Is Asus becoming the next Creative Labs?

  By Michel | February 4, 2013 - 18:17 | Random Rantings of a MadMan, Tech
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con_stormingcreative1Nowadays, companies can seldom compete at any given pricelevel for any given product , except if you hire a really big army of Chinese child laborers. There’s tons of other stuff to make a difference and get people to buy your product. One of them of particular interest for us simple consumers, is simply good support on products we buy

For example, when you buy portable navigation system for use in your car, it’s really helpful you have support in terms of updates for the next, let’s say, 4 years to still be able to get to your destinations in the most efficient way. A couple of manufacturersnow include 2 years of free updates and the option to continue for a relatively small fee.

Now let’s talk audio cards. I’ve bought a nice Asus Xonar Xense a while back (less than a year) and it’s very very good so far. The audio quality of this premium product is really good, with it’s headphones (pre-)amp and all. Untill you decide to install your system with Microsoft’s latest and greatest OS: Windows 8. Asus does not provide any Windows 8 drivers for this card. So what’s a customer to do? Contact Asus support of course to get info on the support on this, this is their view on the matter:

Dear Mr. Lisman,

Thank you for your email.

I doubt that we will provide Windows 8 drivers for this device.
The latest drivers are from 2011/06/28.
In this case its doubtful that Windows 8 drivers will be developed for this model.
I hope to have informed you enough.

Kind regards

P K
Asus TSD.

Naturally, I couldn’t help to react:

Hello Pierre,
 Audio cards in general tend to live past the 2 year mark inside 2-3 different systems, if they are good in particular.
I’ve payed premium money to get a card to be scrapped to the wastebin within a year (card is not that old).
I think Asus needs to rethink their view on that if they want to continue selling great cards like this. Good support is the most important thing in this market now, where you can hardly compete on a decent price level anymore. As a lifetime buyer of Asus products, I feel like Asus really dropped the ball now, especially opposed to eg. motherboard support. Asus is going to be the next Creative Labs in terms of support if not handled and buyers will flee to the next best alternative.
Four fun facts: 
1. You can get it working by installing W7, the card + software and then upgrade to W8. Everything works fine!
2. Xonar STX (basically the same card, same processor but with better components) does have W8 drivers.
3. The audio console is definitely the culprit. I compared results on W7 and W8 and noticed some differences in installation proces. Asus could have prevented this easily.
4. A unified driver project (Uni-Xonar), which supports the Xonar Xense has already brought W8 support. Maybe contact them? It’s the same guys who brought Creative drivers with W7 support when the whole community asked for it and Creative didn’t listen. I urge you not to make the same mistake and loose customers!
People should be warned before they buy Asus products about this practice before they spend hard earned money on premium products without the support expected to come with it for future use.
 All I can say is I’m really, really disappointed by this take on support by Asus.
I hope you forward this mail into your organisation for future reference, maybe it helps.

Of course, I promised them to put a blog up about this and share it on some social networks for your entertainment. All and all I think Asus is really trying it’s best to emulate Creative Labs’ support back in the day with the Audigy 2 line of products.

Creative actually tried to rip people off by offering a new driver in exchange for money in order to get support on the new OS of that time (Vista/7). Result: a reaction thread of literally thousands of pages with customers complaining Creative had lost it’s mind and they would never buy a Creative product again. The most intense moment was when developer Daniel_K got booted of the forum because he had developed the solution that Creative wanted to sell before Creative was finished.

Ironically, this guy recently developed a driver for Windows 8 for the whole Xonar serie, including the Xense.

History repeats? Rather have support the right way, but if I must..

Low-latency high speed day part 4 – Final!

  By Michel | January 25, 2013 - 09:41 | Tech
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911448_300Well well well.. Finally, everything seems to be in order now. Means all services on my now month-old fiber connection are operating like they should (still, a month from 2/3 of services to having them all is silly, even for KPN). Also means saying goodbye to the old provider, UPC.

