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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 discussion erupted on just about every major forum as well. A petition even popped up. However, the brunt of the rage seems to have been released on Creative’s own forums. A screenshot of the top section of the front page (after the stickies) is below. (click the thumbnail for the full thing).

Now people are often upset at various companies, yet things tend not to usually get blown out of proportion. Why was this any different? A few reasons:

• Creative’s products are trash. Bold statement? Yes. What’s my justification for it? I’ve owned a *lot* of computers and hardware over the years, and I’ve seen it. To be honest, if Creative Labs didn’t get such a strong foothold in the market early on in the Soundblaster days, they probably wouldn’t still be around. Anyone old enough to remember Dr. Sbaitso, 2400 baud modems, or heck even just plain 386′s probably remembers that games tended to ask what sound card you had, and “Sound Blaster” or “Sound Blaster Compatible” was usually in there. There was little to no support for other cards, and it wasn’t until Windows games became really mainstream that other cards really stood much hope of being compatible with the latest games (even at that it took a *lot* of time for most drivers to mature enough to be worthwhile). That’s about the time Creative should have died, but the “Sound Blaster” mentality was still there, which meant people were still buying them, and let’s face it – other sound card manufacturers didn’t pump out great drivers nor did they make a lot of impressive stuff either. Creative didn’t have to *try* to compete, so they were content to put out poor stuff. For example, the Sound Blaster Live! didn’t get along with VIA’s KTxxx chipsets. They hogged the PCI bus, and just about anyone using a motherboard with a VIA chipset and Sound Blaster Live! got choppy sound. Changing BIOS settings could sometimes help, but usually didn’t. Who tried to come up with a fix for the massive numbers of users with issues? Creative? Nope. VIA? Nope. A man by the name of “George Breese” did. There was a PCI latency patch he released (that I used), which solved the choppy sound issues for many people, and at the very least, helped with most. Creative did nothing. Add the fact that driver updates for Sound Blaster products were extremely few and far between as well. I’d update drivers for just about every piece of hardware in my system multiple times before finding a Sound Blaster update released on Creative’s site. I’ve come to realize that their mentality towards a product is “make a product, make a driver for it, release it, then forget about it and start on a new product”. It’s gone on for years. With Vista out (and hardware companies having *loads* of time to get ready for it), apparently people have had a lot of issues with their products again. Whether it’s incompetent programmers behind the drivers, or a notion of “don’t improve our hardware/software but make the customer want to buy something newer/better”, one thing’s for sure – Creative’s products are trash. Buy them if you need them, buy them if they’re the most cost effective, and buy them if you really like the pretty boxes and all the marketing. Just remember what you’re paying for. You’re not getting a high quality product. You’re getting a piece of trash. Don’t expect it to ever work better than it does the day you put it in your system, and don’t expect it to work with anything new. It *might*, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’d bet on it.
• Reason 2 for everyone being upset – A lot of them *used* and in some cases *needed* Daniel_K’s driver packages. Now these packages are being taken away. If they can’t get their sound cards to work the way they want them to without those packages, those cards really will end up in the trash.
• “Sticking up for the little guy” – little guy’s well respected and doing a nice thing. Big bad company stomps out his work. If it were a well-liked company, it might just blow over. Unfortunately, nobody’s a big Creative Labs fan. Creative Labs just brought themselves down from “not well liked” to “hated bully”. Good job btw.
• No damage control – Sometimes, “the damage is done, and there’s nothing you can do about it”. This isn’t the case here. The fire was *started* with their post, and they just let the flame spread. They should have tried to work things out right away, or failing that, shut down their forums once the madness started to spread. By leaving the forums up, they left “the mob” with a central place to congregate, rather than forcing them to split up amongst the many other forums where things would have grown more slowly and dispersed more quickly.

