LilBambi’s Blog – BambisMusings

All this mess about Creative Labs, Inc., their crappy Vista drivers with intentionally crippled drivers (that’s not me, that what they said!), threatening Daniel_K (also see Digg.com’s Creative Threatens modders) for fixing their drivers for the users so they can actually make use of the hardware they purchased with the features they purchased the sound card for, btw.

Originally, I would have thought if Creative had such bad programmers, that they would have contacted Daniel_K to hire him like some had suggested. And I totally disagree with those who say that Daniel_K was wrong for taking donations. Bandwidth for downloads is not cheap, and there are website costs etc. A simple shared-hosting service would not accommodate the needs of such a broad audience of users who would want to download these drivers. And why should he pay for that out of the goodness of his heart? He apparently did for awhile. Maybe it gives the appearance that he is making money on this, but if you really pay attention to what his out of pocket costs might be, it would be hard to blame him for at least trying to give folks a chance to help out with that through donations.

BTW: As noted elsewhere, Creative also sued A3D/Aureal/VORTEX back in 1998. They lost and Aureal won. But although Aureal won the battle, the war thrust them into bankruptcy and then Creative gobbled them up in a ‘fire sale.’

And if that wasn’t bad enough, in 2004, Creative Pressured id software regarding their EAX3D drivers (technology they got from A3D maybe??) and ‘agreement relating to Creative’s patented shadowing technique [also known as Carmack's Reverse in some coding circles] and id’s cutting-edge 3D graphics DOOM 3 engine.’

And don’t even get me started on their Lame/Non-Existent drivers for Vista and Linux. Or their flat out refusal to create an SDK that is reasonable so folks could actually create the drivers that Creative Labs can’t seem to do with their own hardware.

Back when I first started with computers, back in the DOS days; back when DOS games ruled, Creative Labs was wonderful! They set the standards that everyone else lived by. And they did it well. But they got cocky, extremely closed minded and closed proprietary crap, until the point that we have ended up with the crap we are dealing with today from Creative Labs.

If they had followed more in nVidia’s footsteps, they would have done things completely different, and their customers would generally love their hardware. (Now I am aware of the probems that nVidia currently has with Vista and I am sure they will fix it. Unlike Creative Labs.)

Gamers, tinkerers, hobbyists, computer technicians, etc. often make recommendations to others in their field and their clients, as well as friends and family. Creative has done a really bad and stupid thing by shutting out their greatest word of mouth adverting. I guess the only people that will be buying their products are people who buy ‘cheap’ systems and have absolutely no idea how to make them work or even know why their new computer doesn’t work right.

People have been getting more and more ticked off at Creative Labs for years for their, support, or lack thereof, and now they have really done the unforgivable.

Good bye Creative Labs, good bye to great memories of the sound card standards of the SoundBlaster card series, that helped gamers get some really great games running so much better in years past. Good bye and good riddance.

I can tell you Creative, I will be making sure that your sound chips are not in ANY motherboard, sound card or other audio/video cards that I buy. You do not exist for me any longer. You are a follower of the “Sue Happy Philosophy” in this country and you are dead to me.

If you have been sold a bill of goods by Creative Labs, paid good money for certain features in a sound card just to find out that those very features have been deliberately crippled in the newest operating system by Microsoft (Vista), and if you live in the United States of America, I would suggest you contact your State’s Attorney General’s office and see what they can do for you.

As I noted on my BambiCNI StumbUpon links, “Interesting path Creative has chosen for themselves.” Certainly not the path less traveled, the ethical path.

I think this posting by Durzel on 03-29-2008 07:58 AM (page 9) sums up my thoughts on the current situation quite nicely,

I don’t usually bother posting rants on forums because usually when people say “I will never buy from company X again!” it’s just a hollow threat. I also haven’t got any time for online petitions as they never achieve anything.

The above said – I’m not going to be buying another Creative sound card again.

I bought an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum a few years ago, along with a Cambridge Soundworks DTT3500 5.1 speaker system, both of these have served me well to date. I don’t believe in replacing hardware “just cos” when there is no justification for it.

When the X-Fi came out I was hugely disappointed to find out that Creative had effectively obsoleted the DTT3500 speakers by changing the protocol for the digital DIN port. There was apparently no logical reason for Creative to do this, and the net result simply was that the DTT3500 speaker set would not work with X-Fi cards, if I wanted 5.1+ sound I would have to buy a newer set of speakers (Gigaworks no doubt). This change annoyed a lot of DTT3500 owners as it seemed like Creative had changed the digital DIN output for no other reason than to deliberately obsolete the older speaker system and force users to upgrade.

