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Open Source Job at Creative Labs 83

Posted by Hemos from the we-want-you dept.
A number of people pointed us to a help wanted form on Creative Labs website. I wouldn't normally post helped wanted, but any situation that includes duties such as "...for the implementation of Linux applications that build on the opensource drivers currently for our DVD's, Sound Cards, Nomad, as well as other products in development. This includes bug fixes, optimizations, kernel tweaks, working with our Open Source team, and individual contributors from the Linux community," looks good by me. The word-use is a bit strange - it looks like they will be Open Source drivers, correct?
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Open Source Job at Creative Labs More

Open Source Job at Creative Labs

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  • I wonder how a human resources department will handle the Slashdot Effect. Should be interesting, not to mention overwhelming.
  • They have had similar openings in the past. And there have been recent announcements about them releasing drivers for all of their products to linux.

    With modular device drivers, generally speaking, who cares if it's open-source. ;)

    --
    blue
  • It took Creative long enough to hop on the bandwagon. I have a SB Live! Value and the support under linux is bad. It's rather non-standard. However, it is nice that they are finally coming around. I am waiting for the Q1-2000 release of the new drivers to see if this will help/fix things.

    Is anyone here working on that project that can give some status on it?

    -Steve
  • It doesn't sound like driver development to me, but rather applications work that will be dependent on the existing drivers. I don't see any indication one way or the other about whether the resulting applications will be open source. ("Working with our Open Source team" doesn't necessarily mean you'll be part of it -- you might just have to interact with them.)

    I suspect someone will have to go for an interview to get more details, unless someone at Creative Labs reads Slashdot and can clarify this for us.

  • Re:Not the first time.. (Score:5)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Thursday December 09, 1999 @05:26AM (#1472534) Homepage
    With modular device drivers, generally speaking, who cares if it's open-source.

    Linux Kernel Modules are modular in that they don't need to be preloaded, not in that they don't need to be compiled for a given machine.

    There are all sorts of variations--SMP v. Single Processor, 1GB v. 2GB memory barrier, and the all important kernel revision that make closed source drivers a nightmare to keep working over time.

    And the Linux-Kernel list doesn't care--and I somewhat agree.

    Microsoft's response to broken drivers has been to blame them for most NT crashes, and *try* to have a certification program. The Linux-Kernel list has pretty much flat out stated that that's not acceptable. They want to do things right, therefore while the interfaces they expose to userlevel stuff will remain compatible, they reserve the right to break the kernel into little pieces if the rebuild ends up more efficient. The interesting thing is that this forces driver development to stay in sync with kernel development, preventing rot and being a definite contributor to system stability as a whole.

    It's an interesting response, if you ask me.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

  • Argh!!! (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )
    I'm hunting for work, I'm desperate for anything half-decent, a Linux job comes up on Slashdot, and it's completely the wrong part of the country.

    *quietly hides under a table and screams*

  • So is this Creative simply trying to stay ahead of the OS community, now that the drivers are released? Is it even possible for them to be succesful at this?

    They still need to have some way to differentiate themselves from what is out there, so perhaps they are looking at adding some of their own apps (or code, whatever) to their products, using a more thorough documentation of their product that was is out there.

    Apologies for the speculation, or if the above didn't come out right. Just thinking out loud, mostly.

  • Creative apps (Score:3)

    by scumdamn ( 82357 ) on Thursday December 09, 1999 @05:34AM (#1472537)
    It looks like a "Creative Play Center" for Linux as well as a "Creative Launcher", etc. The sound card manufacturers feel this need to develope their own applications to do things like
    play a wav.
    play a cd.
    be a taskbar.
    record a wav.
    play midi files.

    What the hell does Linux need with a Creative Launcher? What this will do is end up with a Liveware for Linux with a bunch of low quality sound related applications that have wierd bugs and assorted problems. I think Creative should customize GLP'ed audio apps with a Creative logo, write a good help file documenting everything, and allow anybody to download it. Beats the hell out of proprietary audio apps that don't work as well as their GPL'ed counterparts.
  • You forgot the following problems with closed source drivers:

    - security issues.
    - kernel bloat (new api to support those things)

    And on the bright side for open source:

    - If firms just would release those specs my guess would be that they could fire all of their driver developers for linux. The community would take care of that for them. Which in turn would save them some money!