So you may be wondering who’s side I’m on here. Despite the fact that I’m not a big fan of Creative, it was perfectly in their right to do what they did. Generally, accepting any form of money for modifying someone else’s IP (intellectual property) is a big no-no. Yes, I know that nowadays just about everyone has a “donate” link on the side of their page, and that you *could* say it’s for bandwidth only, but as far as most major companies go, if you’re modifying their IP but not causing any harm by doing so, you’re usually ok. This is part of what makes mod sites for so many games possible. However, start to profit off your work, and most companies will be quick to jump down your throat. Granted, Daniel_K’s work might have been costing Creative Labs a bit anyway if it resulted in less hardware upgrades, but Creative was likely willing to let it go and simply turn a blind eye to their IP being touched. Asking for donations though got the plug pulled on the whole operation.

Best case scenerio: What happens now? It depends on your viewpoint.

• For Creative – Daniel_K’s project dies, people are forced to upgrade and despite claims by many of never using Creative products again, they buy the newest Creative stuff anyway.
• For Current Users that needed Daniel_K’s stuff – Creative reverses their position. Not likely to happen though for reasons that would take another paragraph to explain (legit reasons – not just “because they’re jerks” or something). Alternately, that someone else begins/continues development and that Creative turns a blind eye.
• From my viewpoint – Daniel K’s project dies, people upgrade to non-Creative stuff and find out that some of it is actually pretty decent. Creative starts to trail for a while in marketshare and is forced to make better quality stuff with *good* up-to-date drivers to compete. Basically that competition drives better products at lower prices, not just from Creative but everyone else as well. Competition is always a good thing.

If you just want the files asap, skip the rest of the read and scroll down to the end.

While browsing through the World of Warcraft Tech Support forums, I came across this thread which has something of a fix for high pings. For the technical side as to how and why this works, I suggest you read the thread. The short version is that the WoW servers apparantly wait for the client to send an “ACK” before sending the client new data. The problem is, the client does not always send that “ACK” right away, so you’re left with a period of time where both the client and server are waiting on each other. This *could* be fixed on Blizzard’s end at some point, but until then, there are a few ways of fixing this on your own.

The way to do this in Windows is basically to add a registry entry. The downside is that it changes this setting for the entire computer, and might affect other high-bandwidth programs negatively (the computer will now send a lot more ACK’s than it did before). There were well-written instructions in the thread mentioned above, so I’ll paste them here:

basically windows user type “regedit” in windows “run..” dialog to bring up registry menu then find:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\
Parameters\Interfaces\There will be multiple NIC interfaces listed in there, find the one you use to connect to the internet, there will be several interfaces listed (they have long names like {7DBA6DCA-FFE8-4002-A28F-4D2B57AE8383}. Click each one, the right one will have lots of settings in it and you will see your machines IP address listed there somewhere. Right-click in the right hand pane and add a new DWORD value, name it TcpAckFrequency, then right click the entry and click Modify and assign a value of 1.

you can change it back to 2 (default) at a later stage if it affects your other TCP application performance. it tells windows how many TCP packets to wait before sending ACK. if the value is 1, windows will send ACK everytime it receives a TCP pckage. sounds straight forward to me.

The problem is that if you’re using Vista, it won’t work unless you install a certain hotfix first. I did a google search, and the only place I could find with the hotfix was http://thehotfixshare.net (which was actually mentioned in the forum). It’s a great site, and they offer the download for free, but you have to register first, and they don’t allow hotmail or yahoo email addresses (possibly others), which could leave some people out in the cold. Therefore, I’m offering the files here as well. If you feel like “giving back”, head to their site and make a donation – if it weren’t for them I wouldn’t have the files in the first place.

Keep the following in mind:

• These hotfixes are for Vista only. Don’t try to install them on XP (you don’t need them anyway).
• Install at your own risk. If they bork your system, are riddled with viruses that my virus scanner missed, or somehow cause you or your machine to participate in the annihilation of mankind, I’m not being held responsible. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
• One is for 32-bit Vista, one is for 64-bit Vista. Install the right one. Not the wrong one, not both.
• After you’ve finished with the hotfix, remember to add the TcpAckFrequency registry key!

Good luck!

Downloads
Vista 32-bit – Windows6.0_KB935458_v2_x86.msu.zip
Vista 64-bit – Windows6.0_KB935458_v2_x64.msu.zip

EDIT: A few people were having issues downloading the files (getting garbled text instead of the download). I downloaded the files from thehotfixshare.net and put them back up, just in case something went awry on the server. They’re now zipped.