Speaking of which, they too have a cumbersome process for their customers to get untangled from their claws. It involves making a call to their support lines and listening to 25 minutes of sometimes very crappy music. Once you have been aggravated enough to kill someone, you get a representative that is going to help you. Calm now. She alone can’t help it the company she works for never ever understood the meaning of good and fast service. They could have simply made a web based form for it (like the way you enroll with them), but they simply choose to piss off leaving customers just that little bit extra this way. She did actually helped me pretty well and the urge to kill people faded a bit, but I still fired up BF3 for some rounds of low-latency relieve spree through my new fiber connection anyhow :)

Have to wait for a pre-labeled packaging box now they’re gonna send to return the decoder, as far as I could see they let me keep the cable router. UPC-free 2013 at last :D

First day of snow

  By Michel | January 15, 2013 - 11:30 | Random Rantings of a MadMan
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IMG_20130115_121850In The Netherlands, we have marvelous waterworks like the Delta Werken, new land like Flevoland, we build the most beautiful ships, have pretty nice designers and we have an economy that thrives on knowledge more every year. HOWEVER the government always fails miserably in keeping roads clear from snow and ice. Every year, when the flakes hit the ground, the traffic jams get to a level that’s just unbelievable in a country like this. They even let half the trains run to make sure at least 2 trains per hour run on schedule instead of the normal 4.

Let alone the people. I’m a nice driver (usually :D ) and no, I don’t do everything right and like I should all the time by the rules. But when this cold white stuff hits a windscreen, people get brake pedal-happy around here resulting in massive traffic jams and accidents, since there are still folks that are actually still hit the gas harder than Ike used to hit Tina. Or Badr Hari would hit people when going out, you get the idea. The combination of failing government and people not anticipating these conditions result in very large traffic jams every year. Makes you wonder why countries as Germany and Sweden never ever have problems as big as here. Maybe it all comes down to money, but having broken the all-time traffic jam record today (1003km of happy campers on 4-wheels),   I’d say the economy is suffering more from it than it would cost to prevent it.

Ah well, at least it’s nice to look at it when you finally made it to work, hence the picture from my office over here :-)

Low-latency high speed day part 3

  By Michel | January 6, 2013 - 17:10 | Tech
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stock-footage-no-tv-signalWell, a short update to the now long low-latency high speed day. It’s really turning into a fest. While 2 out of 3 services seem to work, the second most important one in the package is not. Interactive TV still isn’t working and being true to my nature I called the ISP again. Basically the representative blamed their system again but could tell me my TV was still being scheduled for 16th of januari. She could not tell me why there has to be such a long time between getting the first two services and the last one.

Overall, I feel being kept in the dark about the last item from the package I ordered and I’m not intending to pay for it until all services have been provided on the 16th januari 2013. Thanks #KPN. Only thing I can do is hope their “system” will provide me by then.

Low-latency high speed day part deux

  By Michel | December 11, 2012 - 17:18 | Tech
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Called the isp today, patience is a virtue it seems. No ETA given anyways. They are investigating why my TV-part of the order isn’t being activated, but my phone should be activated any moment. Couple of hours past the call now and you’ve guessed it: no phone. Good thing about my old ISP: I haven’t left them just yet so I still have functional TV, internet and phone connections.

The customer representative also asked me to login the customer website to check on some details about the TV and phone parts of my triple play package but the website was out of order due to “technical difficulties”. No shit Sherlock. Gotta appreciate the irony in that though :)

Low-latency high speed day part 1

  By Michel | December 10, 2012 - 19:46 | Tech
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So, it finally arrived at our doorstep: the option to have internet, tv and phone through a fiber optics cable.

Today:

The orange cable in front of our house should go indoors today. A party of two arrives at my house to drill a small hole in the thick foundation slab and reel in the cable. After that, the cable is welded and placed in a box in the meter cabinet. Later that day, I install the router and hook it up to my existing one, placing it in bridge mode.

Internet is coming through fine at almost 100/100 Mbps with nice low latencies, no worries there. Until I try on the interactive TV tuner. The manual (yeah I eventually read it ;-) ) makes notice of a letter with my customer number and a PIN-code. Nowhere to be found. According to customer services, my connection wasn’t planned until January, yet they send me all the requirements last week. Strange, they normally do that 1 week in advance of the connection appointment, said the nice representative. I responded: That’s nice and timely, I got your boxes last week and today it’s low-latency high speed day! They wil get back to me in 24 hours. Well, at least my internet is working..

Given earlier experiences with ISP’s I’m kinda curious if anything has changed over the years. Sincerely hope they get back to me tomorrow, but I’m guessing it’s me who’s making a call tomorrow (and probably getting none the wiser).

To be continued!

Citrix’s Flash Redirection design flaw

  By Michel | November 26, 2012 - 22:16 | Tech
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If I’m not saving the world at night, I have a regular day time job designing and implementing Citrix environments. During one of those projects, I came across something odd, even for Citrix :-)

The situation: When you use Citrix’s Flash Redirection mechanism (it allows you to play Flash content on a client machine instead of the server / VDI), it works OK. Unless you navigate away from the page that is being redirected (for instance: Youtube). The redirection will still take place on the background, effectively preventing new content to be redirected. If you have audio, you can actually hear the audio from a video still being played.

