Mediator PCI USB card

[x56h34]

@Phonic:

Some very good points. Another sucky fact about Spider is that the whole point of owning a Mediator PCI board is to not have to pay premium prices on custom made Zorro cards. :-(

[lorddef]

MAC Tax? Wtf?

The reason xxx card for the mac costs double the price of an identical card on the pc will almost certainly be down to the scale that the cards are produced at. Thus you pay more to fund the people who wrote the firmware.

[Phonic]

lorddef wrote:
MAC Tax? Wtf?

The reason xxx card for the mac costs double the price of an identical card on the pc will almost certainly be down to the scale that the cards are produced at. Thus you pay more to fund the people who wrote the firmware.

That's a contradiction.
If the cards are identical, made at the same fab with the same components by the same people how are they producing more of the PC variety?

They all come off the same line and they're all built to the same budget until a few are pulled out and flashed with the Mac compatible ROM.

You can't honestly believe that a relatively simple modification to a 64KB file justifies a 100% price hike even after factoring in R&D, testing etc.
Oh, and don't forget the sticker on the front of the box....

"Mac Edition"
Must cost hundreds to design that.

The Mac tax.

Back on topic, if anyone wants to know where to get one of the USB cards, shoot me a PM.

[adolescent]

Phonic wrote:
They all come off the same line and they're all built to the same budget until a few are pulled out and flashed with the Mac compatible ROM.

You can't honestly believe that a relatively simple modification to a 64KB file justifies a 100% price hike even after factoring in R&D, testing etc.
Oh, and don't forget the sticker on the front of the box....

Sure it does.  Let's say it costs $10,000/per platform to develop firmware/drivers for a particular GPU.  If they are going to sell 10 times as many cards for one platform, then the card/firmware for the other platform is going to have to cost more, or be subsidised by the more popular platform which could effect sales and profit margins.

Call it MacTax, but it's really an effect of marketshare.  

BTW, most USB/Firewire cards work with both Mac and PC (even if they say they don't).  I got a 19.99 special at Fry's that is USB2.0 and Firewire for my Mac.

[Zac67]

Don't get me wrong - I have no problem with them modifying the vendor ID to make sure you buy custom hardware from them. They want to make money, and if what they offer is worth it, I buy it. If I don't like it I don't have to buy it. I have only a very small problem with them fortifying their driver to withstand simple patching.

But I have a really huge problem with them delivering a time bomb that triggers when I play around with my system drivers or when some RAM chip accidentally breaks or when it just feels like it. This disqualfies them for me for all times.
Sure, restoring the RDB is not that big a problem, but WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY F**KING WITH MY HDD??

Anyone got a Prometheus card for sale?

[adolescent]

@Zac67

It was obviously a huge mistake for Elbox to do that.  If you can't forgive them that's fine, but move on.  It's been years since this happened and people still bring it up like it's in the current drivers.  

[motorollin]

I have only just heard about this. I think it's a disgrace. I understand Elbox's desire to have their driver used only for "their" hardware, but they don't need to trash someone's RDB to do this. They could just make the driver stop running if a non-Spider card is detected (which I suspect is what happens now).

Now that the RDB trashing code has been removed, what is stopping the driver from being modified to work with with non-Spider USB cards which use the same chipset but don't contain the Spider identifier?

--
moto

[Piru]

@adolescent

It was obviously a huge mistake for Elbox to do that. If you can't forgive them that's fine, but move on. It's been years since this happened and people still bring it up like it's in the current drivers.

It was the way Elbox handled this that demands constant reminding. No apologizes for wrongdoing, no remorse. Denial of the problem and outright lying.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=6302
http://www.elbox.com/news_02_11_13a.html
http://www.elbox.com/news_02_11_18b.html

I will continue to remind people of this as long as I see fit (I will stop when Elbox confesses the wrongdoing and apologizes). And if someone is thinking if I am the one who discovered this ('qwe'), no I am not.

@motorollin

Now that the RDB trashing code has been removed, what is stopping the driver from being modified to work with with non-Spider USB cards which use the same chipset but don't contain the Spider identifier?

It hasn't been impossible before either, and skilled hacker could have easily disabled the RDB trashing code, and also made the driver work with regular NEC cards.

It's copyright infrigiment to redistribute such hacked drivers, and in most countries it's illegal to distribute tool(s) that modify the driver to accept any such card. In some countries it's even illegal to "crack" the driver for your own purposes (it's illegal in Finland since jan 1st 2006, for example).

[adolescent]

Piru wrote:

(I will stop when Elbox confesses the wrongdoing and apologizes).

Apolgizes to who?  The 0 people that got a trashed RDB?  

[Piru]

@adolescent

Apolgizes to who?

To their users for putting them at risk of RDB trashing. Unlike what Elbox says the code could have been triggered without any hack attempt. AmigaOS is not protected environment and proper memory poking would have been enough to zap the RDB.

Some part of the apology should go to the hacker who brought this to everyone's attention. Without him every Elbox user would probably still be at risk.

The 0 people that got a trashed RDB?

How can you tell there weren't any?

The code is quiet, it doesn't tell that "Hey there mate, I just zapped your RDB!". If someone lost his RDB for no apparent reason there is no way to tell if Elbox driver did it.

Another silly argument is that you can easily restore the RDB if it's lost. That migth be if you have actually backed it up before, and know what losing RDB looks like. If you have never seen it, you could easily assume you've just lost all your data for good, or assume the HDD is defect.

[Phonic]

Piru wrote:

It's copyright infrigiment to redistribute such hacked drivers, and in most countries it's illegal to distribute tool(s) that modify the driver to accept any such card. In some countries it's even illegal to "crack" the driver for your own purposes (it's illegal in Finland since jan 1st 2006, for example).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering

Some good reading.

[Piru]

@Phonic

I know what reverse engineering is, and I've done it quite a bit myself.

However, to be legal here you'd need to rewrite the drivers completely. This might work in some country with lax copyright law.

This wouldn't work in Finland anymore though, the new Copyright law makes this illegal (at least if the goal is to circumvent a protection).