Sure that can be denied, quite easily, because they didn't do the hardware right and it's killing them. They grabbed nearly off the shelf parts and shoved them together to make basically a PC. This is expensive and inefficient. They don't make their own hardware, they have to pay someone else to do it for the, and they can't take advantage of any technological advances.
Sony, on the other hand, has their own fab plant. They designed custom chips, and they recently miniaturized even more to cut costs. Sony and Nintendo are making money on their hardware, even after cutting prices. Nintendo has a similar arrangement. Microsoft is losing money, and that was before they were forced to cut prices to keep up. The X-Box division is hemorrhaging cash right now with that couple hundred dollar loss per box. Sure, they can afford it for now, but they have to keep evaluating how long it will take them to get entrenched in the console or set-top box market. They have to decide if it's going to happen at all, and if they need to stay in or cut their losses. They're playing a dangerous game, and it could go either way.
The interesting twist here is that Nintendo too is using off the shelf parts. They're using a PowerPC processor and an ATI graphics card. So if your logic holds true then Nintendo too "can't take advantage of any technological advances"
But that's not really true at all. The 2 opposing viewpoints both get to take advantage of different technological benefits. MS and Nintendo get to take advantage of the advancements that Intel and IBM/Motorolla make on processors. They also get to take advantage of the advancements NVidia and Intel make. And this means that Sony is competing with these companies, and their R&D budgets (which are practically dedicated towards CPUs and video cards). It will obviously be tough for Sony to develop a faster processor than Intel or IBM/Motorolla, or a better GPU than NVidia or ATI.
But then Sony gets the cost benefits (after they've blown a wad of cash on R&D) from miniturization. Of course, that's not to say Microsoft or Nintendo couldn't strike deals to combine what they need onto one chip either!
So both strategies obviously have their strengths and weaknesses. But does it really matter? Whatever happens the customers are the ones who are winning here with lots of good competition:).
Can you imagine what could have been if NASA had been quick enough to begin the construction of a full-fledged outpost on the Moon in the 1970's? I we could have stored the spent nuclear material on the Moon, where no one can (at least currently) mount a safe expedition. We could have had this up and running by the end of the 1990's, and if worst comes to worst, and the stuff exploded or something, all that would happen is that the Moon would be sent out of orbit or something, off to have it's own adventures...
This is all fine and dandy until Challenger 2 happens with a load of radioactive material, and then we're screwed.
Good thing they can vote and write letters to their congressmen, though. Otherwise our politicians might do something stupid, like ban new areas of medical research or make it hard to approve new reactor designs because "nukular" power is "like, totally scary and dangerous", especially when compared to buying oil from nations whose populations only want to kill us.
It's a good thing that a large amount of the population doesn't vote. It would be interesting to see if a large amount of this same group voted or not, but I would guess that the people who find science a mystery also find politics to be a mystery.
I'd go off here on a tangent about how we should have a Constitutional amendment requiring prospective voters to demonstrate at least third-grade science and literacy skills before you get to vote, and maybe, I dunno, maybe an eighth-grade science education before you can run for elected office.
This is an absolutely horrible idea. What you're proposing is basically disfranchisement, which the Voting Rights Act did away with (and only in 1965!), and for good reason. It would just be horribly, horribly abused.
The amazing thing about your post is that minutes later (9 minutes to be precise) Slashdot puts up this article on Max Headroom. I just *had* to check the times to make sure you posted this before the article showed up. It's unreal!
I very dubious about web storage as a product for a couple of reasons:
. security. Let someone else store my (potentially private) files and trust them to keep grubby cracker fingers out of it?
. I've got a 120 GB drive in my desktop at work, 80 GB at home and 30 GB in my notebook, what would I need 20 MB for?
Imagine though if you could get say 200 gigs of storage on-line, and you had a fast enough connection where accessing it wasn't a big deal, AND they kept all that data backed up for you. That would be pretty nice... 20mb seems really insignificant though, and we're a long ways off from the bandwidth. But I could imagine it happening SOME day, simple because it's such a pain in the ass to back up data. You either need redundant hard drives (RAID 5 at best), or a tape drive. It'd be nice to just have it happen all automagically...
So, the license is here. I'm just curious what portion of the license you seem to think doesn't allow running the "shared source cli" as it's called on Linux? The license is actually pretty short, and I see no part of it which mentions operating systems at all...