  • Open Source? Why not?! (Score:3)

    by Kintanon ( 65528 ) on Thursday December 09, 1999 @05:49AM (#1472539) Homepage Journal
    Taco seemed surprised that the drivers would be open sourced, but if you look at it from a Creative Labs point of view it's obvious.

    1.Createive labs makes 0$ from their Drivers.

    2.The more people who can purchase and use their hard drive the better.

    3. the better the drivers for their hardware are the more people will want to buy their hardware.

    So it's an excellent business move on their part.

    Kintanon
  • Everyone seems to be complaining that the drivers may not be open source and raising other objections. What about the old saying, "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

    This is a great thing for Linux. First of all, we will finally have better driver support for hardware that most of us have in our systems. Second, with a major hardware manufacturer like Creative Labs jumping on the Linux bandwagon, other companies will take notice.
  • 1.Createive labs makes 0$ from their Drivers.

    Createive = Creative.

    2.The more people who can purchase and use their hard drive the better.

    Hard Drive = HARDWARE

    3. the better the drivers for their hardware are the more people will want to buy their hardware.

    That one had no mistakes.

    Sorry for correcting my own post...

    Kintanon

  • Creative plans to release a binary-only driver to replace the current open source drivers. The open source drivers are simply a stop-gap, and a way to get Linux users to buy Creative cards. The current drivers only implement wave recording and playback, and support for external MIDI devices. Presumably you will need the binary-only drivers to use any of the Emu10k1 or wavetable features. See Creative's SB Live on Linux FAQ [creative.com] for more information.
  • > The word-use is a bit strange - it looks like they will be Open Source drivers, correct?

    Hmmm... this smells like someone in upper management at Creative Labs heard about "that Linux thing", and decided they needed to get into that. So, the HR department whips something up without too much forethought and puts it out there.

    But, still a good sign. Sorry for the pessimism this early in the morning.

    --Mid

  • The stuff that Creative Labs does and the stuff that people are making money off of are completely seperate entities. I would rank multimedia as about the worst thing you could specialize in right now, especially if your not engineering but tweeking, as Creative Labs emphasized. You don't see anyone selling multimedia workstations anymore. They're consistantly selling the e-commerce capability. There's a big difference between tweeking, fixing bugs and optimizing from developing the technology itself. As as we know from 1993, when the technology changes the tweekers usually end up unemployed. If you're qualified enough to beat out the 1 million Creative Labs candidates, you should probably be working on web servers, databases, and networking and not low level multimedia drivers.
  • The way you make money is not by writing apps but by getting as far down in the food chain as possible. I assure you Creative is not going to fund Linux applications.
  • I've been using the CVS snapshots w/ my Live! Value for a while and am quite happy with them.

    In what ways have you found support to be bad?
  • All interesting apps (XMMS, mpg123, the Flash plugin, RealPlayer G2 beta) and games (Q2/Q3A/UT/XMAME) work and sound great now. Problems remaining:

    - the mixer is quite messed up (master volume in kmix controls both front/back panning and bass/treble!) A consequence of this is that the digital inputs aren't all working.
    - No MIDI wavetable/soundfont support yet (Creative has just released some more info on the hardware that makes it possible however)
    - No 4 speaker/3d audio yet

    On the plus side, joysticks work great, and a bunch of apps can open and use the card at once now (I tried 2 XMMSs, an mpg123, and a TiMidity++ running, which created quite a cacophany! :)

  • > I think Creative should customize GLP'ed audio
    > apps with a Creative logo

    They wouldn't like to just do that, because then its easy to remove the logo with a few swift CTRL-K's

  • Wrong! (Score:4)

    by Ian Schmidt ( 6899 ) on Thursday December 09, 1999 @06:24AM (#1472550)
    The current (GPL'd) drivers will continue to develop independantly of the binary-only branch. The binary-only drivers will supply certain IP-bound features of the card (EAX's reverb and HRTF algorithms notably), while the open-source drivers will continue to be developed. (The open source drivers will also get effects, but they won't be Emu/Ensoniq's algorithms).

