Wall Street Journal

Internet Explorer 8: Stay away, don’t believe the hype, aaaaaaaaaaargh!

I was stupid enough to believe all the offhand mentions like on the Wall Street Journal that said that Internet Explorer 8’s beta actually worked nice. So much so that having not been burnt by installing Chrome, I felt bandwagonesque enough to also install IE 8.

First, IE 8 *overwrites* and *replaces* IE 7. That is as uncool and unacceptable as it gets. You (Microsoft) are replacing a WORKING, STABLE program with a BETA in an all-or-nothing move without too much warning. That’s a load of crap. Suppose you have so much faith in it that you are fine with that.

Next, Security so high it is outrageously stupid. File again, under ‘unacceptable’: on my Windows XP machine, IE 8’s default setting disable JavaScript *ENTIRELY*. I repeat, no f-n JavaScript. Never mind Flash, but you know, it 2008. JavaScript is an unproven, new tool, yup yup. Fail fail fail. Anyway, they tell you that your add-ons are disabled. You click the link to the add-on manager and lo-and-behold, ALL OF THEM APPEAR ENABLED. WTF?

So how do you solve this? According to Microsoft’s support, it is as simple as changing an f-n REGISTRY KEY?! As user friendly as entering a class id to the registry. ARE THEY NUTS? DO THEY EVEN CARE?! Is it possible to goof off even more?! A beta means ‘on the verge of release’. This is plain dreadful, Microsoft. Look in the f-n mirror and like, think again. I am so selling my miserable 10 stocks of yours. You suck beyond belief. Really. Done. Indefensible.

According to the Wall Street Journal (quoted in Jalopnik), Chrysler is talking to Nissan about farming out small and mid-size car production to Japanese firm. The Wall Street Journal also had a rather eye-opening list of car sales figures, showing the Camry and Accord up top, and somewhere down there, with less than 4000 cars sold for the month of July, Chrysler.

How did Chrysler fall so low? They can make cool cars, like the Dodge Charger and 300C, and in the recent past its cars were interesting to look at (still fell apart but that’s a different story) like the Dodge Intrepid and Stratus which were powerful and fun to drive. The convertible Sebring was quite attractive, too.

These days, sadly, the produce truly hideous cars.
The Sebring and Avenger are just plain ugly. They are smaller, yes, but they look perplexingly half-baked. The tail is just incomplete and does not cover the back properly. The hood has ugly lengthwise metal strips and the headlights just look unappealing. These are two really ugly, blah cars. The only thing that was as ugly in recent memory is the 1990s Buick Skylark with its awful front.

It is just sad that they are giving up when their own designers create the best looking, butch (in a good way) cars (Charger is a favorite of mine). This time, manufacturing in America is giving up because the designers just suck, and that’s sad.