certificación de drivers en Windows - el HORROR

En la última entrega de "The Old New Thing" (blog de uno de los mejores ingenieros de Microsoft, etc etc), explica uno de los métodos más curiosos que utilizan las empresas para saltarse el diálogo de "Está a punto de instalar un driver no certificado por los laboratorios de Microsoft etc etc":

El método que cuenta esta vez (hay más) es escalofriante: El programa de instalación pide al usuario que "no mueva el ratón ni toque el teclado". Entonces, el propio programa de instalación procede a mover el puntero del ratón manualmente, para actualizar el driver y aceptar el diálogo como si fuera el usuario el que lo está haciendo

Terrorifico.

Y relacionado con el tema, y sacado de la keynote del todopoderoso John Carmak: "The quintessential PC game programmer then dropped a bit of a bombshell by announcing that he had recently moved his primary development efforts over to the Xbox 360, and that he expected to continue development there for the next six months—although the PC version of id Software's next game will still be released first. One of his reasons for the move to Xbox 360 for development, Carmack said, was the headache of driver issues on the PC platform. The several layers of abstraction on the PC make it hard to nail down exact graphics performance because the programmer is held at a distance from the hardware. By contrast, the Xbox 360's more direct approach was "refreshing." Carmack also praised Microsoft's development environment as easily the best of any of the consoles, thanks to the company's background as a software provider"

Y ya que estamos: "Carmack was less pleased with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs' performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor and expressed skepticism about the returns of multi-core designs and multithreaded software, especially in the short term. Graphics accelerators are a great example of parallelism working well, he noted, but game code is not similarly parallelizable.