Fucking Tech

Creative’s terrible Vista drivers

Botrax — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 05:58:21 +0000

I have a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS that has worked pretty good with Windows XP. Now it seems this sound card is doomed to die with XP.

Creative’s limp into the future
Now I have a 64-bit processor and I am ready to upgrade to Windows Vista 64-bit, you know, leaping into the technology of the future and leaving 32-bit to rot in the past.

There is only one problem; my Audigy 2 sound card does not have drivers for Vista that enable the same functionality that I have in XP, namely EAX HD. You know, it would be nice to run my new quad core baby and it’s 8800GT with some hot EAX HD sound. Well, Creative doesn’t think so. Creative does not consider Audigy 2 to be good enough for Vista.

When looking for Vista 64-bit drivers for Audigy 2, here is what I find:

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy series Vista Driver 2.12.0002 (38.30 MB) 16 Mar 07

Wow. No driver updates in over a YEAR, dude! Vista has been available for Creative in Beta release for them to update their drivers to work with Vista since 2005-2006.

But wait! That’s not all! Not only are there no new drivers in over a year, they are crippled and do not have hot EAX HD, as mentioned by the release notes from over a year ago:

Known issues:

* Applications from the original Sound Blaster Audigy CD will not work with this download.
* Users are advised to use Audio Console included in this download to change speaker configurations.
* This driver does not support the following:
o Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS™ signals
o DVD-Audio
o DirectSound®-based EAX games
o Gameports
o 6.1 speaker mode.
* SPDIF passthrough is supported on Vista 32-bit only.

Rrrrright. Do you are telling me that in over a year you could not get these features to work in Vista? Brilliant. Now I’m in 2008 and I have jack shit to use my Audigy 2 in Vista.

X-Fucked
When you support your customers that use older products, you are in very good shape to have them buy your products again in the future. Here is the proof. Since I had no Audigy 2 love for Vista, I then decided to shop around for an X-Fi, knowing it is a newer product and probably has full function drivers for Windows 64-bit. I was happy that I could have some EAX HD in Vista. Well, Creative doesn’t think so. Creative does not think that their X-Fi card is good enough for Vista.

X-Fi is just not working properly in Vista yet, even with X-Fi being Creative’s flagship product. X-Fi has problems with systems have more than 4 gigs of RAM. What the fuck? Having more than 4 gigs of RAM in my system is THE reason why I am running 64-bit, but X-Fi has problems with that. Unfuckingbelievable.

Get this, Creative is even going against Daniel_K, some dude who is making Creative drivers work the way they should. That is fucking kick ass. This also shows how some guy does better than a big company. Creative does not realise that Daniel_K is helping Creative have their products actually work, and they want him to stop. Yeah, great PR move, Creative! Fucking brilliant!
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332&view=by_date_ascending&page=1 (cache)

Not only that, Creative purposely disabled features for the Audigy drivers when Vista is detected on install. http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/04/daniel_k-who-fi.html (cache)

Also, some mad greets to the Digg community for raising this shit storm that Creative deserves.
http://digg.com/hardware/Creative_threatens_community_modder (cache)
Creative certainly is showing that they have no interest in their products to work in Vista. Retarded.

PCI Slomo
Ok, so no love for Audigy 2 and X-Fi for Vista, so I decided to see if Creative had any newer products that work in PCI Express instead of PCI. Their offering does not even do EAX at all. Creative, are you fucking serious? The PCI Express SupremeFX II that comes with my motherboard is looking like a better option for Vista than my Audigy 2 right now. At least THIS card has some EAX on it, when compared to Creative’s PCI Express board. I wonder what I will do when faced with the option of buying new hardware that will not even work, when I have free hardware with my motherboard? Yeah, no shit. Fuck Creative.

Creative killed all the fuzzies
Creative just does not give me warm fuzzies anymore. I never had warm fuzzies in the first place when having to downgrade from my Gravis to a Sound Blaster when Gravis killed their sound card division. You can’t make my Audigy 2 work in Vista when everything else in my system does, and not even your newer X-Fi works in Vista. I never had super warm fuzzies for Creative, but now all the fuzzies are dead. No more fucking fuzzies for Creative. Fucking terrible.

You see, I am TRYING to buy your products, but you don’t want me to buy any of your sound cards. I am shopping right now to buy a laptop sound card for my netcasting, but guess what? That’s right, it’s not going to happen with a Creative product. You simply don’t give a fuck about your sound card business anymore. I really think Creative is dead as far as sound card products go.

Creative products are capable and Vista has been around quite long enough for Creative to produce functional drivers for Audigy 2 and X-Fi, but Creative is doing fuck all.

Fuck you, Creative, I am not likely to purchase any of your fucking tech any time soon.

The Palm Treo 680 is not made for Asians. Palm does not want this market.

