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 »