Pronunciation Key (lônghôrn, lng-)n. 1) Any of a breed of cattle with long horns, formerly bred in great numbers in the southwest United States.
2) A variety of Cheddar cheese molded into a long cylinder.
Cheese wins it for me!
Dictionary terms are so bland for codenames... Actually it's the longhorn saloon. If you visit that page you'll see another familiar codename, "Whistler" (That's Window's XP). And what's next to there? It's Blackcomb.. Blackcomb of course was originally the version after XP, but MS decided to insert a release between to the two - "Longhorn" - which is the ski lodge between the two mountains:)
I remember the old BBS days where you could type something, and then backspace over it, and it would save everything you typed, the original, the backspaces, and the new text. So as you read, a word would slowly disappear, and then change.
But you can't leave out all the ways you could work this into your sig! You could have your sig spin out by doing / - \ | and backspacing over those characters, and then spitting out the character in your sig. And you could combine it all with color to make it look cool and pretty. And if you were on a site where you could post ANSI graphics to go in with it, well that was the bomb:) . Ahh... BBSing...
It's amazing if you compare the level of expression which BBSes allowed to something like Slashdot. On BBSes you could use nearly every level of control available to you & the sysop. Eg, color, backspacing, sometimes ANSI graphics. Slashdot you can't even add color to your posts. Imagine how convenient it would be to set the FG & BG to the same color to add a "spoiler" to your post (visible when highlighting with the mouse, or for Lynx viers via View->Source followed by a search for some text previous to the hidden text)... but I digress...
Meanwhile, Microsoft has gotten greeder, charging upwards of $1500 for Visual Studio, which is your only choice now. That's a far cry from $99 for Visual Basic 1.0 or Visual C++ 1.0.
The funny thing is that VB.NET is only $109. As are both VC++.NET and C#.NET. So VS.NET may cost a bunch, but the individiual pieces don't. I'm not sure what VS.NET has which sets it apart (other than all the languages)...
The goofiest one I've found yet: AI entity gains PhD 2016.
Personally, I think this is worse: Confessions to AI priest 2004
I don't think the Church is going to sanction robotic priests, and definitely not in 2 years. If that happens we'll also be seeing the "Buddy Christ":)
Office Space use PCs, although I think they're probably running DOS - I don't remember, just remembered they look awfully old for a fairly recent movie.
Of course, the characters are using them at their job - not at home. So maybe it's an implication that the "Job is evil", not a statement about the characters who use them (who are the "good guys").
But basically you have ACLs - Access Control Lists, associated with objects (files, registry keys, pipes, processes, etc...). An ACL describes who can do what with the object - eg, create, open, read, write, full control, etc... You can set them in 1 of 3 states: Allow, not set, or Deny. Denying overrules allowing too...
It's all pretty extensive. "The Mythical Man Month" describes NT as suffering from 2nd-system syndrome, where a project gets over designed. Along these lines NT has a very extensive process / thread model.
Of course, I'm no NT security expert, so read the article, 'cuz I might not have gotten all the details right.
Totally agree with you, exept the application framework would have to given away free with the 'OS', so everyone had it.
As you say, it should also be extensable, EG; someone should be able to replace the inbuilt HTML renderer with something like Geko that even supported PDF rendering (aka Quartz)
Now if only we can convence Microsoft!
The thing about this is that Microsoft has already been convinced.
If you want to replace the IE HTML rendering engine ("MSHTML") all the interfaces are defined.
All you gotta do is write your own HTML parser and implement the same interfaces.
From this page it looks like MSHTML's CLSID is 3050f4f8-98b5-11cf-bb82-00aa00bdce0b - replace this in the registry and point it at your own rendering engine and it should be used system wide. Now, IE probably doesn't use COM to talk to MSHTML (although who knows, it might), but you should be able to get a signifigant amount of stuff replaced with it...
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but a lot of Slashdotters don't seem to understand COM. COM interfaces *DON'T CHANGE*. They STAY THE SAME - VERSION AFTER VERSION. If you want to change a COM interface you have to implement a new version of the interface, with a completely different CLSID. So you don't even have to worry about Microsoft "breaking" these at some future point, 'cuz they're set in stone (as much as any software can, of course).
There exists a more informative press release about the Rio Riot. It has a battery life of 10 hours. And apparently it's bundled with iTunes on the Mac. heh...
Of course, USB sucks... But with 20 gigs of storage, how often do you really need to change the music? let it download overnight once, and then maybe you're swapping out an album here and there...
