neowin.net

Source:Slashdot

I was reading about this on the Creative forums yesterday and I have to say its bad news for the creative customers. It just comes to show much of a bunch of money grabbing rip-off merchants creative actually are.

I currently have an X-Fi, which is the last soundcard I get from creative!

Wait, so this guy improved and fixed their software (i.e. he did their job) for free, and they've banned it?!?

I think someone's brain at Creative is being overly "creative" about this.

Damn that sucks. You would think they be happy for the guy to do there job for them for free even if they didn't show it but I guess creative's team didn't like being shown up by a single guy

oh damn it, I have his drivers installed now and have made my Audigy 2 decent under Vista. I installed it under a temp account whist I was setting my system up so I don't think I have the installer anymore which is annoying. I nearly went and downloaded it again the other day to keep it in case I ever need to reinstall but I didn't >.<

Creative are a bunch of idiots and I'm never buying any of there products again, If they had put as much effort into driver development as this guy has it wouldn't be so bad.

This post has been edited by DrCheese: Mar 29 2008, 12:42

Awful.

I will try to avoid any creative product in the future.

it's available on the P2P network.
Anyway, i think they banned and removed it, because they think it's somekind of trojanware

I guess noone of the Creative team checked the drivers if they really work...

Haha, check the thread on the Creative forums [link]. It's quite impressive that nobody supports Creative in this decision (but not surprising).

Creative really have hurt them seleves in this market, for sure.

What do u mean by "i think they banned and removed it" the P2P network or Creative. Creative would have probably checked out the drivers and probably knows that they do work but if you went read the forum post that is linked in the slashdot post it isnt about if the drivers worked or not. It was because he was using there IP and they consider his modding to be theft of there IP.


I guess if they released 2 hardware identically cards with different drivers people would always opt for the cheaper one and use the modified drivers which in essence would make Creative lose money on its sale. Although banning Daniel_K will probably hurt the brands reputation more than his IP theft would have cost them.

hmpf, I agree that it was wrong that he was trying to get donations for it, Creative really had no choice I guess to stop him because of that, especially as they had "apparently" licensed some of the tech from other companies.
If only creative stopped making such a mess of there own drivers. The amount of bad PR they have got out of all the mess with the vista drivers is insane.

All of this is down to Creative having a monopoly in the standalone sound card market. None of this would have happened if creative had any decent competition. I'm glad that finally other companies like Acer and Asus are starting to step up.

It's Creative. What did you expected?



I see, so...

• let a guy do their job
• learn from the guy (that would be surprising)
• guy starts requesting donations, buys new cards and equipament or food, who cares?
• hold it... let the guy make more stuff
• learn enough for a couple of updates, and then kill the guy

Sounds perfectly sane to me.

This post has been edited by tiagosilva29: Mar 29 2008, 13:14

Ditto.

Boycott Creative

I think the issue with Daniel_K has to do with his modified Vista ISO for the Audigy series of sound cards (includes classic Audigy, but not Audigy SE, and the entire Audigy 2 line, including the ZS subseries): Daniel_K included ALchemy Audigy Edition, which Creative charges Audigy owners $9.95 for. That would indeed (legally) constitute IP theft per the law. That may be, indeed, the entire issue between Creative and Daniel_K (who has been a regular contributor in Creative's Sound Blaster and Windows Vista forums); he also made no secret of this in his posts in said forums (so it's not like Creative was unaware of what he was doing).

What surprises me was that Creative took so long to bounce him (despite his inna-your-face attitude).

I will also hazard a guess that a lot of the griping over Daniel_K's ejection is coming from Audigy owners that are running Windows Vista.

(The only comment I will make vis-a-vis the Daniel_K situation is as follows: despite having used (and, in fact, having recommended) his modified Vista ISO for the Audigy sound cards (entirely because of the ease of use compared to downloading the individual items from Creative one at a time), I did wind up purchasing an X-Fi (specifically, the new-design XtremeGamer) for completely unrelated reasons.)

Any decent company would have offered him a job. He obviously does it better than the talentless hacks they have working for them. Creative isn't a decent company though, I learned that years ago. They've been screwing their customers for years now. The whole charging customers for Alchemy nonsense just highlighted that. It's a shame they bought out and/or killed all of the competing sound card companies and standards. That's why they've been able to sit back doing nothing for so long and get away with it.