Believe me, when I say I'm no ATI defender, I've suffered through terrible drivers with 3 different All in wonder cards. Why I keep buying them is beyond me, but the functionality is pretty good. Supposedly ATI is really working hard on cleaning up their drivers, and for the most part this is the first abomination I've seen in a while, however I do believe ATI has a long road ahead of them as far as driver stability.

The Java issues come to no surprise to me, after talking to a few of our developers one being the co-author of this book and a few others (not to be a name dropper I just think it's cool that I work with a guy that writes books on java) but basically he said it's just like any other open source platform in that if it breaks theres normally a switch or something that will make it not break.