Since I had no intention of paying £hundreds for a new speaker system when my DTT3500 set worked perfectly fine (not to mention that my Audigy card did everything I needed it to) I carried on using my Audigy card when I switched to Vista. Like most people I soon found out that the Creative Vista drivers were buggy, and it wasn’t long before Creative stopped providing Vista driver updates completely.

Then I found Daniel_K’s drivers, which fixed a whole host of problems for me and also provided features that were apparently impossible to provide on Audigy soundcards. Let’s not forget – Daniel_K isn’t even a Creative employee, he’s hasn’t got access to the source driver code, etc. The fact he was able to achieve what he did is hugely impressive.

I had assumed that Creative turned a blind eye to this, maybe they figured that they didn’t want to commit resources to developing drivers for older cards anymore. I can live with that, I wouldn’t expect Microsoft to be providing updates for XP in 2015. What doesn’t sit well with me is threads like this because they show categorically that the problem Creative has with Daniel_K is not that he is infringing copyright (which he isn’t), it’s that he is providing functionality that Creative has deliberately omitted from their Audigy Vista drivers, or has flat out lied about whether features were even possible on the Audigy cards.

This single thread proves that Creative just cares about their bottom line – they want people to upgrade their hardware simply because they want to milk more money from their consumers. They could provide the functionality Daniel_K has enabled in his modded drivers themselves, and probably more besides (since they have direct access to the source), but they choose not to because they don’t want users to be able to carry on using “old” hardware like Audigy cards.

I am disgusted by Creatives attitude to their consumer base. There is NOTHING wrong with my Audigy soundcard, and there is NOTHING wrong with my DTT3500 speaker system. I will be damned if I am going to pay Creative £hundreds to upgrade to whatever their current “supported” gen is simply because they refuse to provide functionality, or worse still – will only provide deliberately crippled or buggy drivers to older cards. This is a disgusting business practice.

Creative will never seen a penny from me again, and that’s not a hollow threat believe me.
Message Edited by Durzel on 03-29-2008 07:58 AM

You tell’m Durzel. There are so many comments of value in that forum topic!

Now not only are the ferry’s in the Mid-Atlantic Region upping the ante on their ‘tertiary’ ‘random’ searches, errr, screenings to include popping not only the trunk but the engine compartment as well now (noted in my comment on Bruce Schneier’s blog, but….

NOW, I read this rubbish! And from a Canadian no less!?! What is the world coming to?!

Air safety proposal: shock-bracelets controlled by flight attendants (BoingBoing)

Lamperd, a “firearm training system” company, has patented a bracelet that delivers debilitating shocks when remotely triggered. Their killer app for this is aviation safety: they’re proposing that the TSA could force everyone who flies to wear one of these and then flight-attendants could zap us into a stupor if we turn out to be Al Quaeda.

BOLD emphasis mine)

What country do we live in these days?! This is not the United States of America that we all knew and loved!!?!

On a more recent posting by Bruce Schneir on Security blog, a quote by Barry Steinhardt (haven’t been a great fan of the ACLU in the past, that may be changing):

Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU comments:

I mean, when we warn about a “surveillance society,” this is what we’re talking about. This is it, this is the ballgame. Mass data from a wide variety of sources — including the private sector — is being collected and scanned by a secretive military spy agency. This represents nothing less than a major change in American life — and unless stopped the consequences of this system for everybody will grow in magnitude along with the rivers of data that are collected about each of us — and that’s more and more every day.

And “papers please” anyone?

Gold, Peace and Prosperity
(PDF download from www.mises.org/resources/3150)
Also available from Amazon.

Ron Paul’s amazing understanding about the problems this great nation, and it’s Citizens are dealing with are a great reason for voting for Ron Paul.

I first read his Freedom Under Siege which believe it or not Ron Paul wrote in the early 80s! (also available from mises.org as a direct PDF link as well) that he wrote and mades available for free – also available from Amazon.) and just read this one Gold, Peace and Prosperity which the forward and preface writers call more of a pamphlet (albeit a large pamphlet). They complement each other very well.

Gold, Peace and Prosperity outlines in totally understandable terms all about inflation. Why we have it, when it pretty much started in this country and what exacerbated it — and most importantly why we NEED to get back to the gold standard.

Both are excellent must reads!

Morgan in talks to quintuple Bear Stearns offer (MarketWatch)

As part of the original deal, the Fed guaranteed to take on $30 billion of Bear’s most toxic assets and the central bank also directed Morgan to pay no more than $2 a share for Bear to assure that it would not appear that the Bear shareholders were being rescued, the Time reported, citing people involved in the negotiations.

If the price is increased, some critics could have more ammunition to complain that taxpayers are helping to bail out a Wall Street firm that should be responsible for its own risky behavior, the Times said, adding that is one reason the Fed was hesitant on Sunday night to approve the transaction at $10 a share.