One other note – a post at thehotfixshare.net in the x64 section noted that “this is fix for non sp1 systems only”. If you’ve installed Vista’s Service Pack 1, these may not work, although if Microsoft included it in the SP1 update (no idea if they did or not), then you might be able to use the registry key. Just make sure you write down (or print) where you change the registry so that you can reverse the change if it doesn’t work and you lose network access or something.

Unfortunately, if you use them, and try to send mail through a mail server other than their own, you might run into problems.

Now Gmail, Hotmail, and other web-based email users are fine. It’s those using Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Eudora, etc who might be in trouble. Most mail sent through these programs is sent across port 25. In recent times, it’s started to become a common practice amongst large ISP’s to start blocking this port. Why? Well a lot of spam is sent across port 25, and blocking that port is the easiest solution that many ISP’s have come up with to reduce the chance that they’re customers are flooding the net with spam through their service.
So what are your options if you need to use a mail server other than MTS’s? Well here are a few:

• Switch to another ISP. This is obviously a somewhat drastic measure, but if you’ve been having other issues with MTS, now might be the time for a change. Currently, SkyWeb does not block port 25. It might be worth asking other ISP’s whether or not they block port 25.
• E-mail MTS and ask them to open the port. I really don’t know if they will, or how long it takes for them to do it, but I would suspect that if they have to choose between opening a port or losing a customer, they’d probably simply open the port for your account.
• Use another port. Some mail servers allow connections on various ports. For example, the University of Manitoba has a nice writeup for students who connect through MTS but wish to use the Universities mail servers. They even include specific instructions for popular mail clients. You can read about it here. Alternately, if you’ve got your own website, you can contact your web host and ask if they have other ports available (asmallorange.com for example allows connections over both ports 25 and 26 – I was able to connect using TLS through port 26). You can also investigate the option of connecting through SSL. This typically uses a different port (commonly 587 or 465).

They have the Google brand name. A problem I think any new OS developer faces is that no matter how good their product may be, unless they’re a giant, many people will be hesistant to switch over. After all, if Microsoft Windows is working fine, how can any individual or company be sure that a new OS isn’t going to cause them massive headaches. Even if it’s cheaper or free, is it really worth the risk? Since people are familar with Google, know how to use Google’s services, and in general are not confronted by issue after issue with Google’s services already, I think people would be more likely to “trust” that a Google OS isn’t going to leave them with a bad experience.

Most people seem to like Google. They were the ones to bring about the change in free email storage, and they seem to bring about new services every so often that people just plain like and enjoy. When a new service is brought out, there are people who seem to go out and try it just because it’s from Google, it’s often innovative, and quite simply “neat”. If you like a company, you’re probably more likely to use or switch to their services. Look at Apple’s fan-base. Many people use their products because they simply like Apple. Even when Apple was going through some really rough times, people stayed loyal to them. Liking a company seems to go hand-in-hand with being loyal to the company. This would undoubtedly be reflected in the OS market.

Google has a strong enough financial backing that they can try just about anything. Even if they started an OS and weren’t profitting from it, they can afford to keep developing and supporting it. Not a lot of companies can say the same.

Linux is already well developed, and many people are switching. Yet there are also many who are hesitant to switch for various reasons, perhaps partly because there are so many flavors of it, and partly because while there is a lot of support in the community, just about every major program is still made for Windows, and support for Linux seems to come second if at all. Creating a Google flavor of Linux could change this. Not only would more people quickly convert to Linux, but there would be a great deal of development happening. After all, if Google has an OS that many are switching to, why would any developer want to be left out in the cold?

In short, if Google decided that they wanted to create a linux based Google OS, I have little doubt that it would be a success. Microsoft would undoubtedly suffer, and Google could feasibly take their place on the “OS throne”. Whether this is in the plans for Google is unknown, but at least in the short term, I believe it would be healthy competetion for Microsoft, and beneficial to end users in many ways.

Today, the weather was less than desirable. By that, I mean wet snow coming down, typical for March here in Manitoba. Our internet connection was of course acting up, disconnecting at times, and other times just plain being slow. Yet it didn’t really bother me, and here’s why….