    Wavetable features will be developed for the GPL driver - Creative released register specs for the emu10k1 engine Tuesday on the list, and the new commented .h file is in CVS now. The ALSA guys are working on their own version of such a driver - since they already have soundfont code for the AWE32 they may have an edge on getting wavetable running faster.

    Plus, Alan Cox will be placing the current driver into the 2.3.x kernel soon (cleanup for that is almost done). Creative thinks this is cool (and under GPL they can't really object :)

  • but they got it wrong, but even linux.com has got it wrong, so we'll not hold it against them.

    "- Experience with various window managers (Gnome, KDE, etc.)"

    At least this looks like they want to integrate whatever programs they make into the various Desktop Environments, which has to be a good thing.
  • All of Creative's current drivers are full 100% Stallman-approved GNU General Public License Open Source(tm). No need to be cynical :)
  • 3. the better the drivers for their hardware are the more people will want to buy their hardware.
    That one had no mistakes.
    Actually...

    There was a space between the 3 and the the. Not an error per se but inconsistent with the two previous points

    sentences should begin with a capital letter.

    You used the word 'hardware' twice. Gramatically kosher it may be, but aestitically, it's not kosher.

  • Actually if you look around further, it appears that there will be two sets of drivers-- open source and binary only. The open source driver isn't so much a stop-gap measure as much as it is an opportunity for the open source community to take a whack at driver writing and stop the eternal grumbling about going open source/GPL. Granted, the specs for the EMU10K1 chip haven't been released, but as far as "normal" functions are concerned, the support has gotten at least an order of magnitude better. That, and bugs/problems are resolved with much greater speed. The original alpha drivers Creative released were very unreliable, and it was virtually impossible to know when they might be fixed.
  • Right! Then it reverts to basically the same app that Creative started with.

  • Re:Massive Response (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Dear Microsoft Employee:

    Let go of your bitterness and hatred. Abandon the Dark Side. Repent for your sins (I know this will take you all night, but we will wait). Come embrace open source, and languages and protocols which don't suck.

    Love,

    The Penguin

  • Can you explain the kernel bloat? There is no difference between a closed source binary driver and an open source driver after t has been compiled. The main problem is that you can't effectively debug a closed source driver, and you certainly can't fix it.
    Mike
    --
    Mike Mangino Consultant, Analysts International
  • It seems odd to me, too, but the text says, "You will be responsible for the implementation of Linux applications". I'm guessing that they mean fairly small multimedia tools (e.g. a simple waveform editor) to include on the CDs that come with their cards.

    As I said before, there's not really enough information to tell exactly what's going on. Until someone from Creative, or someone who interviews for the position, posts here, we probably won't know what this means.

  • Re:Argh!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can't find anything good? In this economy? You must be pretty picky.
  • Creative aren't going to like that too much really.

  • Re:Argh!!! (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )
    Picky? *burble!* At the moment I'm even resorting to work with Visual Basic, ASP & IIS. *whimper!*

    From the looks of the job pages in the papers, and the total of zilch that the best agencies in the area can find, the economy doesn't -exist- in the southeast US.

  • I think you mean that *you're* in the wrong part of the country.

    Jobs are where they are.

    People are, too, of course. But the job isn't searching for you. You're searching for the job.

    I mean, it may be the job karma is calling for you -- and if that's the case, well, then I guess you could say that the job is in the wrong part of the country. But since there's no real way to quantify and assess karma, it's probably best to say that *you're* in the wrong part of the country.

    Unless someone knows of an open source karmatic assessment program.

    But then again: this could be the very job that you ought to embark upon -- a Karma assessing program.

    Such a karmatic assessment program is really nowhere yet -- so, in theory, it *could* be anywhere. And since you're somewhere -- and somewhere is within anywhere -- it looks (to me at least) that not only are *you* in the right place for the karmatic assessor but that the karmatic assesor (since it's nowhere and, ergo, everywhere) it, too, is in the right place.

    There, see: karma at work. Too bad we couldn't assess and quantify that moment (one paragraph back) when karma seemed to strike. But it does that a lot -- strike without notice.

    Wait! Oops, no. I thought it just struck again. That was an itch. Oh well.

    Keep an eye out. You never know.
  • Oh, I DO care...

    Suppose I would like to decide to move to kernel 2.3.x to try my Philips USB speakers, and some more new features from the 2.3.x kernel.. - Oops - no drivers yet...