Botrax — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:49:06 +0000

Different is good when it’s better.
Grab any cell phone from LG, Samsung or Motorola, you will most likely find a hole or ring to attach a small wrist strap or lanyard. This wrist strap makes it easy to grab the phone out of it’s hiding place and can also be used to prevent an inadvertent drop of your phone while using it. Palm, in their grandiose wisdom decided that wrist strap rings are not to be part of the Treo 680, when all other phones around the world have had these rings for years.

Palm hates Asians.
Palm must hate Asians by not including a wrist strap ring on the Treo 680. Palm is missing out on the complete lanyard/wrist strap accessory market for Treos in the Asian segment. When I show my Treo phone to my Asian friends, they always ask me what color is my wrist lanyard and which Helo Kitty noise charm I have at the end of it. I smack my head with my palm (my hand palm) every time. It makes me feel like an ass and left out every single time. It makes me feel very North-American.

The small guy get’s the protection.
Find the logic in this. Palm Centro is la less expensive device and can accommodate wrist straps. Treo 680 is more expensive and can not have wrist straps. Is Palm telling me that it’s OK to drop a 500$ Treo 680, but adds anti-drop lanyard capability to the less expensive Centro? Is this some kind of racket to extort more money out of people buying more expensive devices? Fuck, I paid 500$ for this phone. I can’t have a simple hole in the casing so I don’t drop my expensive phone with a 2$ wrist strap?

Sony wins.
My Sony TG-50 has a wrist strap ring, it is very handy when using it as a hand held voice recorder. My Sony UX-50 has the BIGGEST wrist strap ring ever seen in any hand held device. With a 1000$ device when it came out in 2003, it’d BETTER have a fucking wrist strap ring! In fact, this ring is reinforced metal that is part of the frame. FUCK!!! Now THAT’s a strap ring! 3 years later Palm gives me fuck all as far as strap rings on my Treo 680. Great. My 150$ digital camera has a lanyard ring. Why can’t my 500$ Treo have one?

I just bought a Treo 680 for my wife. Now she is asking where on her new Treo does she attach her wrist lanyard & Hello Kitty bell charm combo. Fuck.

Don’t worry, Palm, you’re getting off light on this one. I have more rants to rip you some big ones. Just wait for it. I love Palm OS, but Palm devices have bad implementations. Was I spoiled by Sony? No. Palm had plenty of time to implement all this stuff.

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GoldenTree’s crippled, slow & unencrypted hotel wireless

Botrax — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:56:54 +0000

Hotels seem to have replaced ethernet internet with wireless, as it probably saves money on cabling costs, which is OK. The problems I have with this is that so far I have had slow, crippled, unencrypted and ask for passwords for no reason and they have all been provided by GoldenTree.

Before you can do anything with your wireless connection you need to log in with a password that is the area code and your room number. This is stupid and useless. Residence Inn does not do this, it only asks you to agree to the terms of service, which does not bother with useless garbage.

Unencrypted? Are you fucking kidding me?

Wireless connections that have seen so far in hotels do not even use WEP or WPA encryption.I have seen this at Holiday Inn (cached)(cache), Marriott Residence Inn (cached)(cache) and Marriot Fairfield Inn (cache).

Not only is Goldentree (cached)(cache) doing a bad implementation, but hotels don’t seen to give a shit about guests that are staying for business purposes. Some business users will have VPN access, but some corporate VPN access limits tremendously what is possible to do on that connection. The idea is that we HAVE to use the wireless connection without our personal VPN sometimes. When that happens and the connection is not encrypted, that pisses me off because anyone can sniff around and see what everybody in the hotel is doing on their wireless connection.

By the way, FuckingTech.com has been created entirely over a wireless GoldenTree connection in a hotel. This is scary because all operations have been done over unencrypted wireless for everyone to see, from the domain registration, unencrypted FTP transfers (because SSL FTP never works) and unencrypted back end administration of the article system. Anyone listening over the wireless connection could have hijacked FuckingTech.com before it was even started. This inaugural article could have been hijacked!

I don’t mind if anyone grabs the nude celeb pics that I download, but I start minding when I work and an encrypted connection for that type of work is not available.

Unencrypted hotel wireless is risky and it should stop.

Slow “High Speed” connections

Now on to the speed. Goldentree is horrendously slow on Friday and Saturday evenings. Yo dudes! We need more bandwidth over here!!!! I am talking to you, Marriott, Holiday Inn and GoldenTree! When this shit goes on every god damned week-end from November to March, YOU HAVE A FUCKING PROBLEM with your unencrypted, crippled and slow ass connection.

Slow “High speed” connections are terrible and it has to stop.

Crippling

GoldenTree also limits the POST sizes that are over 25k. Fantastic. That is just retarded when you are trying to upload files to any HTTP content system such as FuckingTech.com

GoldenTree, you provide slow, crippling and unencrypted wireless connections to hotel customers. You have some work to do.

What burns me is that it seems all hotels use GoldenTree over here in Oklahoma City, which limits your options to attain some sort of satisfaction from your wireless connection provided to you.