The Flow of Consciousness

Creative Labs message boards user Daniel_K had been modifying the Vista driver to re-enable functionality which was apparently available on Windows XP but disabled for Vista. In a somewhat DMCA-like claim this past Friday, Phil O’Shaughnessy, VP Corporate Communications at Creative Labs, wrote a message on Creative’s message boards asking using user Daniel_K “to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP.” This created an immense outcry from folks who have paid a premium for Creative’s X-Fi line of sound cards, which is “intentionally crippled” on Vista. Creative doesn’t seem to care, though. “If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.” It appears that the modified drivers are still available, but will no longer be updated as per Creative’s request.

I wish Creative would release a fully-working Linux driver. Even though I did get the Linux X-Fi driver working, Ubuntu still freezes 2 out of 5 times I boot and even then some sounds are completely distorted, such as Pidgin’s.

What is happening to the computer hardware industry? Seriously. nVidia’s crappy drivers drove me bonkers, and from Windows 32-bit to 64-bit, where I’ve had almost no problems. Creative’s shenanigans will keep me off of Vista, and even the modded drivers won’t work because I have 8 GB of RAM, and there’s a note in the driver package which says that the drivers will crash the computer if there is more than 2 GB of RAM available.

I’m surprised that Creative doesn’t have a class-action lawsuit against it for false advertising. It touts features of the card on the box, but these features aren’t available on all of its supported platforms, and there’s no note saying that. Tsk tsk, Creative. You get a wag of the finger today.