World Celebrates as Rupert Murdoch commits suicide!

Well ok, Economic suicide anyway.

BBC News article on the subject.

You see, a little while ago Mr “I’m a Business Man Guha Guha!” Murdock decided that the best way to increase his profits from his news websites was to prevent there stories being put up into Google News.  Despite the fact no other news companies in the world are quite as moronic as to do the same thing.

You see, Google News has previews of a full article on its news page, from there you have a link to the article itself on the original News websites page.  Mr “I like drinking Paint” Murdock has come to the conclusion that this is illegal.  His justification for this point of view is that they are making money out of his company without paying them back for it.  Erm, mate, there linking to the full article – not putting it up on there own website.  In effect there showing you what you can read on your website, which PROMOTES your website.

Apparently Mr “Toy soldiers go in nose” Murdock doesn't understand this concept.  Ok, then!  Should the man himself, hah, ever read this tirade here is how the internet works:  Man puts something on website, nobody knows it is there except the man.  Search engine goes through mans website and finds this thing, adds this to its index.  A different man who is interested in the something that is on the original man’s website uses the search engine to find what he wants.  Search engine gives him link to man’s website with a preview of what is there to let him judge if it is what he wants or not.  Man clicks on link and goes to website. 30 GOTO 10

Now that we have cleared that up, lets investigate how Mr “I’m a Clown! Brum Brum!” Murdock has decided to commit economic suicide.  He has now decided that Google will be blocked from accessing his news websites.

Lets just consider the enormity of what is wrong with this:

1. He is ONLY blocking Google and lets other search engines trawl his pages.  You sure you don’t just hate Google Mr “Microsoft's penis tastes like chocolate” Murdock?
2. Google will no longer be sending people to his websites, decreasing his readership.
3. Every other news website allows Google news to access there pages, and without his pages there to compete, there readership will go up.

This, ladies and Gentlemen, is a recipe for royally fucking your own profits.  Well done Mr “Having a blowjob while giving a speech is completely professional” Murdock, you just killed your company!  Much to the Glee of the rest of the world since your news is biased to the point of humour, sensationalist, badly written, badly edited, inefficiently fact checked, racist, sexist, homophobic and lots of other bad words.

And in closing I’d just like to point out one final thing to Mr “Why does all of Australia hate me?” Murdock:  You may not believe in Free Use, but every other sane person dose.  And thanks to free use, I’ve made him a present!

Here you go Mr "Mooo!" Murdock!.

Drop dead you smug self satisfied Prick.

 

(Apologies to the clown who’s Photo I used for the hair and nose, sorry)

Tuners

I’ve been saying this for a long time and now I’m going to say it louder.  Or rather, I’m going to type it out on here and let the vast wilderness of uncaring readers troll thought it.

Tuners are mostly idiots.

Please note the qualifier because its important, but we will come to why it is important later on because first: Its Moron Bashing Time!

Lets start off with spoilers, particularly rear spoilers on most tuned cars.  The vast majority of tuned cars you see in this country, and indeed around the world, are front wheel drive.  This is of course because the majority of cars built around the world today are front wheel drive, and indeed front wheel drive is a perfectly valid choice for a sporty car.  However, the vast majority of these tuned FWD cars have rear spoilers.

This is very dumb.

Why?  Well basically because either the owner has no understanding of what a spoiler dose or its purely decorative.  Anybody who thinks a cobbled together wing stuck to there boot looks good, needs emergency brain surgery.  As for those why they don’t know what a spoiler dose, here is an explanation of what they do:

A spoiler is in essence an upside down aerofoil as found on aircraft wings.  The shape of an aerofoil creates a pressure differential across the surface of the wing as air flows across it.  This creates lift for an aircraft and down force for a car.  Down force is simply pressure pushing the car down onto the road.  Placing one at the front of the car pushes the front down onto the road, placing one at the back presses the back down onto the road, as the speed increases.