Although what's kinda cool is it supporst MP3 and WMA today, is upgradable to other formats later (someone could potentially hack vorbis support in I'd imagine...) but they also plan to add support for Audible, for people who like to listen to books.
I spent WAY too much time explaining that ls is the same as dir (except better), that less is type (but with functionality), etc.
You'd probably be better off teaching DOS people that cat is like type, and less is like more (even though less works just as well as cat/type). That way they can think of "cat foo | less" as being the same as "type foo | more" - and hey, if they're really dumb all they really have to remember is "cat foo | more" - 'cuz that works too (and they'll be used to the less functionality of more versus less - what a sentence...)
Google I'm Feeling Lucky says: http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/sp7.asp
And that basically says it's not happening because there's not enough fixes to go in it, even after a really long time. Of course, there's a post-SP6a "Security Rollup Package" and everything else that would be availble in SP7 is for download (and conveniently linked to off that page). And to top it all off "Microsoft intends to continue supporting customers by making hotfixes available as they are needed. "
But really, I think Microsoft probably has more of a pressing need to support NT 4 than Win95. Businesses run NT4, and they care more than Joe Schmoe surfing the web at home...
ok, so the easier and more proper way to stop things from running at start up is to run msconfig - from there you just uncheck one box. Msconfig is documented, and you don't even have to edit a file.
With known open standards being enforced by the industry on the industry, we get a level playing field. Then, the company/project/whatever who interacts with the user best and meets thier needs gets the prize, not the one who duped the user into a proprietary format.
This is a great idea in the long run, but in the short run it's not practical/possible. What happens when a new technology comes out? There's no standard for it. If people stuck to stnadards only, then there'd be no new stuff.
One example of this is Flash. You can debate the merits of the technology it's self, but it lets you do a lot of cool stuff, which otherwise isn't possible to do on the web. So, should everyone have waited for SVG? Would SVG have happened if everyone coded to standards? Who knows...
Browser's are another great example of this. Of course the browser wars made web developer's lives hell, but they pushed the edge, and created new features where there were no standards. Now the standards have caught up, and that's what browsers write to. Sure, every browser may not implement every part of the spec, but nothing's perfect. Anyway, it's a lot better then it used to be (if you're willing to forget about Netscape 4 when designing pages).
And of course, there's the biggie: XML. XML provides a way for all data to be represented in a sharable, parsable manner. And all sorts of standards are coming out of that, and they're largely things which have existed before, in a non-standardized thing. And of course with XML we are, and we'll probably continue to see, new standards built on top of that - but ultimately they're just replacing old things which didn't have standards.
And of course there's no reason for this course of action to go away. But when you're defining the hot, new, must-have application, you get to choose the format, and eventually everything calms down.
(note: The Government may have to enforce this at first since getting the industry to agree on a standard is a daunting task, at best. Having Gates, McNealy and Elliston all in one room at one time may provide enough ego to reach critical mass and create a thermo-nuclear type explosion)
And before you start down the "it's your hardware" road.. the exact same hardware is rock solid under linux (including the DVD card) as well as BeOS (doesn't support all the hardware though), and every driver is "certified" for windows.
Why don't you just download WHQL's tests and see if the whole configuration fails for some reason (versus looking at the individual components).
My system doesn't pass the tests, there's a lot of them and I stopped once I saw a failure (with my SB Live). My ATI All In Wonder 128 crashes the machine if I try to do a lot of video capture, but it's a Win2k driver on XP Pro, and it's ATI. But otherwise it's perfectly stable.
GameSpot has some video previews of the game , if you can stand programmers with no PR training whatsoever blathering on for 7 minutes.
But that guy's not even a programmer, he's the hardware editor. Why's the hardware editor telling us about this game? Was it his turn to be on the web or something?
Slashdot Mirror
The only people who used Avatar graphics were gay losers running Renegade.
:)
Not true! I wrote a mod for WWIV which provided Avatar graphics. Now, you can call my a loser for running WWIV, but that's a different story
Sure that can be denied, quite easily, because they didn't do the hardware right and it's killing them. They grabbed nearly off the shelf parts and shoved them together to make basically a PC. This is expensive and inefficient. They don't make their own hardware, they have to pay someone else to do it for the, and they can't take advantage of any technological advances.
:).