    Or, suppose I want to test the latest Alan Cox ac's patches or those PRE kernel versions..

    I have at work a Yamaha DS-XG sound chip (it's on the damn motherboard). OSS (the commercial drivers) doesn't even run with it. So - I'm stuck.. no sound..

    Now, if I insist of using the commercial binary only drivers, I have to BEG to 4Front for support (which they'll probably will tell me either to wait for 2.2.14 or move back to 2.2.13)

    THATS my problem with binary only drivers. Kapish? :)
  • Check the license file they included with it its word for word the GNU GPL V2. So what has been released is out there for good now. Any future versions they can change the license, excepting if they base it on the GPL'd stuff.
  • I didn't seen any Creative Labs products mentioned in Open Hardware Catalog [openhardware.org]. So, are those really open hardware, or do they just pretend it?
  • I agree, the Live! CVS updates have been very timely, efficient, and effective. I'm quite impressed.

    On the other hand, for those who don't know how to use CVS yet, it's a mystery how people are saying the drivers are working great ...

    Now that there are daily snapshots of the code, it's great. In all honesty, I still don't understand why they didn't release the code earlier ... ;)

  • Some Linux drivers have weird quasi-abstraction layers in them, so that most of the code from the Windows driver can be reused. It makes for an easier port.

    Instead of having a single function that opens the device, the function calls a Windows abstraction function that calls the real function that calls a kernel abstraction function.

    Thats bloat if I've ever seen it.

  • Bunch of whiners (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Someone once observed that if you could figure out a way to completely clean up all the air pollution in the US at a total cost of $2/state, someone, somewhere, would still object. All the pointless whining here reminds me of that quote.

    I think the Linux crowd needs to calm down and remember that these sorts of announcements are Good Things for Everyone, and show a little patience.

    Yes, some companies will do truly great things, and yes, some will make some mistakes as they learn about Linux and open source. Would you rather put up with those mistakes or have the companies ignore Linux and spend all their time and money supporting Windows? I can't speak for anyone else here, but I'd much rather have to endure such a trivial inconvenience than be stuck with no support at all.

  • Apparently you aren't aware that there already ARE completely opensource drivers for the Emu10k1, Dxr2, and AWE cards. The drivers were and are maintained by Creative, and have been out for well over a month now.

    Plus, an actual Linux driver for these devices has been out for almost a year (just wasn't opensource until more recently...)

    So no, Creative actually has known about Linux, and is becomming steadily more & more committed to it.

  • DVD?!? (Score:3)

    by fishbowl ( 7759 ) on Thursday December 09, 1999 @07:56AM (#1472574)
    Why did no-one comment on the big TLA, the first
    thing that the article mentioned?

    As it is, we have *NO* DVD for linux and *NO*
    prospects for DVD for linux on *ANYBODY's* hardware. Don't talk to me about the encryption hack/experimental possibilities.

    What about the fact that this is the first, and
    only, time a vendor has said there could possibly
    be DVD support for linux?
  • I suppose they will be handsomely rewarded...
    ________________________________
  • Where do you live? Grady, SC? (that's a Doc Hollywood ref. btw. -- that was actually filmed in SC.)

    There's lots of jobs in the southeast. They will, of course, be clustered in and around major cities. How many jobs do you expect to exist "out in the sticks" where there generally are no computers?

    I grew up in Shelby, NC (about 15 miles north actually.) The only jobs in demand in Cleveland county are farming and industrial jobs. There are (or were) several textile mills and food processing plants in the area -- not a lot of demand for highly skilled workers and even less for highly skilled computer workers.

    I've lived in Raleigh, NC for the past decade. There's certainly no lack of demand for skilled workers around here. In fact, in the past six years, I've had four unsolicited job offers -- the last one tracked me down from a three year old email address (he was determined.) If you count the "quicky" consulting jobs, that number goes up alot.

    Finding a job is easy. Finding a job you like that will keep you happy is the difficult part.
  • don't know why this ceative gets a headline on slashdot.

