I am yours

Dr Hackenbush (having been on a Cruise around the Balkans) has returned to work in Freedonia (warbling on incessantly that being astride a Harley Hog pales into insignificance after you've sat on a Tomahawk). He has thus decided to redesign the website to improve accessibility (I blame it on him being on a diet of Genetically Modified GPS.

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How much is that software in the window?

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This of course means that the price has gone up. In answer to the ultimate question, he apparently said 'The Ultimate Answer'.

Which of course is 42 (pounds)!

It was anticipated that this would happen as soon as Ian McGaskill announced the likelyhood of ground frost occuring overnight in the Scottish Glens.

However this was pre-empted by his appearence on 'Have I got News for You' at Halloween 1998, where he informed us that you cannot predict catastrophic events. Never being able to resist a challenge Dr Hackenbush did just that !

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So would I have got for 42 quid?

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The www.ContaminatedLAND.co.uk Website has over 260 'sections' of content - over 2.7 Megabytes of pure text (with NO IMAGES! - as long as you browse with Netscape). In addition you would have received, by email every month, an up-to-date index of the Keywords on the site.

For just ? 42 (Forty Two pounds / Seventy US dollars / Eighty crumbling Euros) you could have had a perpetual license for your own personal copy of the full Website, on two 3 ^1/2 inch disks, with the full sub-directory structure and relative URL links, including one year's worth of Keyword index updates.

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And if I had wanted it for free?

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However being suckers for a sob-story if you were :-

1. In full-time education (student, staff etc)
2. Working for peanuts (charity, local authority etc)
3. Totally broke
4. To tight to pay for stuff on the Internet
5. Planning on voting for Jeffrey Archer as London Mayor
6. Expecting Frank Dobson to beat Ken Livingstone

You could have been notified as and when the bi-monthly updates were posted onto the site, by just

With this in the 'Subject-line' :- tellme-when-there-is-a-new-Bolux

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But I heard that Free Lunches don't exist

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Yes that's true Prof Hawawini told us at INSEAD that there was no such thing as a Free Lunch, so that's why we asked for the following 'Blind-date' information about yourself:-

• Who you are
• What you do
• Where you come from

Although we pleaded with you to be discrete about the photos, Dr Hackenbush still needed urgent on-the-spot surgery, from Quantas ground-staff at Heathrow Airport, after he 'ran into' Mrs Claypool, who had just read a recent email to him from an Australian lady who said :-

For your blind date information, I am 5ft 10", I have blue eyes and blond hair and I'm really smart, which is quite boring because most Australian women fit the same description. I am far from a novelty

The surgeons were hopeful that the cigar-burns, from the 'Reverse half-clinton' she inflicted, would have cleared up in time for Ascot ! - but as we all know Time wounds all heels

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So why is this page written in the past-tense

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Well as we have only sold 3 copies of the ? 42 version in the last 18 months since November 1998, it is obvious that our business model for making money on the Internet is very robust and that we are the ideal 'dot.com' business as :-

1. Hardly anyone is buying our product
2. We have lots of visitors
3. We have a very flakey business plan

As we all know that Venture Capitalists give you money for nothing, we plan shortly to list on the NEASDENAQ, and get loadsa money from gullible punters. The only thing currently stopping us is that we need someone to design us a 'proper' website that:-

• needs ISDN, a Pentium III, and MSIE5
• uses Flash, Frames, VRML, and Javascript
• works on DHTML, SEXML, and chocolate chip cookies
• has a homepage that takes at least a minute to load
• requires users to register and use a password
• and most importantly - crashes frequently

So in a nutshell our business model is to let people download a 'Boluxed' copy of the www.contaminatedland.co.uk website for nothing.

We will not allow people to buy it, and as people always want the unattainable, they will be surreptitiously stuffing cheques into our hard-disk. This way we will make a fortune flogging bootleg copies - that is until either Metallica or Napster finds out where we live!

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'Bolux' and the Wildebeest licence

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We subscribe to the open nature of information flow on the Internet, and hence you are free to copy or use the information on this site for personal use WITH THE PROVISO that if you make money out of it, (by repackaging the information and selling it on) then it is only fair that we should benefit as well and receive some form of equitable payment for our hard work too.

This philosophy is the thinking behind such works of art as Linux and the GNU-licence, and we are proud to advance the concept further by the introduction of the concept of Bolux issued under the 'Wildebeest' open sauce Copywright licence.

This concept is derived from the word uttered by a Web-surfer on hearing that someone wants money for something that they can get for nothing on the Web! Hence when Microsoft announced that they would start charging for access to 'Slate' their online magazine, the response was 'Bolux' and not long after, Slate once again became accessible for free.

Apparently Bolux is an old Serbo-Kosovan word, the story goes that when the Kosovars asked, at the end of the 20th Century, if they might have some of their Autonomy back, the response from the Serbs was 'Bolux'. In turn when the Serbs asked if they might be allowed to hang onto Kosovo as they had won a critical battle there in 1389, the Kosovars response was also 'Bolux'

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Oh stop trying to be funny, what do I get for my money ?

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Well in a word - Nothing!

OK,OK calm down, your options are threefold (ask a friend, 50 : 50, and of course the audience) oops sorry, gotta concentrate....

1) You can download it for free as - 'Bolux'

• Pro's
  
• it doesn't cost money

  Con's
  

• it needs to be 'unzipped' prior to use
  
• it's not complete (less than 50%)
  
• there is no index of Keywords
  
• it's only updated every 2 months

2) You can't have it sent to you on 2 disks for £42, as - 'Iridium'

• Pro's
  
• it could have been installed + used immediately
• it was the full + complete version
• keyword index updates would have been sent out monthly by email
  

  Con's
  

• it cost you money
• only 3 people actually bought it in the last 18 months
  

3) You can lie back and think of 'Iridium'

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If I had a dollar for every ace I've drawn

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Yes it's the intro to the Grateful Dead song Loser

And that in a nutshell is our real business model - each time someone asks us how the question