major innovations of the
As for Xbox Live, I can't really think of any PC services that came before Live that offered the original features. Part of the innovation of Live is that your name is the same on all games (this just can't be done on PCs right now and wasn't done on consoles until the Xbox). The 360 expands this even more.
It is obvious from your post that your conclusion (that MS is not an innovator) was arrived at prior to any of your reasoning. It would be better to concede these rather small areas as that is all they are, small areas of innovation from a rather gigantic company. It doesn't look good when compared to companies like IBM or Sun. I understand that you feel like Microsoft is the big evil (and in some ways I would agree) but you can't just dismiss everything they do just because it's Microsoft. You end up sounding more like a tool of the opposition rather than the thinking person I am sure you are.
Then again this is
I like OSS software as much as anyone (I just forgot to drink the Microsoft Haterade at the last meeting) but in all honesty if these kids are being trained for business work then all those wonderful programs are pretty non-relevant. They just aren't used in business all that often and the uses that you do see them in are really more likely to be college fodder as opposed to primary school fodder. I mean an IT person may encounter these everyday, but your average joe business guy uses Word, Outlook, and Excel in Windows XP SP2.
/. says, oss is on the outside looking in for the vast majority of business applications.
In my industry (process control systems integration) the front end software is almost always running on Windows. The how and the why of this could be debated for years (although I bet a good case study would be the whole Debian cdrtools fiasco. Not exactly an arguement for the advantages of having free (as in how speech used to be) software). Still despite what
Amen to that. No coworker has been harder to work with than those who have had "20 years of experince" because in several (of course not all) cases they just will not do it any other way than what they think is correct. One thing to consider would be the fact that standards exist for a reason. Sure it may be that there are more efficient answers to a commonly addressed problem, but perhaps those standard approaches work in 100% of the cases as opposed to the less standard "more efficient" approach that works in like 75%. Also unless you are at a small company, your code better be easy to read and understand by all of the programming staff. Hence the encouragement of standard time tested approaches as opposed to more esoteric ones. Despite common knowledge saying that what you learn in school is not applicable, I have found that I use those foundations in my programming much more than I do any little tricks I've picked up along the way.
As an American myself I can point out where this all or nothing attitude comes from. As you said, a good government requires care and observation; however too many Americans are so focused on being consumers that they do not have the desire to actually pay the attention required to have a responsible government. Instead they tend to take one of three general political stances Conservative/Libritarian, Moderate (aka: apathetic), or Liberal. These are all easy choices and require very little independant thought you just watch or listen to the news source targeted for you occasionally (Fox News, Air America, New York Post, MSNBC) and regurgetate what you hear. Now these sources do have some redeamable qualities (well except for Fox News...I still haven't heard anything on there not specifically designed to bypass critical thinking and push for emotional response) but mostly they are just personalities designed to put add a human face to what is ultimately another product being sold.
I would say that the attitude that says "well it's Government they are supposed to be corrupt" is a direct result of both the fact that government is now knowingly corrupt and people are too lazy to really worry about it too much (easier to dismiss) and the fact that a lot of the canidates have been campaigning on the "Government is bad" ticket for the last 30 years and it has entered into the collective wisdom as a "fact". I guess it's a chicken and egg question... which came first the corruption or the indifference?
All of those are Apple software products right? Of course the generic Windows box can't do that due to their monopoly status (they may try but they do eventually either get stopped or so harried that they change their stance). This is why Apple is dangerous. I agree that there will not be a sudden colapse of Microsoft and rise of Apple, but I guarantee that if Apple becomes anything like what Microsoft is now then the industry will be in horrible shape (assuming the Steve Jobs way of doing business persists). I hope that the powers that be would break up or prevent such a monopoly from happening again, but with Apple being so waterproof due to the almost religious adherance of its fans coupled with the unwillingness of psudo-independent media (such as slashdot) to criticize a competitor of Microsoft (the enemy of my enemy) makes one wonder if they might be more capable of true monopoly.
