Horsesoft Dobbin 2013

You sell horses. You have made a lot of money over the years selling horses. Pretty much every business in the world and every household owns one of your horses. You bring out a new breed of horses every 3-4 years. Sometimes these new breeds of horses are failures but in the main people replace their old horses with your new breeds.

Your only rivals in the transportation market are a bicycle company whose products have traditionally been expensive, and a whole range of people offering rideable llamas for free, but these llamas have a history of being ugly, high maintenance and frankly – they spit.

But in recent years the bicycles have become cheaper and faster and every time you go to a conference pretty much everyone there now has a bicycle rather than a horse, indeed most of them have traded in their horses for the new world of portable, folding bicycles.

The llamas are less ugly, more pliant and spit a lot less frequently these days too.

It is time for your regular release of a new horse breed.

In order to maximise your market you decide in the following approach for Horsesoft Dobbin 2013:

  • You increase the cost of actually buying a horse significantly.
  • You introduce a new arrangement where people can hire a horse for a year but that horse can only be used by one person. At the end of the year the horse is taken away.
  • The horse is a horse, it does come with a new ribbon in its mane but that’s it.

 

As an MEA (Master of Equine Administration) student, do you think that the sum total of people buying and renting Horsesoft Dobbin 2013 will be higher or lower than previous breeds of horses?

Nothing is Simple

I am currently reading the excellent book by Jim Holt – “Why Does the World Exist?”.

And it turns out that that question is related to one of my late night musings – “What is the simplest possible universe?”

As in every good debate, we start by defining our terms. “Something” is easy to define, at least as a bucket, but what is “nothing”?

One way to define nothing is to start with something and then take it away.

So we start with our universe and remove all the matter. Do we then have “nothing”? And is then the simplest possible universe “nothing”?

The problem is that emptying the universe is not as simple as subtracting 1 from 1 to give us 0.

Even if we removed all matter, particles would still bubble up from the Dirac Sea. The only way to stop that is to remove the fundamental laws of this universe.

But where are these? How are they manifested?

Are they intrinsic to our universe or do they sit outside? And if outside then how do they affect our universe and have we not just replaced God with an equally inaccessible controller?

If they are intrinsic then where are they? Wearing a Mysterian hat, perhaps they are in plain sight but are imperceivable to our consciousness.

Emptying the universe starts to seem a lot less simple.

In the book, Jim Holt gives three requirements for this subtractive model of nothingness. One of which he, though not I, thinks is a deal breaker.

For me the fundamental problem with the subtractive model, aside from the challenge mentioned above, is ghosts.

Ghosts do not exist, they are therefore nothing. But they are obviously not nothing as there is a word in the page “ghosts” and you who read it know what it means.

Ghosts are both being and nothingness. What do I take away from what to create the nothingness that is a ghost?

Lent Upon

So here we are again, at the start of Lent, and the focus is on renunciation of worldly desires – chocolate, caek, drink, meat – we give up something for a few short weeks and gain karma or self-awareness or … well something.

I have always found there to be something dubious about the concept of treating Lent as an exercise in self-discipline. Temptation abounds 365 days of the year, simply ringfencing a part of the calendar and adding some additional temptations seems more an affectation than an engagement with the numinous.

Fasting during Ramadan teaches awareness of the body and the tension between body and soul, giving up sweets during Lent just makes one tetchy.

So this Lent whilst I will be treating my own views with the disdain they richly deserve by giving up sweets and chocolate and those delicious lard butties I will also be tasking myself with posting something here each day. To focus my mind on Lent as a time of self-examination. 

And to take my mind off of those delicious lard sandwiches…

Chromebook – first thoughts

Google yesterday launched the Chromebook and a lot of the coverage has been about the 3 year leasing model which they offering.

I am still waiting for more details but based on the information here I have some first impressions.

Chromebooks essentially appear to be thin clients in netbook form – data and apps are stored remotely with the device essentially being the presentation layer.

On a 3 year basis the cheapest device has a cost of $28 x 36 or $1008 as opposed to the one off purchase cost of $349.

So the question is “Is the service wrap worth $659?”

The only details I can find so far are here.

Cost savings seem to be mainly captured in this paragraph:

Chromebooks and the management console automate or eliminate many common, time-intensive IT tasks like machine image creation, application distribution, patching, and upgrades. Additionally, there is no need to purchase licenses for anti-virus, data encryption or data back-up software. Subscription pricing means that you only pay a low monthly amount.

Minimum quantity is 10 so service wrap will be a minimum of $2197 per annum.

But someone still needs to do configuration, deployment, run the management console etc.

Will do some more detailed modelling and realworld comparisons but will be interested to see a) how the thin client model works in operation and b) whether the netbook form factor is now too unfashionable for the market to accept!

What’s my language?

Words spill over my tongue,
Dart from between my teeth

 

Dropped ‘aitches and Yiddish mix with
South Yorkshire “Baths” and “Bizaaaaaare”.

 

My shibboleth is not “Broagh” but “Three”.

 

My Spanish has a French accent,
If only my French did …

 

My language is words but my language is hands,
Hands twisting and pushing to shift reality.

 

I know the meaning of words,
I know the tocsin of words.

 

So tell me, what’s my language?

A Pound of Email Please

Is email like cheese or is it like air?

Cheese is a finite resource – no matter how much you may like cheese you can only eat so much, your larder can only hold so much and all the cows + sheep + goats of the world can only produce so much. We could indeed run out of cheese!!!!

Air is an infinite resource – we do not even think about it save in very rare circumstances. It just exists and we can use as much of it as we like, indeed we do not even consider that we are using a resource – it is so invisible and ubiquitous.

Users of email think of it as being like air, providers of email services think of it like cheese.