Sony, on the other hand, has their own fab plant. They designed custom chips, and they recently miniaturized even more to cut costs. Sony and Nintendo are making money on their hardware, even after cutting prices. Nintendo has a similar arrangement. Microsoft is losing money, and that was before they were forced to cut prices to keep up. The X-Box division is hemorrhaging cash right now with that couple hundred dollar loss per box. Sure, they can afford it for now, but they have to keep evaluating how long it will take them to get entrenched in the console or set-top box market. They have to decide if it's going to happen at all, and if they need to stay in or cut their losses. They're playing a dangerous game, and it could go either way.
The interesting twist here is that Nintendo too is using off the shelf parts. They're using a PowerPC processor and an ATI graphics card. So if your logic holds true then Nintendo too "can't take advantage of any technological advances"
But that's not really true at all. The 2 opposing viewpoints both get to take advantage of different technological benefits. MS and Nintendo get to take advantage of the advancements that Intel and IBM/Motorolla make on processors. They also get to take advantage of the advancements NVidia and Intel make. And this means that Sony is competing with these companies, and their R&D budgets (which are practically dedicated towards CPUs and video cards). It will obviously be tough for Sony to develop a faster processor than Intel or IBM/Motorolla, or a better GPU than NVidia or ATI.
But then Sony gets the cost benefits (after they've blown a wad of cash on R&D) from miniturization. Of course, that's not to say Microsoft or Nintendo couldn't strike deals to combine what they need onto one chip either!
So both strategies obviously have their strengths and weaknesses. But does it really matter? Whatever happens the customers are the ones who are winning here with lots of good competition
Can you imagine what could have been if NASA had been quick enough to begin the construction of a full-fledged outpost on the Moon in the 1970's? I we could have stored the spent nuclear material on the Moon, where no one can (at least currently) mount a safe expedition. We could have had this up and running by the end of the 1990's, and if worst comes to worst, and the stuff exploded or something, all that would happen is that the Moon would be sent out of orbit or something, off to have it's own adventures...
This is all fine and dandy until Challenger 2 happens with a load of radioactive material, and then we're screwed.
Good thing they can vote and write letters to their congressmen, though. Otherwise our politicians might do something stupid, like ban new areas of medical research or make it hard to approve new reactor designs because "nukular" power is "like, totally scary and dangerous", especially when compared to buying oil from nations whose populations only want to kill us.
It's a good thing that a large amount of the population doesn't vote. It would be interesting to see if a large amount of this same group voted or not, but I would guess that the people who find science a mystery also find politics to be a mystery.
I'd go off here on a tangent about how we should have a Constitutional amendment requiring prospective voters to demonstrate at least third-grade science and literacy skills before you get to vote, and maybe, I dunno, maybe an eighth-grade science education before you can run for elected office.
This is an absolutely horrible idea. What you're proposing is basically disfranchisement, which the Voting Rights Act did away with (and only in 1965!), and for good reason. It would just be horribly, horribly abused.
The amazing thing about your post is that minutes later (9 minutes to be precise) Slashdot puts up this article on Max Headroom. I just *had* to check the times to make sure you posted this before the article showed up. It's unreal!
I very dubious about web storage as a product for a couple of reasons:
. security. Let someone else store my (potentially private) files and trust them to keep grubby cracker fingers out of it?
. I've got a 120 GB drive in my desktop at work, 80 GB at home and 30 GB in my notebook, what would I need 20 MB for?
Imagine though if you could get say 200 gigs of storage on-line, and you had a fast enough connection where accessing it wasn't a big deal, AND they kept all that data backed up for you. That would be pretty nice... 20mb seems really insignificant though, and we're a long ways off from the bandwidth. But I could imagine it happening SOME day, simple because it's such a pain in the ass to back up data. You either need redundant hard drives (RAID 5 at best), or a tape drive. It'd be nice to just have it happen all automagically...
That's a hoot! The fact is that CLR doesn't support anything that can't be accessed from C#.
:)
One word: Tailcalls! Yeah!
So, the license is here. I'm just curious what portion of the license you seem to think doesn't allow running the "shared source cli" as it's called on Linux? The license is actually pretty short, and I see no part of it which mentions operating systems at all...
Dictionary.com
:)
4 entries found for longhorn.
Pronunciation Key (lônghôrn, lng-)n.
1) Any of a breed of cattle with long horns, formerly bred in great numbers in the southwest United States.
2) A variety of Cheddar cheese molded into a long cylinder.
