Status-Q

I was reading a discussion about whether or not it was worth buying AppleCare – Apple’s extended warranty – on your new iPod/laptop/desktop. It reminded me of another discussion, several years ago, when a friend pointed out to me that all insurance policies of any sort will, statistically, lose you money. If they were worthwhile for the purchaser, they wouldn’t be worthwhile for the manufacturer/insurer, and they exist only because they make money. Money for other people. People who aren’t you.

Now, it’s not always easy to keep that fact in mind when you suddenly get a £700 bill for a new logic board on the laptop you bought 18 months ago. You forget that you saved £120 by not buying the extended warranty on the elderly fridge which is still working fine, and the TV, and more on the last laptop, and your last three mobiles… and so forth, all of which add up to much more than the immediate bill that looks so distressing.

So you should only buy insurance when the thing you’re guarding against is so expensive that you really couldn’t afford to be hit by it (which must also mean that it’s terribly unlikely, or you couldn’t afford the premium), when you’re legally obliged to, or when you have good reason to believe that it’s very much more likely to happen to you than to anybody else. For anything else, if you feel pangs of angst when the salesman starts putting pressure on you to buy his lucrative extended warranty, set up a special savings account and put the money there instead. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you’ll be better off in the end, my friend!

The US/Canada edition of Rose’s latest book officially hits the shelves next week. We’re heading over to Michigan for the launch, and stopping briefly in New York on the way back.

But apparently, people who ordered it on Amazon have started receiving their copies. So I thought I’d let my transatlantic readers know, just in case… there’s a link on Rose’s site if you get the urge… 🙂

Today is annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. If you get frustrated with the occasional problems on your computer, spare a thought for the guy who has to spend his life fixing those problems for other people’s benefit, while absorbing their frustration! The problems are not normally of his making…

So hug a sysadmin today….
[well, ok, that may be too much… but at least buy him a pint]

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of iPhone software, here’s a handy hint. In the browser and in various other apps there’s a special ‘.com’ key which saves you a few keystrokes.

What’s not so obvious is that you can press and hold on that key to get some other options.

Now, if someone can work out how to add ‘.co.uk’…

A great talk by Cory Doctorow last night – he spoke for an hour but packed in more words than most people would manage in two hours, and certainly more insights.

One phrase I liked:

“Innovation happens when people can afford to fail”

This is exactly right. I’ve said a related thing before in a talk about innovation: “Redundancy pay is a wonderful thing”. For many people, especially young people, it’s the first time they get a chance to raise their heads, look around and think about options beyond the next month’s pay cheque.

Most people will not, or cannot, risk the roof over their family’s heads, or their career prospects, or their employees’ livelihoods, if that’s the price of experimenting and failing. The thing Silicon Valley got right is the understanding that a high proportion of new ideas will fail, and that’s OK, because enough of them won’t. If investors looking at proposals, or employers looking at CVs, or governments thinking about policy, understand and allow failure (in moderation, of course), then great things can happen!

Many thanks to Neil Davidson of Red Gate Software for the invitation to the talk.

Following on from my earlier post about average speed checks, Thomas Hunger pointed me at this story about in-car technology defeating an instantaneous speed check.

I do use a GPS logging device in my car; you never know, it might prove useful one day! A UK speeding ticket costs rather more than a GPS logger now.

Note that I’m not encouraging people to break the law here, just to be able to defend themselves if wrongfully accused 🙂

Dan Gillmor gives this nice piece of advice to students using Wikipedia for research:

It’s a great place to start; a terrible place to stop.

In the UK we’re getting more and more stretches of road with ‘average speed checks’. Rather than simply measuring your speed as you pass a particular camera (or a particular policeman), your time over a distance between cameras – typically a few miles – is measured and you’re fined if your average speed exceeds the limit.

I’m not very keen on this, and I have some concerns about the amount of time I then spend looking at my speedometer, but I must admit the system does seem to do its job rather well; I imagine it will become the norm on most of our roads in due course.

Now, averages are funny things, of course. If you’re stuck in traffic for half the distance between two cameras, and moving at half the speed limit, you could then go infinitely fast for the other half and still be within the appropriate average. I imagine the authorities are banking on people not realising this.

Yesterday, as I drove a long stretch of monitored road, I was thinking about creating a system which would let you know what your personal real effective speed limit was at any time. It would need to know the positions of the cameras, but such a database could be built pretty quickly.

And then I realised that my car already has a partial solution built in: a ‘trip’ facility which can tell me the average speed over the length of the trip.

I just needed to press the trip-reset button as I went under a camera, and then I had a nice simple way to keep my average speed within limits until I reached the next one.

So until my next company, Below Average Inc., builds the full all-singing, all-dancing speed management product, this is very handy!