10 Jun
2006
10 Jun
'06
3:05 a.m.
On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 22:51 -0700, Thomas Vecchione wrote:
Oh, it sure has changed - it's gone down the shitter. Creative's new
stuff is garbage compared to the SBLive! which IMHO was a brilliant
piece of hardware.
I wouldn't know about the EMU line because it can't be used with Linux.
Yeah it's
unfortunate. Maybe the rise of these cheap knockoffs is what
drove a company like Creative, who were one of the first to open their
drivers in the mid 1990s, to their current position of not releasing any
hardware specs or Linux drivers at all.
Well truth be told, not much has changed quality wise since then;) Ok I
jest some, but I dont really find creative to be all that great anymore
myself. Not even a big fan of the EMU line;)
But that has little to do with your point I suppose.
I agree things
like that above happening are quite unfortunate, though sometimes I
wonder if there was a bit more to it than just that in their case.
The trend since then has been to make cheap junk cheaper every year and
move as much logic as possible into the driver which makes supporting
Linux more work with each generation of devices.
It's not just PC hardware, it's the whole damn economy. For example new
houses are bigger and more expensive than ever but they're basically
made of cardboard. Where they used to use 2x4s for interior walls they
use 2x2s now. In 10 years they'll be twice as big, 5x more expensive,
and made out of paper.
Economists call it "improving efficiency", engineers call it "cutting
corners". The economists seem to have won.
Yes, I'm a little bitter about the whole thing ;-)
Lee