Creative Goes After Driver Modder 385
FreedomFighter writes "Since the release of Windows Vista, Creative has promised their Sound Cards as being 'Vista Ready'. Unfortunately, as many unlucky customers did discover, this is not true. What the users actually found were buggy, feature crippled drivers. Creative insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on windows Vista. With Creative releasing less than one new driver a year, things seemed bleak. Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to 'fix' many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers."
Not a big surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Used to be I would buy ONLY Creative sound hardware. Now I've given up after even a USB sound box of theirs didn't work, but the $15 Taiwanese ugly grey box worked fabulously with no effort, and on Linux, too.
Now they not only refuse to release decent drivers, but actively annoy those who do. What, exactly, is the value proposition here for me as a customer?
*golf clap* (Score:5, Insightful)
Well your drivers always sucked and your hardware business is being steadily eaten by rapidly improving onboard audio and much better high end audio cards. You are not long for this world.
So post the instructions or a diff (Score:5, Insightful)
And surely a diff is not a derived work in itself - is it?
Re:Scruffy seconds. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So post the instructions or a diff (Score:3, Insightful)
But, as Jennifer Granick said at defcon 15 (TINLA either): the answer in many cases of technology vs. law is either "we don't know" or "it depends".
What he needs to do is release the patcher... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So where's the class action lawsuit? (Score:3, Insightful)
I suggest that we might be witnessing Creative getting involved with the evolution process here...
Creative Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
So I upgraded to their latest card in the hopes that their latest drivers might fix things. I picked out a X-Fi Audio Extreme, and this is only recently mind you...
And although the memory leak seems to have gone this card has the highly entertaining bug of turning down the master volume by 75% each time any input is received on the microphone, in use or others. A wonderful feature you can't turn off. So if I type too loud on the keyboard my music turns down by 75%...
Long story short... I gently unscrewed my Creative X-Fi and throw it against a wall. Then I plugged in to my Gigabyte motherboard's built in audio, enabled it in the bios, and haven't had any audio issues at all for coming up to two months now.
I'm not using Creative again. I'm done. Seven years a happy customer, now gone.
Re:Third-party problem (Score:5, Insightful)
God forbit that music might be heard without jumping through DRM hoops.
E-mu/Ensoniq -- anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Instead, they bought two of the finest synthesizer and sampler vendors and sent them down the drain.
This, Creative, I will never forget. And for this simple reason you won't sell anything to me. Never.
Yes, even if you shipped it with Linux drivers...
Re:So post the instructions or a diff (Score:0, Insightful)
I stopped buying Creative products 10 years ago and refuse to touch a single one of their branded products. They're driers are infested with malware.
You cry on one hand about how bad they are but YOU give them your money? Why?
What kind of person does this? A stupid one. If you did this, then yes, YOU ARE STUPID. No sympathy here.
Re:petulant and/or puerile (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remember (Score:5, Insightful)
We are the ones that fix computers for friends and relatives. Slashdot readers alone probably account for a good sizable chunk of all your sales ever so what do you think will happen when we stop recommending your brand to the people who don't know any better. Or better yet, say it sucks?
Your company won't be the first to die in the flames of a hoard of angry geeks and you certainly won't be the last.
not ineptitude? (Score:5, Insightful)
after all they have the original source code and we have to assume some partway competant SW engineers.
it seems that some of what Daniel K did was reactivate some features that had been intentionally crippled from older cards.
this seems more to be nefarious decisions on backwards compatibilty and forward roadmap taken on profit grounds not technical grounds. after all, we of the
follow the logic here. a brand new and shiny OS hits the market and you need to release drivers for it. would it not be tempting to cripple some of the older cards and hence try and tease people to upgrade to the latest HW? even better you could hold back some of the features of the later versions and try to gain additional income for them in the form of top range drivers. its an insane tactic but one that is used in the field quite alot.
the bad thing is that somebody then dissassemles that code for the driver realises what has happened and then patches the removed functionality back in.
this tactic is very prevalent in the industry - by attempting to artificially shorten the product life cycle you try to force repeat purchace and then profit. when there are no more additional features you can dream up then you attempt to deprecate the original in order to force purchase of the new. Creatice make no money at all from people using old sound blaster tech on vista so they will do everything they can to halt it.
maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I see this sort of thing all the time and it make a more logical explanation to me then "large multinational cannot write new drivers even when they have the source code".
comments?
Re:Meh...Duh...and everything else (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Third-party problem (Score:5, Insightful)
We've had decades, and STILL don't feel that operating systems work as well as we'd like, when they're designed to work.
Into this, add Vista, the first OS that is designed *not* to work at certain times. Plus it's supposed to figure out what those times are that it should work, and shouldn't work. What chance of success has this, in a real world of bugs, and all.?
developers managers (Score:1, Insightful)
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332&view=by_date_ascending&page=7 [creative.com]
"Now the painful truth which half the posts here have missed: the Creative driver team is a group of smart, very talented people who could release a fully funcitoning driver set TOMORROW if company executives would let them. The fact that they have not done so is a strategic marketing decision based on 1. The cost of drafting a license with other IP holders that would cover the card itself for its entire life cycle versus just the card on a particular set of OS's, and 2. The desire to use a new OS as leverage to force customers to upgrade to a new sound card even though the previous card is still fully functional."
it's all about forced obsolescense
Re:Not a big surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
They do. From my reading of it, Daniel K's work basically re-enables all those features that Creative had disabled - and the reason for disabling was not technical, it was purely a legal/marketing decision.
Re:Third-party problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Never, never let lawyers run the show. They don't know anything about the real world.
Creative: one example of an Evil Company (tm) (Score:4, Insightful)
Please, Creative, just vanish.
Re:Illegal hack is not the answer. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, it might violate Creative's EULA, but that isn't against the law.
Now that said, redistributing the hacked driver is a copyright violation. However, that is easily solved by distributing the hack as a patch rather than as a complete package. If he does that, there is nothing that Creative can really do about it (although they don't have to let people discuss it on their forums.)
Re:Just remember (Score:3, Insightful)
The geek with an ego the size of the planet.
Top Operating System Share Trend for April, 2007 to February, 2008 [hitslink.com]
Re:Mob mentality (Score:1, Insightful)
A company screws it's consumer base, showing complete indifference to their problems, and you not only advise against a boycott, but you try and sell it as a negative?!?!
I really hope that you are just a company shill, trying to shift the momentum of this, but if you're not please save the gene-pool and skip having children.
I mean really, what side of the bunk-bed do you fall out of every morning? This is not a case of a shitty dev team. This is an established global company that LIED about a products compatablity, then LIED about being able to fix it, then denied its customers an available fix offering no alternative. Class Action. They will lose and they should.
And NO this will not hurt the consumer, as it will send a clear message to Creative and any other companies up to similar shenanigans, that there is a real risk of a Company Bankrupting Lawsuit just waiting for you when you break the law and cheat buyers.
Re:So post the instructions or a diff (Score:1, Insightful)
But where does Daniel_K reside? (Score:3, Insightful)
Deja Vu (Score:2, Insightful)
How did they get onto this list? By pulling the EXACT SAME STUNT you guys are talking about for Vista and Audigy and I experienced with XP and Live. The strategy to "support" the customer was pretty much:
"Send us $20 to get a CD with new drivers on it, which... by the way, won't work either"
Leaving the user to try and find hacked up drivers on the web that actually worked worth a damn.
So... I see now that some things will never change. And I extend my blacklisting of Creative's products another 5 or more years.
I refuse to purchase anything from a vendor which, as a matter of policy, holds the paying customer hostage for more money just to use the item for it's most basic purposes.