Daggone right there should be complaints that taxpayers are helping to bail out a Wall Street firm that should be responsible for it’s own risky behavior.

If this is allowed, what I want to know is, how do the rest of us REAL live human Citizens get in on the action. How can REAL live human Citizens get the Fed to help bail us out.

Sound ludicrous? Of course it is. And so is this Morgan Bears crap.

Even seemingly reliable e-mail vulnerable to [unethical] hackers

“The bad guys are trying billions of random combinations … and finding new ways to break in,” says Gartner tech security analyst John Pescatore.

Crooks use flaws uncovered by fuzzing to create tainted files disguised to fool targeted employees. Earlier this year, individuals at several corporations were targeted to receive e-mail carrying an attached Excel file corrupted via a previously unknown flaw. Clicking on the file opened a worksheet with data relevant to the targeted worker; it also gave the attacker a beachhead to probe deeper into the company’s network. “The victims never really knew,” says VeriSign iDefense researcher Matt Richard, who discovered the attack.

In another attack, crooks installed a tainted QuickTime video file at several porn websites crafted to steal data from eBay and PayPal accounts, according to security firm Intego.

“It’s not just Microsoft,” says Secunia Chief Technical Officer Thomas Kristensen. “Crooks now use many different ways to gain control of computers.”

This is nothing new to many of us, but the fact that USA Today has even posted this article shows how pervasive the problem really is. And how easily people within companies, corporate or home office/small/mid sized businesses are being affected, as well as home users.

Social Engineering is alive and well. And although Windows computers are mainly targeted, no operating system is entirely safe.

However, to limit the problem to simply saying that email is the problem would be a disservice to the public.

With thousands of ordinarily safe websites hacked by unethical hackers, people don’t even have to open a dangerous email to have their computers infected with malicious tools that steal passwords, install keyloggers or other malware in order to take over the computer or spew spam, or open backdoors to pretty much do whatever they want. All behind the scenes. Often going unnoticed unless the computer becomes inordinately slowed to the point that it interferes with what the legitimate user wants to do on their computer.

There is an old saying, curiosity killed the cat … for many today, curiosity killed security, thoroughly.

On the other hand, it is also wisely reported at ImformIT in the article entitled, “Crime, War, and B.S. in the Electronic Universe“,

Unlike Chicken Little (and plenty of people in the media), Michael Kemp doesn’t believe that the sky is falling and our electronic connections will soon evaporate under attack by terrorists, criminals, and [unethical] hackers. But he does warn of a more insidious threat: By pandering to these fears, industry professionals may drive themselves right out of business.

And later in the article,

The U.S. Patriot Act has become a stick with which to beat security researchers and invade personal privacy alike. Also in the U.S., the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been employed to criminalize even legitimate reverse-engineering (thanks to supposed copyright infringement), making a criminal out of Dmitry Sklyarov, and impeding research by cryptographers and security consultants alike. And what has the security industry done about these legal trends? Thus far, not a lot.

There are always AT LEAST two sides to a coin depending on which ‘dimension’ you refer to.

Overall, I think our best intelligence would dictate that we can not be naively clicking on anything that piques our fancy, or be too busy to think through before clicking or opening a file from email or on a website, or make sure that a file in an email truly is from the person we think it’s from, or assume that person has a virus-free computer, and making sure we virus check files with the latest virus definitions before opening them. Period.

We can’t assume, rightly or wrongly, that everything on a website is benign just because the organization is a good one. We have seen in the news that we can’t blindly trust every security site, bank site, sports site, news site, kid’s site, good cause site, etc.

Sometimes we seem to get caught by malware, when we were only doing what seemed reasonable — trusting a known good site.

We need a heads up on what search results appear to be safe and which ones do not appear safe or have some problems like good and bad downloads, or popups, or massive emails sent after visiting a particular site.

There are some really good security tools out there for many of the problems that we might come up against. They may not all be free, but they are available.

Fear is never a good thing. F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) is a big enemy to thinking individuals, communities and governments.

What’s America’s real inflation rate?
If rate is so low, how come food and energy cost so much?

Why is it that the federal government says the U.S. has virtually no inflation – less that 2 percent – but everything keeps getting more expensive, especially food and gasoline?

Today, gasoline is well above $3.00 a gallon. “Sticker shock” comes not just from the cost of buying a new car, but from the $50.00 or more it costs to fill up the gas tank, even if you don’t own an SUV.

You’re lucky if $100 buys two bags of groceries at the supermarket, even if you avoid the filet mignon.

Take a family of four to a movie theater to see a first-run film and it can cost $75 even in the Midwest. You will shell out somewhere between $6 and $9 just for one adult ticket, and you can end up spending somewhere between $65 to $75 total if all you do is spring for the luxury of popcorn and sodas.