So this means a tuned FWD car with a rear spoiler has its rear pressed down into the ground as it speeds up… ..lifting its front wheels upwards.  This has two effects:  First, the car looses grip, making it more likely to spin its wheels or go hurtling off into a wall when the wheels don’t have enough grip to turn the car.  Second, the front wheel breaks (which on a FWD car are usually the more powerful ones) are now attached to wheels with less grip, making it harder for them to stop the car and a lot easier for them to lock up the wheels.

In essence fitting a rear spoiler to a FWD car makes it handle, stop and accelerate worse at speed than it would without it.  Plus with the added wind resistance created by the spoiler and the turbulence it causes – the cars top speed will be lower as well.

So then, what about a front spoiler?

Well here we hit another obvious issue to do with Tuners: the people who design the bits.  Most cars today are created by companies that have between 100 and say 40 years experience building cars.  They have access to the best in wind tunnel and computer design equipment outside of perhaps the aerospace industry.  Tuners are either young men in sheds or older men who used to be in sheds and now make money selling things to young men in sheds.  As a result the front bumpers of modern cars are designed and styled by experts (though I will admit with some companies – BMW and Subaru I’m looking at you – this is hard to credit.)  While the plastic or fibreglass body kit found on your average tuner was designed by a man in a shed.

Not to knock men in sheds, after all some of the worlds best cars came out of sheds, but I’d rather trust the evil but well qualified multinational than a guy who judges his parts aerodynamics by eye.  As a result of this I doubt there are more than 5-6% of body kit bumpers that actually work as spoilers at all.  The rest being extra weight and more wind resistance to suck away at the cars top speed.

*Sigh*

As for punching holes in your exhaust pipe to make it louder – it just sounds like your exhaust is broken guys and you will probably fail your next MOT as a result of it.

Now to the explanation of the word “Most”, to put it in a nutshell some of the best car designers in history were tuners.  Graham Chapman would be an obvious example, he started working with Austin 7’s and from those humble beginnings created the Lotus company, a company that today tunes the suspension of a large number of the worlds best cars.  Sir William Lions, the guy who founded Jaguar, started off as a side car maker and created luxury versions of Austin 7’s before moving on to greater things.  Enzo Ferrari started off at Alfa Romeo, and while I doubt he could really be called a tuner he did borrow from his experiences there in creating his own cars.  Porsche was not strictly speaking a tuner since he did design the VW beetle himself, but his early cars did share parts with there humble brother.  The Renault Alpines started off as racing tuned Renault Dolphines.  The Saleen company, who I personally dislike the products of, started off as tuners before moving into there own limited production models while still tuning existing cars.  For that matter the tuning division of almost any modern car company could fit in here, from AMG to MG (Though there now defunct as tuners and instead have there badges slapped on Chinese made rebodies of a Rover 75, though it has to be said they are rather nice rebodies and the 75 was a good platform to start with even if its dated by European standards.)

So, not all tuners are morons, just the majority.

 

And especially any of them who stick half a 747 wing onto the back of a 1990’s Mitsubishi FTO, seriously, what where you thinking?

Very well then…

Lets start us off with something about that juicy new OS from the Unspeakable ones.  Windows 7! *Cue dramatic music*

First of all let met just clarify my personal opinion of Microsoft, since you must remember that it colours this review.  As far as I am concerned MS is about as wrong as you can make a company.  From its anti-competitive business tactics to its shockingly poor record on security, all I see is a company running around on some kind of power trip.  Also there REALLY bad at hardware, seriously guys, just stick to the software and get somebody else to style your GUI’s.

Right, now that’s covered lets move on to the actual review!

I’ve been running Windows 7 now for almost a week, and currently I’m rather impressed.  Oh sure, there’s a few bits and bobs that need work and some parts of the UI can FOAD right now (Got your Pitchforks and Burning torches? Cause we be storming Ribbon Castel boys!)  Its stable, it seems to be secure and though it shocks me to say this; I actually consider it superior to Ubuntu on the user friendliness front.

However that said it is not without its problems, and the biggest one of them all is the new UI.  In previous Windows incarnations we had customisable toolbars that could be modified and moved to suit our needs.  In 7 we have bloody great big things that put all of the functions you never wanted right there in the main screen rather than buried safely under a safe mound of menus.  I can see the point for idiots using a word processor – yes they could find it useful.  But I’m not an idiot and so I don’t need these screen hogs (thank god Open Office is sticking with toolbars) and I sure as hell don’t need them in Explorer.