Cheese wins it for me!
Dictionary terms are so bland for codenames... Actually it's the longhorn saloon. If you visit that page you'll see another familiar codename, "Whistler" (That's Window's XP). And what's next to there? It's Blackcomb.. Blackcomb of course was originally the version after XP, but MS decided to insert a release between to the two - "Longhorn" - which is the ski lodge between the two mountains
I remember the old BBS days where you could type something, and then backspace over it, and it would save everything you typed, the original, the backspaces, and the new text. So as you read, a word would slowly disappear, and then change.
:) . Ahh... BBSing...
But you can't leave out all the ways you could work this into your sig! You could have your sig spin out by doing / - \ | and backspacing over those characters, and then spitting out the character in your sig. And you could combine it all with color to make it look cool and pretty. And if you were on a site where you could post ANSI graphics to go in with it, well that was the bomb
It's amazing if you compare the level of expression which BBSes allowed to something like Slashdot. On BBSes you could use nearly every level of control available to you & the sysop. Eg, color, backspacing, sometimes ANSI graphics. Slashdot you can't even add color to your posts. Imagine how convenient it would be to set the FG & BG to the same color to add a "spoiler" to your post (visible when highlighting with the mouse, or for Lynx viers via View->Source followed by a search for some text previous to the hidden text)... but I digress...
Meanwhile, Microsoft has gotten greeder, charging upwards of $1500 for Visual Studio, which is your only choice now. That's a far cry from $99 for Visual Basic 1.0 or Visual C++ 1.0.
.NET and C# .NET. So VS.NET may cost a bunch, but the individiual pieces don't. I'm not sure what VS.NET has which sets it apart (other than all the languages)...
The funny thing is that VB.NET is only $109. As are both VC++
The goofiest one I've found yet: AI entity gains PhD 2016.
:)
Personally, I think this is worse: Confessions to AI priest 2004
I don't think the Church is going to sanction robotic priests, and definitely not in 2 years. If that happens we'll also be seeing the "Buddy Christ"
Alright, now how do you switch tabs using the keyboard? I would have expected Ctrl-Tab to do it, but it doesn't work...
Office Space use PCs, although I think they're probably running DOS - I don't remember, just remembered they look awfully old for a fairly recent movie.
Of course, the characters are using them at their job - not at home. So maybe it's an implication that the "Job is evil", not a statement about the characters who use them (who are the "good guys").
And how well does this perform? Or rather should I ask is this the type of thing you want to throw into an inner loop of an O(n^2) algorithm?
Sorry, i've a question, not a troll or anything, just curious.
What exactly would win2k kernel security model would that be? I'm just not aware that nt kernels had that unix-secure-and-extendible philsophy.
Here's a link on MSDN which explains NT security.
But basically you have ACLs - Access Control Lists, associated with objects (files, registry keys, pipes, processes, etc...). An ACL describes who can do what with the object - eg, create, open, read, write, full control, etc... You can set them in 1 of 3 states: Allow, not set, or Deny. Denying overrules allowing too...
It's all pretty extensive. "The Mythical Man Month" describes NT as suffering from 2nd-system syndrome, where a project gets over designed. Along these lines NT has a very extensive process / thread model.
Of course, I'm no NT security expert, so read the article, 'cuz I might not have gotten all the details right.
Totally agree with you, exept the application framework would have to given away free with the 'OS', so everyone had it.
As you say, it should also be extensable, EG; someone should be able to replace the inbuilt HTML renderer with something like Geko that even supported PDF rendering (aka Quartz)
Now if only we can convence Microsoft!
The thing about this is that Microsoft has already been convinced. If you want to replace the IE HTML rendering engine ("MSHTML") all the interfaces are defined. All you gotta do is write your own HTML parser and implement the same interfaces. From this page it looks like MSHTML's CLSID is 3050f4f8-98b5-11cf-bb82-00aa00bdce0b - replace this in the registry and point it at your own rendering engine and it should be used system wide. Now, IE probably doesn't use COM to talk to MSHTML (although who knows, it might), but you should be able to get a signifigant amount of stuff replaced with it...
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but a lot of Slashdotters don't seem to understand COM. COM interfaces *DON'T CHANGE*. They STAY THE SAME - VERSION AFTER VERSION. If you want to change a COM interface you have to implement a new version of the interface, with a completely different CLSID. So you don't even have to worry about Microsoft "breaking" these at some future point, 'cuz they're set in stone (as much as any software can, of course).
