English - 2

An Englishman telling, a Fin commenting and a German (me) listening:

< Clownshuttle> i live in london < kaaos> cool < Clownshuttle> i work for transport for london < kaaos> be our special reporter tell us whats happenin < Clownshuttle> 6 tube stations attacked < Clownshuttle> 1 bus < Clownshuttle> 800 casualties < kaaos> not cool

It happened today, 11:13cet, when all of my 21 irc-connections to the Quakenet got G-Lined .. apparently for no-reason.

I'm having a botnet network that spreads messages over many IRC channels that want to receive those. It's like a one-way communication that many can use to send messages to others - great for communities, especially those gaming communities. I'm running those IRC-bots on my own server. So since it's only one server I needed a "trust" from Quakenet to be allowed to run more connections than 5 from one host. I got myself a trust of 30 clients and I need to obey all those rules that one will have to obey if you get a trust. You know... - Don't connect more than you have been allowed - One connection must have its own Ident, not being same with other connections - No abuse... (of course) and all those things you can imagine that's just being nice to Quakenet.

I obey those rules. Now how could that happen then??? What the heck? It must have been an accidently mis-typed G-Line by an IRCoper or not?!

I can call myself happy I know another IRCoper that can give me information on such happenings otherwise I would never have known the REAL REASON for the G-Line of all of my connections to the Quakenet Servers - I still don't get it...

He told me the G-Lines reason: "do NOT use your trust to make unncessary connections (1st Warning - 24 hours gline) (hit 21 users)" What the?!?!?! Ey??? Can't you talk to me? For what reason did I give my emailaddress? Besides 24 hours? Why? And.. by the (funny) way I DON'T HAVE ANY UNNECESSARY CONNECTIONS. And again.. you don't even have a rule that states or warns about "unnecessary connections". What THE?!?!?

Well, thanks for all the fish. I know QuakeNet opers and admins do this in their free-time and noone gets money for any of their services BUT banning my (also FREETIME) community IRC-Services WITHOUT being NOTICED with a reason IS NOT good for ANYONE. Nice culture, eh? Now my message botnet is being down until tomorrow 2005-06-23 11:13cet. Thank you so very much.

This pissed me off. ..So much I needed to write a blog-entry about it.

/Paul

This may be my first english entry here, yet it's quite needed because it's concerning a wide range of people.

To say it in short: If you're using Linux and wanted to have hardware mixing capabilities in your soundcard, you always thought a card of the "Creative Labs - Soundblaster Live!" series would do the job. WRONG!

There's the "SB Live! 24 Bit 7.1" and the "SB Audigy LS" that have the CA0106 chipset instead of the EMU10k1 or EMU10k2 chipset. The CA0106 is more like a crippled down version of it and it supports NO HARDWARE MIXING. I repeat, NO HARDWARE MIXING.

Here's what my recent research on it gave to light: http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/linux-audio-user/2005-February/020577.html

Well, of course, Creatives website says nice stuff like: "superb quality" and "hardware accelerated sound" and whatnot. You can give a shit about that concerning the above two soundcards. Remember, the soundcard is not an old model! It's still "new" and selling on the market. Every cheap and old 10 Euro soundcard with the EMU10k1 chipset can do that! This "SB Live! 7.1" is not worth the name of "Soundblaster Live!" - really. And you can quote me on that.

So, talking about Linux, the site: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/index.php?vendor=vendor-Creative_Labs#matrix ... says, "Yo, ALSA supports this card" - ok, that means, ALSA can access the card and may mix soundstreams together ALSA-internally. Like the Windowspeople know it from DirectSound - The software mixes the streams together if multiple applications want to access the soundcard that has no hardware mixing capabilities. This results in a bit of "selfmade" latency since the mixing is done by the software.

But, there are still many Linux applications that only support the deprecated OSS "interface" and thus lock other applications out if it already uses /dev/dsp. If that's the case, YOU NEED the capability of mixing soundstreams in the soundhardware to allow those applications to co-exist. Nevertheless, it's clear, such applications should finally update their software to use ALSA.

TeamSpeak, in its Linux version, is one of those applications .. funny enough they make money by licensing TeamSpeak servers to resellers but have not managed it since three years to release an ALSA version of TeamSpeak. Goto http://www.goteamspeak.com to have a word with them.

So what I wanted to say: - Screw Creative Labs because of the standard they lowered and thus sell crap. - Screw applications that still have no ALSA support.

Look at cool games like Doom3. It definately has ALSA support and that's the way to go. Still, keep away from the CA0106 soundcard chipset of Creative.

So.. good night