    A quick perusal of sgi's employment pages http://www.sgi.com/cgi-bin/employment/opportunitie s.cgi listed 6 linux development jobs. 3 in kernel, 1 I/O, 2 in OpenGL drivers. Search IBM/HP etc and you'll probably find a bunch more. Plenty of work for kernel hackers/device driver writers at the moment.
  • Again, how would this be different if it was modular or not? Or if it was open source or not?
  • Oh please, DVD for Linux is progressing nicely and (provided you have a fast enough computer) you can view any movie you want to. So get you facts straight.
  • So what? All I saw was about 5 devices by 3 companies.

  • The SB Live! Works with Quake 3 now?
    When did this happen? The readme says that PCI based cards are not yet supported. Q3Arena runs great on my system, but I have a Live! and the sound is choppy as all hell.

    I guess thats what open standards do.

    I would appreciate anyone providing a link as to how to get my Q3Arena sound working properly however!

    ---Yeah, its slightly offtopic, but I can hardly frag in Linux with no sound can I?---
  • DVD support is coming along, with support for DVD drives in the CD-ROM drivers. You can install DVD support by using a recent 2.3.x kernel, or add the patches from http://www.kernel.dk [kernel.dk] A software DVD player is available - although currently it needs P-III /Athlon level performance to run it, the performance requirements should come down, and support for hardware based solutions is coming along, in particular support for the Matrox G200+decoder.

  • The Job (Score:5)

    by Jake_Hawley ( 124402 ) on Thursday December 09, 1999 @08:51AM (#1472584)
    Well, sorry if the wording is not clear. What I am looking for is an S/W Applications engineer to develop tools, sample code, utilities, and of course Apps (GUI Mixer, Effects Compiler, Misc GUI Apps). Right now we have a sound driver(no pun) that is coming along very quickly, and in a short period of time I believe that we will need some good GUI controls for various features (downloading effects, routing inputs/outputs, etc). In addition we need a pretty "User Gui" for other products such as DVD, WebCam, and Nomad. Now... it is critical that we(Creative and other driver developers) put together Application Interfaces and Driver Interfaces that work well together -- which is why the add reads they way it does. I am looking for someone to come in and help pull together ideas from the people that are doing the driver work(inside and outside the company). I am NOT looking for someone to come in and push their own agenda. So the ideal person is both technically capable as well as being able to articulate a long term vision to people. I hope this helps clarify what I am searching for. Cheers, Jake
  • At first, well ... that's a start. Do we want, that there is any this kind of certification? If we doesn't care any of this, then, do anyone seriously think companies cares if we don't.

    I think this certification is good, and clear way to tell how open company is publishing devices specs, without any catches.

    Of cource we can silence that certification to the death, if it's totally bad. But somehow I think it's clear, compact way of telling how "secret" some devices are, and how good support manufacturer wants give to own products.
  • Thanks for the explanation. I'm particularly interested in how you're planning on supporting DVD-Video players given the various legal+encryption issues. But I guess you don't want to pre-announce products any more than the rest of us :)

    Moderators, please moderate up Jake's post as it will help make things clearer.
  • If someone did a driver abstraction layer that was open source, it could well look like the various layers that are out there - however, an open source layer would at least have the potential to become part of the Linux kernel, and hence would avoid bloat from N different layers for different vendors' binary drivers.

    Having said that, having the source tends to encourage people to port drivers rather than just use a binary layer, so it's not clear that an open source driver abstraction layer would ever happen.

    Since Linux is evolving quite rapidly at the kernel level it makes sense to have open source drivers so that it's easier for J. Random Hacker to make driver fixes when the kernel breaks tham.
  • - If firms just would release those specs my guess would be that they could fire all of their driver developers for linux. The community would take care of that for them. Which in turn would save them some money!

    Well, not quite. There's a chicken-and-egg problem here - once some hardware is popular, there will be a lot of people who are willing to (want to?) support it. But how will it become popular if there are no drivers? This situation will become more pronounced if (when?) windows retires (un)gracefully from the scene. So there will still be work for paid driver developers, I hope - 'cause I am one.
  • hmm forgive me already but my memory of Creative is that they pushed the sound card / CD Rom stuff into the open.
    All their stuff that I have had has been solid and reliable and pretty good.
    I've been with them since my first SB16 with CDROM and since then I've had a Spigot, SBLive and my trusty 36x CD.
    What's your beef with them?
    If it's just the OpenSource thing then grow up some.