There exists a more informative press release about the Rio Riot. It has a battery life of 10 hours. And apparently it's bundled with iTunes on the Mac. heh...
Of course, USB sucks... But with 20 gigs of storage, how often do you really need to change the music? let it download overnight once, and then maybe you're swapping out an album here and there...
Although what's kinda cool is it supporst MP3 and WMA today, is upgradable to other formats later (someone could potentially hack vorbis support in I'd imagine...) but they also plan to add support for Audible, for people who like to listen to books.
I spent WAY too much time explaining that ls is the same as dir (except better), that less is type (but with functionality), etc.
You'd probably be better off teaching DOS people that cat is like type, and less is like more (even though less works just as well as cat/type). That way they can think of "cat foo | less" as being the same as "type foo | more" - and hey, if they're really dumb all they really have to remember is "cat foo | more" - 'cuz that works too (and they'll be used to the less functionality of more versus less - what a sentence...)
where is Service Pack 7?
Google I'm Feeling Lucky says: http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/sp7.asp
And that basically says it's not happening because there's not enough fixes to go in it, even after a really long time. Of course, there's a post-SP6a "Security Rollup Package" and everything else that would be availble in SP7 is for download (and conveniently linked to off that page). And to top it all off "Microsoft intends to continue supporting customers by making hotfixes available as they are needed. "
But really, I think Microsoft probably has more of a pressing need to support NT 4 than Win95. Businesses run NT4, and they care more than Joe Schmoe surfing the web at home...
ok, so the easier and more proper way to stop things from running at start up is to run msconfig - from there you just uncheck one box. Msconfig is documented, and you don't even have to edit a file.
With known open standards being enforced by the industry on the industry, we get a level playing field. Then, the company/project/whatever who interacts with the user best and meets thier needs gets the prize, not the one who duped the user into a proprietary format.
This is a great idea in the long run, but in the short run it's not practical/possible. What happens when a new technology comes out? There's no standard for it. If people stuck to stnadards only, then there'd be no new stuff.
One example of this is Flash. You can debate the merits of the technology it's self, but it lets you do a lot of cool stuff, which otherwise isn't possible to do on the web. So, should everyone have waited for SVG? Would SVG have happened if everyone coded to standards? Who knows...
Browser's are another great example of this. Of course the browser wars made web developer's lives hell, but they pushed the edge, and created new features where there were no standards. Now the standards have caught up, and that's what browsers write to. Sure, every browser may not implement every part of the spec, but nothing's perfect. Anyway, it's a lot better then it used to be (if you're willing to forget about Netscape 4 when designing pages).
And of course, there's the biggie: XML. XML provides a way for all data to be represented in a sharable, parsable manner. And all sorts of standards are coming out of that, and they're largely things which have existed before, in a non-standardized thing. And of course with XML we are, and we'll probably continue to see, new standards built on top of that - but ultimately they're just replacing old things which didn't have standards.
And of course there's no reason for this course of action to go away. But when you're defining the hot, new, must-have application, you get to choose the format, and eventually everything calms down.
(note: The Government may have to enforce this at first since getting the industry to agree on a standard is a daunting task, at best. Having Gates, McNealy and Elliston all in one room at one time may provide enough ego to reach critical mass and create a thermo-nuclear type explosion)
And this is just stupid.
I don't know where you're buying from, but www.estore.com.au lists the prices at:
XP Professional New $579 (Upgrade $405)
XP Home Edition (not standard) $405 (Upgrade $208)
You gotta find a new retailer...
And before you start down the "it's your hardware" road.. the exact same hardware is rock solid under linux (including the DVD card) as well as BeOS (doesn't support all the hardware though), and every driver is "certified" for windows.
Why don't you just download WHQL's tests and see if the whole configuration fails for some reason (versus looking at the individual components).
My system doesn't pass the tests, there's a lot of them and I stopped once I saw a failure (with my SB Live). My ATI All In Wonder 128 crashes the machine if I try to do a lot of video capture, but it's a Win2k driver on XP Pro, and it's ATI. But otherwise it's perfectly stable.
GameSpot has some video previews of the game , if you can stand programmers with no PR training whatsoever blathering on for 7 minutes.
But that guy's not even a programmer, he's the hardware editor. Why's the hardware editor telling us about this game? Was it his turn to be on the web or something?