Category: Editorial

Have you ever driven behind a car that had its brake lights on for a really long time? Eventually, you conclude the driver is driving with both feet because the car keeps accelerating. Sure enough, as you pass the 1972 Cadillac, you realize that the 900 year old man driving it probably thinks the brake pedal is comfortable place to rest his foot.

Or, have you ever been behind one of those massive SUVs when the driver taps the brakes and you have no idea why? These 5 ton behemoths are hard to see around. In fact, the only way to see around them is to buy an even bigger SUV! But that is a different story. When the driver hits the brakes in front of you, it is usually not possible to tell why – even if you aren’t tailgating.

Lastly, have you ever been in a really bad traffic jam and just watched drivers’ brake usage patterns? In heavy traffic, you’ll see there are 3 basic types of drivers. There are those that use the brakes constantly, those that use the brakes sparingly, and a third group that seem to tap the brake pedals at fairly random intervals. I suspect these are individuals that are being cautious and careful. But because the lights on the back of their car are either “on” or “off”, the following drivers have no choice but to brake too. You just can’t discern what the driver is really thinking.

All of these examples showcase the fact that our system of boolean on-off brake lights is inadequate. While the cockpits of our cars have added MPG gauges and all sorts of bells and whistles, the driving indicators on the outside of the car remain completely un-evolved since their inception!

Here are some ideas for things we could do better.

First off, let’s start using more signals on the back of each car. Rather than knowing whether the driver has their foot on the brake pedal, I’d like to know if the car is accelerating or decelerating. If the driver has his foot on both pedals, who cares if one is on the brakes- the driver still may be speeding up. So how about a system which has:
– GREEN – accelerating
– ORANGE – decelerating 5%

I thought about making the third brake light be a differentiator to distinguish between mild brake usage and heavy brakes, but that would be incompatible with existing cars such that other drivers just wouldn’t know. The same argument could be made for my use of “red’.

Another thing I’d like to see on every bumper is a digital readout of two things. First, how fast the car is going, and second, the average speed of the car over the last 5 minutes. This somewhat assumes that speedometers are accurate, and these would be obviously ugly and prone to tampering. But, wouldn’t this be useful? Immediately, when you get behind another vehicle you’d be able to determine his approximate speed, and his “typical” speed in the last few minutes. Don’t think for a second that police officers wouldn’t start keying in off these things too.

Anyway, I think we should have better brake lights and gauges on the exterior of vehicles. In a traffic jam, being able to differentiate between silly brake pumping and real braking could really help us all drive more efficiently and more safely.

Every day I come out of the building where I work, and there will be one or two people just sitting there. If its cold, they are bundled up. If its hot they might be in the shade. They are not talking to each other; they just sit and stare out into space, and do absolutely nothing except smoke.

I can’t imagine my life being lulled into such a non-existence. Even if I did smoke, being forced outside to sit in the corner and do nothing would just be intolerable, and I’d quit. How can anyone do it? I really don’t care that much about the health aspects of it; but isn’t time just too valuable to be wasted like that? Oh well; it’s not my choice.

On my way into work today, I was thinking about bridge tolls. There has been talk of raising the tolls on various Bay Area bridges to $4 or $5 or even $6! Yikes!

Now that we have FastTrack, it seems that there may be more creative solutions we can come up with. For instance, what if the toll is variable? Those crossing at 5am get to cross for $0.50. At 6am, its $1.5, at 7am it jumps to $3, at 8am its $6, at 9am it drops to $3, etc etc?

I found a similar proposal for the New York area from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign which had some good data in it here. They divided their plan into “off peak” and “on peak”, at $4 and $6 respectively.

Using excel, a little math, and a bit of arrogance, I am coming up with this model. My goals are to increase revenue, but also increase vehicles-per-hour over the bridge.

1) If you don’t use fasttrack its $7.50. This is because you are costing us a lot of money and slowing everyone down. Get fasttrack.

2) Peak hours (7am to 9am): $7

3) Off-Peak hours: $2

Now this is a no-comprimise plan with teeth! A commuter can save $25 per week by shifting to off-peak driving hours.

Using the same percentages for vehicles per hour as the TSTC used in New York, my model would produce a 5.7% increase in revenues over the current, static $3 plan. At the same time, it puts such a heavy incentive to get drivers onto FastTrack and to not use peak hours, I think we’d see a significant decrease in overall bridge wait times.

But what do I know….