....and of course slashdot is the place to find an accurate consensus on what Microsoft is.
I think it's more likely that the consensus on this thread would be that Microsoft is an Evil company, but once again this would also being inaccurate and skewed.
Like it or not, any company that develops as much techonology as they do is a technology company. If Apple is a tech company then so is Microsoft (I mean few companies have been as guilty as Apple of the blatent marketing of old tech as some kind of new thing...nor found as much success).
There is in fact a good deal of crying that takes place over the governments allowing such things to happen it just isn't as big of a news story. The problem with your logic here is that you seem to think that we live in a world in which there is an actual seperation between corporations and the bodies that govern them. At least in the U.S. those that represent us in government require money to run and for the most part this is coming from these transnational coorperations.
You ask why isn't their a good deal of complaining over the fact that we have normal trade relations with the countries which is a good question. A better question however would be to ask why we actually have normalized trade relations with these companies and who it is that is pushing for such things. Who was it that pushed for things like NAFTA or normal trade relations status for China? For the most part it was several transnational coorperations that pushed for it knowing that it would improve their bottom line signifigantly. This isn't because coorperations are evil, but because their main goal is to make money for their shareholders. A coorperation will almost always seek whatever available legal option that they feel will make them the most money. A smartly run coorperation will seek to have the laws changed as to improve its ability to make money. All of that "shut up" money you mentioned is just as useful in getting legislation passed and signed. Of course the morality of the individual board members and managers does help hold them back a bit, but the fact that the shareholders in general just vote on the bottom line tends to offset this pretty well.
IMHO the problem here isn't that coorperations are evil but rather that they are amoral and are being allowed too great an influence on our governing process.
Well it's still an economy of sorts it's just not an economy that supports the gathering of wealth. Instead you use your skill points as a sort of "one shot" (well unless you unlearn things) type of money to purchase upgrades that you felt you wanted or needed. What might be interesting to see would be to see what would happen if the price of learning the skill in points was directly set by the number of people using this skill. That is those skills more in demand cost more than those that were not. This could serve to balance the game and encourage the use of less popular skills (kind of like magic in Asheron's Call). I think the answer to Gold Farmers (if they are indeed a problem, they have never bothered me at all) is to implement a system that does not deal in accumulation of wealth. The MMORPG that I see having the easiest time working this into the story will be the upcoming Star Trek MMO. I pray to the heavens that they stay true to the idea that there is no money in the 24th century. If that game manages to be both fun and money free then perhaps it will provide insight into how to best avoid having gold farming in an MMO.
Planetside does not have a currency system and I do not think they suffer from it (but rather from other things). The equipment available to you is detemined by where you spend your skill points. Now in this case the available equipment is a lot more limited than on something like WOW but I still think it could apply. Story wise this concept would be hard to fit into a fantasy RPG though.
No idea why this is a "Troll" just DL'd it and it is great.
He is only "giving stump speeches on how important it is to keep doing this" because of the leak. Anyone who is intellectually honest will see that this has nothing to do with Terrorists any more than the war in Iraq had anything to do with 911. This is all about the consolidation of power from within the executive branch and their ability to keep the public in check through the use of fear. As has been said time and time again, the government has 72 hours to obtain a warrant after wiretapping a line. There is no reason to wiretap without obtaining a warrant with the 72 hours rule, so one must wonder why they didn't? If these wiretaps were in fact on suspected terrorists or terrorist activity then there would be no way that they would be refused the warrant. No, this is a case of the executive branch trying to expand its powers by setting a precedence during a time where there are no effective checks or balances in place (after all, Congress certainly isn't doing their duty in overseeing these things). Clue: Illegal search and seizure laws have been rules to cover phone conversations, which is why there are laws requiring warrants for these kinds of things. It is naive (or dishonest) to claim that new technology is not covered by the constitution.