  • yes!! i will reward them handsomely!

    thank you.
  • Man, what's wrong with some of you guys? Creative is doing just fine, with the CVS EMU10K1 driver and it is coming along just great, almost every issue at bugzilla is now dealt with..
    Sound output is stable, it works with almost any app and on SMP systems and you can play upto 32!! wave streams at the sametime.. I just bought come cheapo speakerset with fake surround for the rear speaker output and it sounds nice, we even have a way to get the rear-volume slider to work now..

    Okay, the AC97 mixer is really messed up, but that was because the soundcard specific register specs where lacking. Jon went to great lengths to sort out what could be released outside the NDA, well done!

    And indeed, people like Alan Cox went into great trouble, to try to Unix-fy the driver, cleaning it up and making it readable, also to other programmers..

    'and the support under linux is bad. It's rather non-standard.' Well, thank you.. that must me an insult to my adress I guess... I'll keep it in mind next time, if you mail me for help..


    Manuel Beunder AKA MBr Webmaster Linux-Sound Blaster Live! page: [euronet.nl]
  • I apologise for lame yelling, but I, honestly,
    tried to contact someone from Creative via e-mail
    to no avail :( So this is probably my only chance.
    My question is whether you are going to make
    specs of Infra CD-ROM drives available? This
    is a way cool product and I'd like to make my
    Linux box controllable with IR as well as my 3.11
    is.
    Please, feel free to either respond through /. or
    email in private. TIA
  • Ever heard of Nist/Livid [openprojects.net]?

    No DVD under Linux, huh? Well than don't look at this sample [geocities.com], it might confince you otherwise... Also, never heard about the DXR2 drivers on the Creative Opensource site? [creative.com] Or that Sigma Designs [sigmadesigns.com] is planning on giving their next Hollywood chip native Linux support?!

    With those Windoze players, I always have to mess around with my display settings, if I want to watch DVD.. with Nist I just compiled it in.. no need to mess with that anymore..
  • Great work, your patches, btw! Using a DVD, CDR and CDROM on one machine and it works just fine.. can't say the same under win9x, nt4 and win2k :( An intelligent too, I disconnected and reconnected my DVD hot and it even mentioned that it was powered down and not some weirdo 'eeeeeeck' messages in the kernel log ;-) (Fan was suckin' my powersupply dry, had to reconnect it somewhere else..hate restarting ;-) MBr
  • Or try mailing Jake directly: Jacob Hawley jhawley@creative.com Maybe that'll help... MBr
  • Darn annoying that you can't moderate, when you've made a comment to a thread.. 'cause you sure deserve a -3...
  • Because most other compagnies you mention, are strugling to survive.. and they are putting their hopes on Linux (wise decission..) whereas Creative is an healthy compagny, would could do easely do without that 10% of the market..
    Also, finally hardware manufacturers are opening up specs, what saves us painstacking work to try to reverse engineer every piece of hardware, which is sometimes impossible, due to the complexity of some propriety DSP's/ASICs and also enables us, to make even better drivers than the windoze users are custom to..

    Just my 1 eurocent..
    MBr
  • Ouch, sorry. I was unable to get to the job
    posting in instant (/.'ed?) and rushed to
    address J. H. at once.
    Thanks and sorry again.
  • I don't know if anyone has posted this or not... But here it goes. From reading the DXr2 mailing list mailings, supposedly it costs $5000 for the DVD specs which would be needed to make the *complete* dvd driver. I guess that the IFO files need to be decoded which contain the chapter, sound, and other important info...i think. I presume that if they have an *internal* employee, then they could more easily make this code available
    Bye,
    TYLER
  • You're trying to use the job pages in the paper?

    When I was looking for a new job, I posted my resume on monster.com. I started getting phonecalls the next day. Ended up getting a great job dealing with Linux, and made quite a bit more money to boot.