For those not familiar with Manitoba, Canada, there is really only 1 major city (Winnipeg), and then a couple other small cities. A great deal of Manitoba’s population is in rural areas. Unfortunately, for services like Cable TV and High-Speed Internet, most of us are literally ‘left out in the cold.’

That is, until high-speed wireless came about. We started out on dial up, and were on it for years until we got a notice in the mail around the summer of 2003 or 2004 from our Rural Municipality, letting us know that a company called “Rainy Day” was hoping to offer high speed wireless. There was a town hall meeting about it, and I of course felt compelled to attend.

During the meeting, I basically learned that they already provided service to Niverville, and were hoping to bring the service to Lorette as well. Now Lorette already had high-speed DSL offered through MTS, but since many people live in the outlying areas, this really sparked interest.

The meeting went well, most were for the arrangement between the Municipality and Rainy Day, and work on the project began. It was expected to take a few months for the tower to go up.

Our plan at home was to sign up as soon as it became available. Believe it or not, we had 4 or 5 computers sharing the same dial-up connection using ICS (internet connection sharing) built into Windows XP. Not only does that mean the connection was slow, but we’re also big Warcraft III fans here, and playing 4v4′s got to be quite difficult when someone else checking their email (or an anti-virus program updating itself at an inconvenient time) meant we would ‘lag out’ or get disconnected.

Finally, Rainy Day’s internet became available, but there was a problem… A maximum transfer of 1GB/month. Figure that driver packages can be 30MB+, service packs can be 250MB+, and so on, and you’ll see that 1GB doesn’t go very far. In fact, with dial-up I think we were probably pushing 2GB. On top of that, there was a $300 start up fee, and then somewhere between $50-70/month. This wasn’t really acceptable, so after searching around, I came across a company called Skyweb.

Now Skyweb’s actually been around for quite some time, even before Rainy Day. They’re also known as Skycable, as they offer both wireless internet and wireless cable television. They haven’t been really popular though, probably because they suffered massive growing pains in the beginning years of operation. Anyway, aside from the technical problems they had, they also over-sold their service at one point in time, so it was painfully slow. In fact, they stopped doing new installations, which meant we couldn’t use them. The good news was that they had no bandwidth limit, cost around $45/month, and had a $150 sign up fee that was waived if you stayed on for a year. The bad news is that every time I phoned, they told me “we’re not doing any more installations in your area right now… try back in a month”.

Months and months went by, and finally when phoning one day and asking “are you doing installations in the Lorette area yet?” I got a yes. This was around Christmas holidays, and unfortunately the day they were supposed to do the install (which I even booked off of work), they had over-booked, and we didn’t get the install until the following Saturday. I was actually quite irked, because after all this waiting… well I finally had to wait some more. Plus I booked the day off of work which meant I lost out on some money.

Saturday came, and the install went well…. until the installers left and I tried to log on to Hotmail. The connection dropped. When it came back up, Hotmail caused a drop again. So did Windows Update, and a couple other sites. After phoning, and spending a while having them switch us back and forth between “subnets”, things finally worked, and aside from hiccups here and there, it hasn’t been bad.

So it’s a year later, and the connection is still going quite well. Our house is somewhere between 30-50km away from the tower, yet we hit probably 500-1000kbps on average for a download speed (which is a lot better than what our 56k modem that actually did about 30kbps used to do). Instead of getting disconnected from 75% of our Warcraft games, we get disconnected from less than 1%. Ping times are always over 100ms, but it’s still not that bad. Sure, the service is worse than what DSL would be, but we’ve had much worse, and when we get days like today, I simply think about the way things used to be, and I all of a sudden feel much better. That is why the flaky connection in this weather doesn’t bother me. We’ve had years of agony with dial up, so if our wireless high speed decides to puke out every now and then, I’m inclined to say “oh well” and spend the time reminiscing about the old days.

For those interested in Skyweb, simply drop by to Skyweb.ca. For those interested in Rainy Day, they have since increased their package to 5GB bandwidth/month, and they’re available at RainyDay.ca.