Really Extreme

But what if we wanted to get really radical, and have a completely variable price that adjusts in real time?

Google is an interesting example of a company that adjusts their prices in real time. They deal with a huge volume of “ads”, and they are constantly figuring out which ad is best optimized for their business. This is done in real time.

What if all California bridges were linked electronically. As tolls are collected (either digitally via FastTrack or via toll-takers), the central system adds up the money. At the same time, the central system knows how many vehicles per hour are flowing through any bridge.

Each year, the governor types in a number for how much revenue per day he wants to get from the Bridge system. Then, the bridge system uses its historical models, current traffic flow rates, and the target revenues to calculate how much it should be charging drivers to cross the bridge at that instant.

Imagine the case where a bridge is extremely congested. The bridge system would automatically start raising the toll – in REAL TIME. This would have the effect of also lowering the tolls on the other non-trafficked bridges also in REAL TIME. We could set limits on the toll so that it never exceeded say, $15. But when it gets congested, commuters need to find another way to get home.

The advantage of this system would be that bridge tolls would be almost free when crossing if there was no traffic. But, when congestion occurs, the price would get higher and higher. Its actually a very fair way to deal with pricing.

Anyway, this idea is wild and crazy. The state of California isn’t very capable for creating real-time, dynamic bridge crossing toll algorithms. And we can get “close enough” with something simpler and less politically damaging anyway…

I want to be a union boss. Talk about an easy job:

1. Collect union dues all year round.
2. Instigate unrest and dissatisfaction within the ranks by complaining and fueling every small thing
3. Use a fraction of the union dues to take your members out to nice dinners and complain about management.
4. Once a year, bargain with management and ask for the unreasonable
5. Even though you don’t have any financial knowledge or training, tell the press that management is lying about how much money they have.
6. Every 2-3 years send them out on strike while you continue to collect union dues.
7. Go to the beach and don’t tell your members how much you are making!

What a life!

Ever heard anyone say, “I hate bikers”? Well, I don’t hate them, but I sure am angry about sharing the road with them.

“Share the Road” should be a two way street. When was the last time you saw a biker actually stop at a stopsign? These turkeys want the cars to slow down and stop for them, but then they don’t take their own turn at the stoplights. I think most of them are so clipped in via their toe-clips they probably don’t even know how to stop without falling over.

Today I almost took out half of a 10 man biking team. They were riding right through a stopsign that I had legally stopped and looked both ways at. They just decided that I was supposed to “share” my right of way. Urgh.

If you are a biker, please obey traffic laws.

Barry Bonds complains a lot about how the media is always hounding him. I do feel sorry for him in this regard – he just wants a little space, and when he asks for it, the press calls him a jerk and hounds him more. OK – I guess thats the price of being such a celebrity.

But, much of the hounding is related to the public suspicion that he is using steroids. Major League Baseball doesn’t test their players, and for some reason which I cannot understand, thinks that they don’t need to. So, how can we possibly know?

Well, if Barry is so upset about being *accused* of being on steroids, why doesn’t he just submit voluntarily to being tested? I know its not required by MLB, but that is not to say tha the can’t do it on his own. If he is not using steroids, which he claims, then the test should be easy and conclusive. All of his troubles will go away.

But, he hasn’t done that. Why not? Concerned about privacy? He already has no privacy! At least if he did this (and cleared his name), he’d be a hero to baseball and make the press disappear. There is only one reason I can think of why he hasn’t done this – and thats because he probably is using steroids…

My prediction is that he’s weening off them now. Part of his lengthened injury report is to heal his knee injury (which, coincidentally, is similar to common side effects of using steroids!), but part could also be to retrain after getting off the juice.

One last note for the lawyers – I really make no claim that he is using steroids or not. Just trying to point out that it would be very easy for him to prove that he isn’t. And he hasn’t done that. And that looks pretty damning.

I had to turn off comments on this blog today.

90% of the comments received are spam, and last night I received about 10 new spam comments.

Rather than trying to keep the blog clean manually, I just had to disable them all.

This is an area where Movable Type could have better software – the comment processing is really primitive. Don’t get me wrong, though, Movable Type is great!

OK – well its been about a month now since I made my prediction about Google…

My bet was that Google would not sustain a $100 price within a week of the IPO. On the technicality, I guess I was right – the auction went for $85. But, overall, I confess I was wrong. Its stayed above $100 since the opening bell, and now hovers at $113. Congrats to them!