    Forget looking for a new job. Let the new job look for you :)
  • sorry...but why does everything have to be "open source" so what?! as long as it works...i don't care
    Bye,
    TYLER
  • Jake,
    As both a software engineer and an audio engineer I must admit I am HIGHLY tempted by this position, actually I was back when it was first posted on your site (almost as soon as opensource.creative went live wasn't it?) I'm also a long time Creative SoundBlaster customer... in fact I still use my original SB16Pro, my SBAwe32 and my SBLive! Three out of four sound cards I've ever owned came from you. (the fourth was an MWAVE in a thinkpad... not much choice there ;) As a geek I've always had rather cutting edge hardware in my hands and as such I can say with some certainty that the people implementing your drivers have never understood multithreading - infact NONE of these cards performs flawlessly under NT on a multi processor machine no matter how current the drivers - this is one reason why I'm pleased to see the rapid progress being made on the Linux drivers. Because of this belief I am even more attracted to a chance to work with your developers; assuming of course that they do not hold the same opinion of customers that the support people at creative obviously do.

    All that being the case I'm happy where I'm at. (or maybe I'm just crazy ;)

    I would however like to present an idea for your consideration: All work on the drivers and the GUIs need to be seperate and distinct; with a clean, public, documented interface between the two. They should be distinct entities. I say this because I know of NO ONE who likes and uses your GUIs. There were over 50 people in a group I formerly belongged to who used creative cards, and not a single one of them could tolerate the creative programs for more than a couple days after installing a new driver package. By providing a clear break between them you allow other developers to interface into your cards and take full advantage of the awesome capabilities you develop in hardware. It seems to be that Creative has an incredible talent in the hardware realm, but the software side just can't match it. So what. Those of us in the OSS community can and will if you'll let us.

    [...]

    I just read this in review mode and it sounds a lot more negative than intended, please understand that I perfer creative boards to the competition; however, realize also that as an professional engineer in both senses I have an amazingly low tollerance for bad design or function. Example: update a point realse of the drivers and all of a sudden the output gain control disapears and the level is hard coded at 4x. Example: removing a source from the speaker positioning mutes the channel rather than removes the 3D effect. Example: the presets for environmental audio configurations (just down right frustrating). If it wasn't so late I could probably go on... all the way back to the dos drivers for the SB16Pro. If you give me the interfaces, then I'll implement my own controls, and they'll look something like a Soundcraft Venue board [home.com] and be wired by a virtual patch panel. ;) -=Chris
  • I was recently job hunting (IT Infrastructure, 3rd level) and was having a hell of a time finding anything. It seems a LOT of companies are holding off on starting anything new till the date flip (refuse to say that thing that rhymes 'WhyBlueJay')... I finally got lucky and don't even have to work over new years!

    -Steve
  • Use the latest CVS snapshots of the driver. The choppiness problem (in general, I don't know about Q3A) has been fixed several weeks ago (at least).

    If your system bus is full of stuff going to your video card, though, that still couldn't help...
  • You have to have an expanded memory manager for a SBLive DOS driver, because there simply isn't enough memory in the base 640k to support it. So forget it - it won't ever happen.

  • Ever heard of Nist/Livid ?

    Yes, it falls under the category of "getting there." So things are coming; and I do not mean to sound like the one complaining that "We aren't there yet". But my message was sincere -- there
    have been damn few reports of DVD working under
    Linux; fewer that would indicate DVD/V4L will ever
    pass the mom test, and lots of reports of things
    like patent problems, crypto problems, and general
    vendor noninterest.

    So to me, the biggest news of the piece was that a vendor was going to work on DVD support.


    "never heard about the DXR2 drivers on the Creative Opensource site? "

    My post was about the lack of mention of this support, and to comment on the perceived general lack of usability for dvd
    drives. My basis for the statement is on the huge amount of discussion about just how little chance there is of dvd support under linux due to patent problems and vendor ignorance. To my understanding, except for a very
    few models of DVD drives, those problems are still
    showstoppers. If that's not true, it should have been headline news sometime in the last 2 months or so.

    "Or that Sigma Designs is planning
    on giving their next Hollywood chip native Linux support?! "

    If the future is bright, that's wonderful.

    Right now, most linux users will need to reboot to
    another OS to have a fully supported DVD.


    Personally, if you could tell me what model of
    DVD to buy in order to enjoy full linux support, I'll buy it today. It doesn't matter to /me/
    that playing dvd's is more complex than putting
    the disc in the drive and closing the door, but
    there's a lot of people out there that we'd like
    to get started using linux. They're in for quite
    a shock given the general state of affairs.

    That's why I think announcements like winmodem support and dvd support are important and need
    to be talked up.

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