Oh yes, Explorer.  Previously using explorer was like using any other file manager on any other computer system, now however in there finite wisdom MS have decided that using the Ribbon interface in a file manager makes sense.  Context sensitive toolbar in a file manager… ..can you imagine a more pointless UI change?  Have we not heard of the “Right Click” menu guys?  Hired a lot of Ex-Apple users by chance?  Just in case you don’t get my point, here it is: the right click menu is a context menu, it displays options relevant to the file/item/fish you are clicking on.  In 7 you can, thankfully, still do this but why then do I need to have a blasted un-editable toolbar there to do the same job?!

Grah!

Breadcrumbs, a feature I can actually see the point in, hell I actually like the idea quite a bit to be honest.  However why did we have to loose the “Directory Up” button for it?  Why can’t we have our crumbly bread and our uppers?  Its a pain in the proverbial to shuffle though the address bar looking for the folder you want, particularly when with an up button you could just go to that button and click till you hit the one you wanted!

The Start button, it should shrink with the blasted task bar, not droop off of it like it was stuck on by a 4 year old with prit stic.  Also make it less gaudy or give us the chance to have a greyed out version at least.

Aero Glass, its all very nice and pretty, but why dose it have to be smeared with diagonal bands of white?  Yes I know there trying to make it look like its glass, but why?  I’d prefer it to just be transparent and leave it at that.

The Window controls are on the wrong side.  Yes I know that’s the side MS always puts them on, but its still the wrong side.  Look at it like this: Most computer users are right handed, when they rest there arm there more likely to roll it up and to the right than anywhere else as there arm relaxes forwards and out from the body.  This slides the cursor up to the top right corner, where if they click by accident they close, de-maximise or minimise what's currently maximised on screen.

Libraries feels half finished and teaches new computer users not to think about where there files are stored – I predict doom arising from this.  Thankfully its easy enough to disable.

Homegroup… ..why? Why would I have more than one computer running 7 in the first place for one thing.  Why would I want to share with other people what’s on my computer, that’s what remote desktop is for.

Windows XP mode, I have got virtualisation set on and my processor and motherboard support the blasted thing! WORK DAMN YOU!

Despite these rather petty gripes I actually like most of Windows 7, its a good OS and comes with some neat features.  Plus most of my gripes can be fixed by using something like WindowsBlinds, or patches from MS themselves.  Considering its still pre SP1 I think its only fair to cut it some slack when the majority of the system is actually as good as it is.

Overall a recommendation then?  Mostly, though I’d point out that Win7 and Ubuntu are about equal on the user friendliness in most areas, and Ubuntu has far more scope for out of the box usage.  If your a gamer like myself your choice is obvious: you will get 7 and enjoy having a gaming OS that’s both 64bit and non-shite.  However if your not a gamer, I’m not sure you can justify spending £200 on an OS when an equivalent one is free.

 

 

Oh, and I wrote this one in “Windows Live Writer” to test it out, seems to work quite well.  Though I still want to burn whoever created the idea of a context sensitive non-customisable toolbar that you can’t switch off.

Ah the Joys

I've started a blog, oh lovely! now all I have to do is buy a copy of a microsoft prod... ..oh damn, did that already with Win7 din't I. Well ok, if I'm going to have to join mainstream modern culture I might as well do it thought the nerdy self important ranting way. Play to your type I say. So a Blog then, perhapse it would be a good idea to outline what I plan to do with this benited thing hum? Lets see, I already plan on posting my half baked rants about how much blasted bad advertising there is out there. How bad acting now seems to be regarded as acceptible. How TV show writers seem to have been, as a group, drinking lead based paint. And most importantly of course: Bashing Capitolism for being corrupt and run by the mentaly disadvantaged.

Fairly standard fare I would image, at least if you discount all the blogs moaning about there life or talking about there horrible crotchfruit. Uhg.