IMO the 3 worst tech creations of all time

3: the pre-intel macintosh series of computers... why? closed box design... patronizing 'hold you by the hand' style OS (OS classic anyway... i havent used OSX)... and waaay too much $$ for not a lot of computing power...

mac fans please note; this is just my opinion... if you like macs then, by all means, enjoy yourself... thats what the macs are there for... for ppl to choose to buy them instead of a linux or windows machine... competition is a good thing...


2: 2cycle gasoline engines (see this wikipedia article if you dont know what a 2 cycle engine is...)
...why? they spew immense ammounts of thick putrid blue smoke that smells horrid... are obnoxiously noisy... and are an absolute nightmare as far as pollution goes.. a quote from the EPA (taken from wikipedia article linked above); "the old 2 cycle motors have been said to cause more pollution in two hours than a car running for an entire year."

there is no reason for anyone to honestly 'like' these engines considering there are equally powerful and equally sized 4cycle engines... perhaps they can be sold as scrap metal.....


1:Microsofts Internet Explorer

ah yes, i do believe everyone out there can agree with this one... at least everyone in the webdev community... broken CSS, broken ECMA script (javascript) complete with proprietary extensions, lousy PNG support, browser components embeded into the OS itself... the list goes on...


i have been fighting with IE to get a good-looking stylesheet for my site that doesnt require dean.edwards rather poorly named IE8.js javascript suite that makes IE as standards compliant as possible by applying a thick layer of hacks to the ages old (currently roughly 8 years old in IE6) trident rendering engine... and im fscking fed up with it...

then MS has the balls to keep IE7 and the new supposedly more standards compliant (when pigs fly) IE8 away from users of older versions of windows (2k and earlier).... and even those two are crippled when installed on an XPSP2 machine... (of course SP2 for XP cripples XPs TCP/IP stack but thats another topic)... wtf? the standards compliant firefox and opera browsers can be run on windows 95 for silicons sake... and yet MS insists that you need the latest windows to get the full functionality out of IE... whatever... its not 'non trivial' to backport just the rendering engine you hive-mind MSIE drones... 'borrowing' pngfilt.dll from IE7 and sticking it on a win2k machine running IE6 fixes the alpha png problem (at least as good as MS can handle alpha pngs)... so whatabout the rest of it?

note: if you are not tech savvy with the internals of windows please do not attempt to replace core .dll files or you may end up breaking more than png transparency

this wouldnt bother me if most windows users didnt have the mentality that 'internet explorer' is the only browser or is 'the internet'... and users were given a little choice in what came with windows.... but MS (moreso steve balmer cos even bill gates himself gave the IE team a 'WTF?') is blinded by dollar signs and more than happy to keep its users in the dark about what the other half out there have to do to make IE look pretty...