Shame on you, Creative!

Just came across this on the Creative forums (via Digg).. And my respect for Creative as a brand has just dropped like 95%..

Apparently, Creative has been releasing a whole bunch of audio cards whose drivers did not work properly in Vista, even though the boxes claimed that these were “VISTA READY”. Creative tells everyone that they’re working on building updated drivers, but they don’t seem to release these for ages. So a guy called Daniel comes along and builds a set of drivers himself and distributes these to desperate users on the Creative forum!

Now any sane person would expect Creative to be thankful to this individual and maybe even give him a job (Hell, he was able to do what the Creative software engineers couldn’t for so long!). Instead, the ‘VP of Corp Comms’, Phil O’Shaughnessy coolly comes along and posts this on the forums. He basically accuses Daniel of ’stealing’ their intellectual property and order him to remove all links to the drivers! He seems to think that the Creative IP is far more important than millions of users who are stuck with cards that basically don’t work. Dumbass. And now that Daniel has removed all his links, we have a whole bunch of audio card buyers whose cards are nothing but hardware junk

Obviously the customers are mad – The news is spreading like wildfire and whole communities of gamers have sworn never to buy Creative products again! And our friend Phil seems to be missing (he hasn’t replied to any of the angry Creative buyers after his ‘brilliant’ post).

Now, seriously, what sort of a dumbass actually does something like this?! He’s the VP of Corp Communications for crying out loud.. Will someone from Creative please fire this moron before he ruins your company?

thesixtyone

I stumbled on thesixtyone today.

Indie music?

I’m not usually a fan of indie music.. that’s ‘independent’ music or music by independent artists who aren’t backed by major labels.. I normally tend to stick to the big names and usually lean heavily towards rock music.. Lately, however, I’ve been starting to get bored with the 3000+ tracks I have on my ipod and so I started exploring.. and that’s how I came across thesixtyone.

digg for songs

thesixtyone is a digg-like website for music.. You can sign up as a listener or an artist.. As a listener, you can listen to a whole bunch of indie music from different genre for free.. and of course, as an artist you can upload your own music.. But you see, the problem with this is is that a lot of the independent music turns out to be crap and it can be really hard to sift through the junk to find the good stuff.. that’s where the digg like voting comes in.. the listeners basically vote up their favorite tracks (its called ‘bumping’ here) and the most popular tracks appear on the first page.. The result? You get to listen to the music that’s been truly vetted by the community.. I tried it out, and trust me when I tell you that some of the stuff over there is even better than today’s chart toppers!

points

Well, sounds good so far, doesn’t it? Except one little problem… gaming. Gaming is when an artist gets some of his friends to repeatedly bump his song up (even though it may sound like crap) so that he gets on the front page. To get around this, thesixtyone has a nifty points system. You start off with 90 points (i think) and you get points for logging in everyday or listening to new music. Every time you bump up a song, you ‘pay’ 5 points. Not only does this reduce gaming, it makes you think twice before you bump up a song.. So, only the really good tracks get a large number of bumps To make things more interesting, you get additional points if you bump a song that eventually makes it to the homepage (aka becomes popular). And the more points you have, the more ‘reputation’ you have in the thesixtyone community.. kinda like a social network.

what about the artists?

Well, I haven’t tried signing up as an artist (yet).. but I think thesixtyone has some sort of payment system for artists.. where users download a song for a fee and the money goes to the artist.. I’m not too sure about this part, so check out the website.

UI?

The UI is another big plus for thesixtyone. Very nicely done. Click on any song and it starts playing in a mini player on the top right corner of the screen. And the best part is that you can continue navigating through the site and the music keeps playing! You can play one of the homepage playlists (hot/new/week) or make your own.. and of course you can share your likes/dislikes/playlists/rants/etc with your friends (aka a social network).

Great site.. I checked out a number of sites before I landed up on this one and I think I’m gonna stay (at least for a while).. Do check it out – http://www.thesixtyone.com.

finally i’ve moved

I’ve finally moved over to WordPress.. I’ve been wanting to do this forever…

My last post as u can see was in April or something last year.. Actually I wrote a couple of posts after that but I haven’t migrated them over from my previous blog yet..  Meanwhile, I haven’t been completely idle either.. Check out laid back for some comic relief

Now that I’m done with college n all, I think (and hope) i have more time to write..