Bill’s Mind

March 29th, 2008

For those just tuning in, Creative Inc, the company that sells the Sound Blaster brand of sound cards, has been giving a driver hacker a very hard time. The issue involves Vista driver support. I don’t know the full details, as I don’t own a Sound Blaster anymore, but the gist of it is that many features do not work in Vista, that used to work in XP due to architectural differences in the OS.

In other words, all those neat features they listed on the box, which people foolishly paid for, well those features do not work under Vista, Microsoft’s latest mainstream operating system.

Let’s think about that for a moment: it’s a sound card. It takes digital sound, converts it to analog and shoves it down a pair of wires to the speaker. Actually it doesn’t even drive the speakers, you still need amplifiers (which are built into most computer speakers). As far as add-on devices go, this is about as simple as it gets. Here’s an example of a basic home-made sound circuit that hooks up via USB.

Anyway, Daniel K is a smart fella who hacked the drivers in order to bring those missing features back in Vista, and he has shared his work online for others to enjoy. He’s basically giving away for free what should have been Creative’s responsibility from the beginning, giving Sound Blaster owners what they want and paid for, and he’s being punished and threatened by the company as a direct result of these actions.

If you want to find out more about this despicable company, hit up Google and read all about how they once tried to charge money for Audigy device drivers, or how they drop support for their products after 2-3 years only to re-release near-identical hardware for more money (see “X-Fi Xtreme Audio”).

I invite everyone to boycott these bastards. Today’s Sound Blasters have nothing in common with the products we all fell in love with 20 years ago.

Here’s the forum thread concerning Daniel K. Many people have signed up to the forum purely to leave angry comments, I invite you to take a few minutes to do the same. Tell this company exactly how much they suck. They will never change, but the more people post, the more attention this story will get and hopefully others will stop buying this overpriced garbage so we can all watch the company die!

Message to Daniel_K - Sound Blaster - Creative Labs

March 22nd, 2008

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I pondered long and hard about where this site was going, when a lolcat jumped at my face and shouted “UR DOIN IT WRONG!“. That illiterate micro-bastard could not have been more right.

Billsmind.com needs a reboot, a new format that better represents what it’s like to live in my reactive world. Until I figure it out, I probably won’t be posting much on here.

If you want to be informed when this new encyclopedia of Billco hits primetime, leave a comment below with your contact info and I’ll give you… Read the rest of this entry »

March 12th, 2008

This is an FYI for anyone visiting my site in response to spam / e-cards or any other garbage received from aliuysal@ billsmind.com, ajrang@ billsmind.com or michaelmcfadden@ billsmind.com.

The spam did not originate from my server. These are just half-bred scammers putting fake addresses in the “From” field. I would love to find out who’s behind this, chop them into a bloody goulash and have demon sex with their remains, but that’s not quite how thinks work on the Internet.

I would simply remind that if you receive any email from people you don’t know, look them up before clicking… Read the rest of this entry »

December 9th, 2007

Charity Forced to Pay Copyright Fee So Kids Can Sing Carols | TorrentFreak

I won’t even try to say anything clever about this. Fuck them all! Fuck the idiot inspector, fuck his boss, fuck everyone who touched the paperwork involved in this case. I hope they all get gang-raped by a pack of Wii hoarders for the rest of eternity.

November 29th, 2007

Optimus Maximus in minimus sub-$1000 configurations - Engadget

We live in a fake world. Fake people, fake careers, fake tits and fake money. Well if you’re the kind of fake person that likes a fake computer, here’s your keyboard: the Optimus Maximus, by Art Lebedev (aka the “geniuses” who got paid to draw a heart on a microwave).

For those of you who just got off the boat, this keyboard’s claim to fame is that each key has its own mini color OLED display, so you can put little icons and animations on them. It’s real purty!… Read the rest of this entry »

November 23rd, 2007

$620M for Quebec manufacturers hit by loonie rise

If you’re too lazy to read, the Liberal government is issuing tax cuts and other beneficial adjustments to help struggling Quebec manufacturers whose business has been negatively affected by the rising value of the Canadian dollar. Real cute.

While all of us consumers are enjoying the strong dollar (at least in theory, because importers are mostly pocketing the exchange), these factories are suffering. Why are they suffering ? Maybe because they rely too much on exports; if their income were coming primarily from within Canada, they would be somewhat… Read the rest of this entry »

November 22nd, 2007

YouTube - Xubuntu Compiz Fusion VERY OLD computer / Better than Vista

I don’t usually post Youtube links, but this one actually has adults commenting :P Damn kids. Anyway, the topic I want to touch on is old computers. Not old like Atari, old like a Pentium-III 800mhz, which was released in 1999, almost nine years ago.

Nine years is a very long time for computers. Most of them don’t survive that long, thanks to Chinese manufacturing. Cheapness aside, most people replace them a lot sooner than 9 years. I must have gone through… Read the rest of this entry »

November 20th, 2007

Canada failing its obligations to children: UNICEF

Apparently we’re a bad nation for kids. More accurately, we’re as bad today as we were a generation ago. Here’s a priceless excerpt from the article:

• About one in six Canadian children live in poverty, a number unchanged in a generation.
• A child obesity rate of 26 per cent — one of the highest rates of obesity among children in developed countries.
• Infant mortality rates at five deaths per 1,000, a figure unchanged in five years.
• Canada has one of the highest rates of children in state care and in youth detention centres compared

November 9th, 2007

CQ Politics | FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here

Fee Fi Fo Figger… As if the collective society of US law enforcement and security agencies weren’t already the biggest asses on the beachball, they’ve done yet another thing to remind everyone how ignorant they truly are.

I don’t know how else to say this, but the FBI is trying to track down terrorists by observing what kind of food they charge to their credit cards. I guess my “5 shawarma platters per week” diet makes me Osama Bin Canada! I guess that means the… Read the rest of this entry »

November 1st, 2007

Absorb this for a moment:

Dear, customer
 
New bug in Windows Kernel was found. It makes your computer vulnerable.We strongly recommend you to install this Critical Update (in attacment).
 
Best Regards,
Microsoft Window Update.
 
Jennifer Gervasio about creating “super children” contribute to Jennifer Gervasio become creative, her kids have the resources, overscheduled these things, will Gervasio said. feel pressure to be plenty of time love to do. balanced with plenty the pressure,
 
Attachment: update.zip

Now I realize I’m basically a human virus scanner, but I have a hard time believing how anyone with at least room-temperature… Read the rest of this entry »