Some of the traditional investment “experts” are still criticizing Google for having “flubbed” their IPO. While you may think I’d agree with them based on my previous blog on the subject, I absolutely do not.

What I do agree with is that they made the process too intimidating and scared off investors.

But I do not conclude that they did the wrong thing or flubbed. They absolutely did the right thing.

The Forbes article claims that “Google left money on the table” (as opposed to had they not used a dutch auction), and therefore they flubbed the whole IPO. But the real question is “who didn’t get their money”? If Google had used a traditional IPO, they would have received a fixed, negotiated price from their underwriter – which they would have been locked just a few hours before the IPO. As I mentioned before, Netscape negotiated $24 per share on their IPO. However, the shares immediately turned around for about $70 on the open market. Did they leave money on the table? Oh yeah – about 2/3rds of the money!

Had Google trusted the traditional investors, the same thing likely would have happened. Google may have seen as little $50 or $60 per share (far less than what they did retain for the shareholders), and the opening bell price would have been the same.

So, who didn’t get their money? The “traditionalists” didn’t. And they feel upset about it. Its just a case of sour grapes.

Here is just a random prediction I wanted to put out about Google’s upcoming IPO. I’m probably wrong; but I wanted to put this in ink before the IPO happens…

First of all, I really admire the guys at Google for doing their IPO differently. There is absolutely no reason to let the bankers and underwriters walk away with more money from the IPO than the company itself. When I worked at Netscape, I watched the Netscape collect $24 per share for IPO stock which the business guys then sold on the market for $70+ per share on that very same day. That means that for every $24 that went to Netscape, $46 or more went to the bankers, who never built any product or any value. What a shame for both Netscape the company and the investors in Netscape. Congrats to Google for having the power, foresight and courage to do it differently.

But, I’m a little worried for our friends at Google too. I’m not planning to purchase any of their stock myself (much too risky for me!), but I did check out their IPO site when you could still get a bidder ID. (You can no longer get a bidder ID now) What I saw was pretty daunting. The site was like most prospectuses – it outlined all the hazards, risks, and things which could go wrong. But on top of that, you had to click “accept” though about 4 pages of legalese and terms which were just really long. As an individual investor, I got scared halfway through the process and dropped out of my plan for getting a bidder ID altogether.

Now, consider how traditional IPOs go. If you want to invest, you call your broker, and say “I want to invest in Google”. He says okay, takes your request, and does everything else for you. Its so easy. If you were going to “invest on a whim”, he’s completely happy to take your money and help you do just that. All the legalese was signed and taken care of when you opened your brokerage account years ago; so there is no daunting process.

But Google really puts that process in your face. I think it will scare investors away. I’m not an expert in the field, so I don’t know how many people will be scared away. Will institutional investors be scared? Or just private investors? I don’t know. But I do understand supply vs demand, and the process simply can’t increase demand for their stock. Keep in mind, SEC regulations make it illegal to “pump up” your stock. So, disclosing all the bad stuff is the right thing to do. Arguably, your broker makes it too easy to gloss over the warnings in the more traditional IPOs.

On top of all the process just to get in on this IPO, the IPO is also closed to non-US persons. This further decreases demand for the stock. I don’t know how much, but it can’t be good.

Finally, there are all the recent publicity problems for Google – they forgot to register a bunch of shares they had issued, they accidentally spoke to the press during their quiet period, and they think its worth $100+ per share at the opening, which seems pretty high to a lot of people. Wow – thats a lot of bad stuff!

So, my prediction – I don’t think the stock will maintain a $100 price within 1 week of the IPO. The real question is “how low will the sellers go”. I do not think there will be very much demand to buy at that price, but sellers may be unwilling to sell immediately for less. So, I’m expecting lower-than-expected volumes of trading, and gradual decline of the price; settling around $60 per share in 3 months.

Well, I hope everything goes really well for them; but I won’t feel bad for them in any case. The fact is they built a great product, and they will have success. At some level, whats the difference between a $10, $20, or $30 billion IPO? The investors will whine about the difference, but to the employees that built Google, its a great success no matter what, and they should be proud.

Keep in mind that I have no idea what I’m talking about, and I am basically making all this up.

This is really wordy. But its got a great point at the bottom. If you can’t get through this wordy doc, then just click right now over to Open Office and check it out. Otherwise, read on about how I found it… This is a real life story of why software piracy is good for Microsoft, and how Microsoft is making a big mistake right now.

