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

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 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 »

October 18th, 2007

Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14

Okay, time out! Can someone please tell me why these worthless South African war mongers have autonomous robotic machine gun thingies ?

Who makes these things ? How much does one cost ? What kind of bottom-feeding Mercedes-driving sack of shit would design and build such a thing ? And who got the brilliant idea of outsourcing the software development to some backyard meth lab in China ?

How about we stick them all together on a remote island and napalm these sons of bitches on live TV ? I’d… Read the rest of this entry »

October 5th, 2007

Jury penalises music file-sharer - BBC NEWS

A Minnesota woman just lost in court against the RIAA, and has been slapped with a quarter-million dollar judgement.

Now I don’t care how much music she was sharing (it wasn’t much!) or how badly she may have messed up her testimony, there’s just no fucking way she could have “cost” the music industry $222,000.

The interesting bit is that this was a jury trial. That means there was a group of people in that court, who decided by majority that this woman was guilty, while the judge set the penalty. I’m… Read the rest of this entry »

September 8th, 2007

Ahh, computers… That’s why you’re here, right ? That’s how you got here, too!

With the recent release of ‘new’ iMacs from Apple a few weeks ago, there has been much buzz around the blogosphere about quality and value. A lot of whiney ignorants like to hear themselves say that Macs are expensive because they are built with high quality components, but really how can you gauge the quality of a piece of computer hardware ? Is there really that much variance in quality from one brand to the next ?

Billco says NO!

First of all, Macs are… Read the rest of this entry »

July 11th, 2007

The guys at Scifi.com have a little blurb about a Wireless Tazer that may be coming to a cop near you.

It’s certainly not rocket science, just a bullet-sized gadget with electrodes and a battery. While I’m sure there’s a mile of paperwork documenting all the homeland-security-funded R&D, the fact is I’m simply not impressed. The potential benefit of a wireless tazer is greatly outweighed by the absolute certainty of its abuse by law enforcement officials. It’s not like they can be trusted with regular tazers anyway.

Oh I wonder how the… Read the rest of this entry »

June 9th, 2007

The article at News.com.com.com.com :P

You’ve got to love California and their Hollywood legal system. A federal judge has ordered TorrentSpy.com to start tracking its visitors’ habits, as part of the discovery process in their suit against the MPAA.

It just keeps getting better and better (and by that I mean WORSE). You see, the MPAA doesn’t even have any proof of copyright infringement. They’re asking the defendant to provide self-incriminating evidence, which is a direct violation of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

This sets one ugly precedent. It’s yet another gross distortion… Read the rest of this entry »

May 28th, 2007

I ran out of blank DVD-R discs today, and since nobody in town ever has good media (Verbatim, TY) in stock, I ended up trying a different brand as recommended by the store manager and my former boss. They are Philips 16x DVD-R, and they are the worst garbage I’ve put in my burner, EVER!… Read the rest of this entry »

May 16th, 2007

You may have heard of an Icelandic photographer named Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir (I have no idea how to pronounce that!). She’s taken some gorgeous artistic shots and trick photos that dazzle the eye and mind alike. She’s so good, in fact, that an unscrupulous print shop decided to sell canvas prints of her work without permission, and made a fair chunk of money… Read the rest of this entry »