As usual, I logged a case about this behaviour. Took about two months and a lot of research  from Citrix to finally conclude this is a serious Flash Redirection design flaw. Basically the Pseudocontainer process is not able to monitor page/view changes in a browser in the user’s XenApp / XenDesktop session and happily keeps on redirecting the content to the local device. And no, they’re not going to fix it at this point in time or in the future.

This strike me as odd. In the world of today, 85% of all websites still embed Flash in a way or are very dependent on it for delivering content like video and audio. While it is true that HTML5 is being favored for new websites and redesigns, it’s still pretty obvious Flash enabled sites will be here the next 5 years regardless. Take a look at this, dated May 2011:

And this is the chart 10 months later (March 2012):

It looks like HTML5 is gaining some grounds on Flash, but not all-that-much. You could also conclude there is room in the world for both standards at this point, but with Adobe’s lack of proper support of Flash, interest wil waiver as time progresses. At this rate, it would take approximately 60 months to have full HTML5 support in all browsers propelling a growth of the target audience. HTML5 userbase could reach same levels as Flash in approximately 40-50 months.

It really surpises me Citrix is not really that willing to re-evaluate the Flash redirection design at this point, since it will clearly handicap Flash redirection in both XenApp 6.5 and XenDesktop 5.6 and onwards for the next 4-5 years. All I could do is request the issue being delivered to the respective product architects and hope more companies do this, which eventually should lead to a redesign and better support for Flash enabled websites for the years to come.

If anyone has some news about his subject, please comment! If you want folks to read about it, hit the share button below.

Facebook / Spotify suggestions, really?

  By Michel | November 22, 2012 - 19:15 | Music
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Some of you may know or have seen the imfamous suggested stuff between your friend’s posts on facebook. Would it be repayment for my usual listening style during studying?

What I listened to prior to the suggestion:

 Michel listened to Replica by Fear Factory on Spotify.

They suggested:

C’monC’mon, an album by Ke$ha on Spotify.

Seriously. I”m at a loss. Like Kesha? The girl looks as if she shops in a dumpster in some faded backally next to a crackhouse, sings even worse. Where is a dislike button when you need it ;-)

But seriously, how do you go from the sounds of Fear Factory to Ke$ha? Is there any similarity in that at all?

First post! Again!

  By Michel | November 19, 2012 - 20:38 | Random Rantings of a MadMan
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This is a no-brainer. I always think “Ok, new blog! Yay! Excitement!” and after publishing the first post, my thinking shifts to “Shit! Why doesn’t anybody visit my site? I’m writing to nobody here!”

Most depressing are those statistics that show how many days you have gone by without a single reader. Good job, WordPress. Good job on bringing me down and killing the innocent dreams on blogger super celebrity stardom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Really, nobody does. I can proof it. Nobody cares about this post. They’re too busy on bashing Justin Bieber, inserting funny captions on photos, or in Sweden, getting drunk because the team won the World Championship title in icehockey.

They really don’t give a shit. Especially if you’re a social media guru. Dude. If your job title is that, I’m really sorry for you. Really sorry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have gotten always a few visitors on my previous blogs, but they often seem to be looking for some weird topic, that in any circumstance I don’t have on my site. They have a handy solution for that: they start to hate me.

Thus they’ll think I’m an idiot, because they thought my blog would be filled with smurfs, but it isn’t. Further, they say I’m an double-idiot, because I haven’t started a blog about smurfs.

 

 

 

 

 

Other than angry comments, there is always dear spam. I always think why the spam commenters are so transparent in their scams. They’ll leave poorly written comments like

“Helo. Thank juu for this infor mat ion. Thank. Now pleasee ckeck my site at www.visitthesite-diesoon.com.”

They take this new corporate transparency stuff on social networks far too seriously. Please, try, even a little bit.

Also, they have names in the comments like “Not from Eastern Europe Mafia” or “Vladimir the Dealer”. Maybe they just think I’m stupid. Even they think that my first blog post sucks.

And it does. The first blog post sucks. Always.

 

 

 

You might have guessed it, I’m gonna do it again, sharing blogstuff to the world ;-)

After all, “It ain’t no fun if the homies can’t have none.”
― Snoop Dogg