mattgadient.com

March 28th: It started with a C&D (cease and desist) letter on their forums…

Daniel_K:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards.  In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative.  Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended.  We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services.  The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing.  By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods.  When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own.  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.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you.  We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages.  To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP.  In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules.  If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

From there, chaos ensued. Not only did just about every major tech site pick up on this story, but Read more…

Anyone familiar with stress testing in Windows is probably familiar with Prime 95. Problem is, if you head to the mersenne.org website, you won’t find a link to a Mac OS X version.

Head to their *forums* however, and you’ll come across this thread which has links to download the latest beta version (25.6) for a few operating systems, including Mac OS X!  Only downside is the link is broken (it’s missing the .org in mersenne.org). Either fix it manually in the URL bar, or click here [ftp://mersenne/gimps/mprime256-MacOSX.tar.gz] to download it.

Just so you’re not in for a surprise… the Mac version is all text-based. No fuzzy GUI like in the windows version. Run the program and a terminal window will open. However, it’s still easy to use, and still great for stress testing your machine. If you’re in the middle of stress testing and want to cancel and go to the main menu, hit CTRL-C.

While writing up an article and scrounging for information on all the BIOS settings, I came across a couple Anandtech articles for other ASUS motherboards that have *very* similar settings to the P5K-E. If you’re looking to find out what most of the memory/cpu/fsb/frequency/voltage/timing options do, check out the articles here and here.

Here’s the background. I’m a Wordpad/TextEdit kinda guy. I don’t use office suites unless I have to, and the few times I do use them, I just want to get my task done and move on to something else. I’ve got to be able to find what I want quickly which means most of the options have to be easy accessable. At the same time, I hate a cluttered interface, so having every option plastered over the screen makes me less than happy. Yes, I can be both picky and tough to please.

Moving on, for my last blog entry, I had done a small benchmark and wanted to be able to present the numbers in a chart, since it’s easier to visualize differences in nice colorful bars than it is a zoo full of numbers. Before going on, if you’re a professional user who plans to use a spreadsheet every day, this review isn’t for you. I’m really just comparing something relatively basic between 3 programs. I certainly *don’t* recommend you make a multi-thousand dollar corporate purchase decision based on what I say here. If on the other hand you’re a casual home user and are just looking for the opinions/insight of some others when it comes to a spreadsheet program for the Mac, I dare say you’ve come to the right place. Just promise you’ll research what others have said too

I had 3 programs available to use:

• NeoOffice - Based on OpenOffice, an office suite tailored specifically for the Mac. Strong points are that it’s free, and apparantly excels at opening files from other office suites.
• iWork ‘08 - Apple’s own set of office apps. From what I’d read, Keynote (the presentation app) is a very impressive program, but Pages and Numbers are a little weak. We’ll see. Not free, but there’s a 30 day free trial. A reasonable $79 otherwise.
• Microsoft Office 2008 - The king of office suites, and the one used in just about every office, school, and business. Quite powerful, and finally runs natively on Intel Macs. $199.95 for the Home & Student edition. Thankfully most home users won’t need the “full” Microsoft Office edition wihch weighs in at a whopping $549.95. Fortunately, Office was installed on the office machine here, so I was able to try it out too.

So what are we looking for here? Read more…

In a prior article, I was playing around with OS X installs on regular PC hardware. I’ve kept a couple of the installations going for the time being, and have been using one of them to recode some videos that we have in DivX and XviD format into H.264 for the Apple TV I recently bought.

Recoding is a time consuming process, and with this particular system, using 2-pass encoding resulted in around an hour per 1-hour episode that’s been recoded. Looking for a way to speed up the system a bit (the E2140 is known to be a pretty decent overclocker), I looked to the BIOS. Read more…

I bought the 20″ SyncMaster 206BW to replace an old weak 17″ CRT that was showing signs of age. I also wanted something that would show a little more screen real-estate.

Monitors are one of the few things where I’m very hesitant to buy online. Picture quality can vary drastically between monitors, and in no way is one $250 model guaranteed to be anything close to another. Preference comes into play a lot here too. Something as simple as glossy vs matte can make a world of difference. I head into the nearest Future Shop, and spent a pretty long time looking at their displays.

There were 2 major things I was looking for: Read more…

A couple days ago, I went through the process of installing the Kalyway OSX install on a white box computer. Since then, I’ve tried on a couple more machines, mixing up the hardware a bit, and have been through about 10 install attempts. None of the installs have gone hitchless, although with enough time and effort put in, they were all workable.

Rather than write an essay for each install, I’ll put the tidbits in point form. If anyone else is installing and running into similar issues, hopefully this will help. Read more…

Some of you may have read my previous experience installing OS X Tiger on “whitebox” computers. I tinkered with it on and off from 10.4.6 to 10.4.8 on various machines but haven’t really played with the new versions until recently.

A couple months ago, I got a hold of a couple installers - iATKOS v1.0i, and the Kalyway 10.5.1 OS X installers. I was doing re-installs of Windows at the time on a few different machines, so I tried the OS X installers to see if things had progressed to the point where it was a simple install-go-and-everything-works sort of thing. It wasn’t (which answered that question), and I didn’t touch it again. Until now that is… Read more…