Still, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August 2007 a remarkably low inflation rate of only 1.7 percent.

With the dollar nearly vanished in value, and everything costing so much by comparison, it’s no wonder folks have trouble treading water, much less getting ahead.

Thank you Jerome R. Corsi for writing this article! Must read for the rest of us in America!

Rest in peace, Devin Ossman. My heart goes out to Devin’s Dad, David Ossman, Devin’s wife, and the rest of his family, and the Firesign Theater during this very difficult time.

Body Of Missing Hiker Found On Mount Rainier (kirotv.com)

MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK, Wash. — Crews searching for a missing hiker on Mount Rainier found the man’s body on Wednesday, park officials said.

The park’s ranger office said the body of Devin Ossman, 45, was found just before noon Wednesday 1.5 miles from the trailhead in the Kautz Creek Drainage area. Searchers followed tracks in the snow to an elevation of 4,200 feet. The tracks then descended east of the trail to about 3,000 feet, where the body was found, rangers said.

Injured? We will hunt down the guy who did it to you!

Some time in December I walked out of my favorite pizza place in Provo and found the Law Firm Hummer of Death parked intimidatingly next to a pitifully undersized normal car. I don’t know if you’ll find this funny, but there on the back of the Hummer is the classic ambulance chaser pitch: “Injured? call 888-…” Several thoughts go through my head as I see this. The first is, why on earth does a law firm need a Hummer to conduct business?! One possibility is that by affixing an ad for the law firm to the Hummer, the over-sized intimidating gas hog of the highway becomes a tax write-off. Getting closer.

Gotta check it out for the kicker! LOL!

House unable to override Bush’s veto of waterboarding ban

House Democrats failed Tuesday to override President Bush’s veto of a ban on waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, and they castigated the administration for subjecting prisoners to torture in the fight against terrorism.

A quote from an email from the American Freedom Campaign on this sad situation:

Unfortunately, the vote to override the veto failed, 225-188, falling 51 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed. This means that the CIA will NOT be held to the standard of conduct set out in the Army Field Manual – a standard deemed appropriate by many military leaders, including Gen. David Patraeus, the commanding general in Iraq.

Full article at the LA Times.

A quote from that article pretty much sums up my feeling on such tactics:

“Torture is no proper tool in the arsenal of democracy,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) “If we abandon our American values, we lose who we are as Americans. . . . And if the administration and all of its apologists . . . continue to force America to abandon our values, we will lose the war.” Torture, he said, “is not only un-American, it is ineffective.”

See how the vote went and how your congressmen voted here.

(image from Canada.com)

Rising above great adversity (cancer) from the time he was one year old, Jeff Healy went on to be a brilliant guitarist and leader of The Jeff Healey Band.

From his website jeffhealey.com:

Jeff Healey, arguably one of the most distinctive guitar players of our time, died today (Sunday March 2) in St. Joseph’s Hospital, Toronto. He was 41, and leaves his wife, Cristie, daughter Rachel (13) and son Derek (three), as well as his father and step-mother, Bud and Rose Healey, and sisters Laura and Linda.

Funeral and memorial arrangements are pending.

Robbed of his sight as a baby due to a rare form of cancer, retino blastoma, and he started to play guitar when he was three, holding the instrument unconventionally across his lap. He formed his first band at 17, but soon formed a trio which was named the Jeff Healey Band.

After his appearance in the movie Road House, he was signed to Arista records, and in 1988 released the Grammy-nominated album See the Light, which included a major hit single, Angel Eyes. He earned a Juno Award in 1990 as Entertainer of the Year.

Also from an article in the National Post:

At the time of his death he was about to see the release of his first rock/blues album in eight years, Mess of Blues, which is being released in Europe on March 20, and in Canada and the U.S. on April 22. The album was the result of a joint agreement between the German label, Ruf Records, and Stony Plain, the independent Edmonton-based label that has released his three jazz CDs.

Mess of Blues was recorded in studios in Toronto, with two cuts recorded at the Jeff Healey’s Roadhouse in Toronto and two at a concert in London England. The backup group on the upcoming CD — the Healey’s House Band — played with him regularly at the downtown Roadhouse, and at a previous club bearing his name in the Queen-Bathurst area.

Sorry to hear that he didn’t get to see how well his album would be accepted when it was released.

More in the article and at his site and on Wikipedia and Wikinews as well.

I loved his part in Road House!

I am so sorry to hear about Jeff’s passing. He was so young and such a brilliant guitarist! My heart goes out to his wife, children and the rest of his family and friends.

Rest in Peace Jeff Healy. You will be greatly missed!