I bought a new PC this week. Its nice. I decided to do some video editing, so I got 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB, 512MB system with an ATI 9000 All-In-Wonder graphics card. Thats a pretty decent card for the video input. I ended up buying the thing in parts, because it was substantially cheaper than the assembled systems. Normally, assembled systems are cheaper these days, but with my fussiness over the DVD writer and the ATI graphics card, I couldn’t find one with the stuff I wanted.

Anyway, it turns out that installing the hardware was the easy part. The hard part was getting Microsoft Windows to work. I wanted to upgrade to Windows XP, and then I stumbled across the no-piracy stuff thats in there. With XP, it turns out that Microsoft requires activation over the network. They know if your key has been used before, and they won’t let you activate if it has. Of course, I was up late at night trying to get the thing installed, so I was using a CD that I got with my laptop (a legal copy, just not for my new machine!). Well, Microsoft was successful in preventing me from getting my installation done. They will let you try the OS for 30 days before they’ll lock you out, but curious me actually set the clock forward 3 months to see what happened when the 30 days was up. Yup – they locked me out !!!

So I got on the phone to MSFT calling the number that was given to me in the activation application from Microsoft. I told them I wanted to buy two copies of WinXP Pro. The nasty woman on the other end of the phone was clearly angry with me. She kept going on about how my license didn’t allow me to install the software. I told her I knew that and I wanted to give her my credit card number so I could pay for two copies. Needless to say, that was beyond her competence.

So, the next day, I took a trek to Fry’s and bought an OEM copy of windows. The OEM version costs $99, while the regular version costs $150. But, you have to buy hardware in order to qualify for the OEM version. And my system, purchased the day before, didn’t qualify. The nice customer service person directed my to their screw isle (no pun intended), where I picked up a $0.99 bag of computer case screws to qualify as my hardware purchase to go with my OEM version of XP.

Where does this leave Microsoft? Did they win? Did they lose? Well, in the short term, they clearly won. I purchased two copies of Windows XP that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise purchased. In the long term, however, they lost. I’m definitely not going to be upgrading to any new versions in the future unless I absolutely have to. And, I’m going to start looking for alternatives to Microsoft more seriously now too. From what I’ve read, they’ve locked down Microsoft Office tightly with keys just like they did for Microsoft Windows. So, this means I’m looking for alternatives to both.

I’ve never been a linux or open source bigot like many software developers are. I like linux, of course (the server which is serving this page is running Linux), but I don’t want linux on my desktop. So for now I still need Windows as my operating system. And I will admit it – I like windows! Microsoft has really done a great job with XP, and I have no major complaints about it. In the long run, buying it, even for home, is may be okay. But I’m going to look a lot more at competition if I *have* to pay for it rather than *elect to pay for it.

So, I think this anti-piracy crusade could be long term trouble for Microsoft. If they had just let me have it for free at home, I’d use it at work (and pay for it). Why would I look for anything else? I think the software is good – I learned it at home (for free) and I want it in the office too, because that makes my job easy.

But, instead of having me use Office at home, I’m now out looking for something else thats cheaper. And the only reason is because Microsoft wanted to get $99 from me. (Actually office costs more – $200) I’m really liking the alternative I found so far. Yes, I’ve still got XP, of course, but Microsoft Office is NOT on my systems anymore.

I found OpenOffice – an open source based alternative to Microsoft Office. Bundled in the package is a Excel, Word, and Powerpoint – oh – they call them “Spreadsheet”, “Document”, and “Presentation”. So far, its awesome. The install was incredibly smooth and the visual presentation was great (although it did give me some too-techie gripe about not having Java installed?). And now its worked with every word doc and spreadsheet I have. Literally- I see no bugs, and I’m absolutely blown away. This is really good software.

So, Microsoft, we’ll see who has the last laugh. I’m a small business owner, and I obviously hope my business grows. In the future, I’ll need to purchase Office-like software for my own employees. Had you not added this anti-piracy thing to my Windows XP install, I’d absolutely be purchasing Microsoft Office. Why would I look for anything else? I know how to use it, I like it, and its cheaper to not have to train employees to use something else. Now, however, I’ve discovered OpenOffice, and I’m going to use it for a while. Other home users are doing the same thing. And the next time I need to purchase a Word Processor, you may not get my business. While I may not have been paying when I was at home before, at least you were getting my mindshare. Now, I’m still not paying, and I’m not even running your products.
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