Microsoft Internet Explorer is Crap

It has been a few weeks since I bashed Microsoft.

I have finally started designing my web sites with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a way to provide web pages with much greater layout control. You can almost create pages as complex as you could in a desktop publishing program such as QuarkXPress. CSS is an internet standard. It has been around for years. And is widely supported by all of the web browsers versions that have been released for the last 3 or 4 years.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows is a total piece of shit. It supports CSS, but not the official standard. NOOOO. The rat bastards and Microsoft have created a series of Internet Explorer for Windows versions that all support different versions of Microsoft's very non-standard crap CSS implementation. Yes, Microsoft knows how to properly support CSS. Their version of Internet Explorer for Macintosh has done so for about five years.

Microsoft is not evil. They are very successful marketers, and monopoly builders. And they are often very poor programmers, and do not play well with others.

Advice to my Windows using friends. Use Netscape Mozilla for a web browser. It is highly standards compliant and very fast. Oh, and NO annoying popup windows will bother you while you browse the web.

MS is not to blame for everything

After ligtly hammering on Microsoft, I read this report of a nuclear reactor being hit by the Slammer worm. Okay, the plant has been offline for a year an a half, but still this is bad.

Now I don't blame Microsoft for this. Windows is NOT a ultra secure platform. Sure it should be more secure than it is, but Windows is a general purpose OS and by its nature not designed to run a nulcear power plant. When you need software to run such critical computers, you need to do two things: 1) Don't allow any connections to the Internet. ZERO, NONE, ZILCH, NULL. 2) Use a special purprose OS. Some of the very high end Unixes might qualify: AIX, HP/UX, OpenBSD, and some of the real-time/embedded OS's might qualify: OS/9, QNX.

Okay, this story is no doubt over blown. The system in question was appearently for monitoring, not controling. Still it sounds like this would have been a very bad situation if the Plant had be online.

Mean spirited MS slam

But what the heck. While another worm is chewing through gaping MS security holes, I say this tag line on slashdot.org:

One World, One Web, One Program - Microsoft ad 

Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer - Adolf Hitler

Fair? No.

Funny? Yes.

But we could also bring Tolkien into this: