Category: Computers

— The latest Alexa rankings put this site ahead of all the other warblogs except Sullivan, Reynolds, and Kaus, which is absurd, and ahead of all the tech blogs except Winer and Kottke, equally unlikely.

Update, 7/25/02: I’m now ahead of Kottke, so world domination is within my grasp.

— Nice little strip featuring free-riding hippie:

— The Indepundit: Stock Options Revisited isn’t done with options yet, hauling out big guns Greenspan and Buffett (Warren, not Jimmy) on behalf of expensing them. Buffett says:

1) If options aren’t a form of compensation, what are they?
2) If compensation isn’t an expense, what is it?
3) And if expenses shouldn’t go into the calculation of earnings, where in the world should they go?

So let’s answer Buffett, who was kind enough to take a break from buying the wired infrastructure of the Internet (while the world goes wireless) to help us out with this weighty question. Options aren’t a form of compensation, they’re an investment. People forego compensation for options, in many cases by making a direct choice, as I did on my last job where I was offered either a higher salary and an option for a certain number of shares, or a lower salary and an option for more shares. By choosing a compensation package that combines cash and options, we invest in the company. Companies don’t have to account on their balance sheets for the profits and losses shareholders make buying and selling shares, so why should they account for options?

One reason: the company has granted options for more shares than it holds in reserve to satisfy options. In this case, the company has to buy shares on the market when options are exercised. So this sort of a transaction certainly is an expense, and it probably should be reported.

But what if the company has sufficient shares in reserve to satisfy outstanding options? Should the paper value of these shares be reported as an asset, or as income to the corporation? We don’t know if options against such shares will ever be exercised, esp. if the options are underwater for some period of time.

So the question of how to account for options and how to account for shares held in reserve is a bit complicated, and until the proponents of expensing options can say how they want it handled, we don’t have much of a debate — it’s like every other issue in politics, where the parties generally agree on abstract principles, such as justice and freedom, but disagree on how to put such principles into action. We wouldn’t be having this debate, however, if the government hadn’t already passed a salary cap law. Options are a work-around for that law, and a messy one at best.

Evil communist Ted Barlow also weighs in on options, but no link to a particualr post since he’s a Blogspotter and his archive is hosed like all the rest of them. (p. s. – anyone who doesn’t like stock options is a an Evil Communist, by definition.)

— Reiter’s Wireless Data Web Log reports on the Big Story du jour:

The New York Times today reports that a group of large telecommunications and computing companies is discussing the possibilities of creating a nationwide 802.11 network. The group includes Intel, IBM, AT&T Wireless, Verizon

It won’t be long until essentially all laptops will ship with WiFi built-in, which bodes ill for the smaller chip companies. Nation-wide networks are coming as well, and there will be more than one. So what’s Warren Buffett doing about all of this? Read Letters from Exile and you’ll see.

— The Indepundit believes limiting stock options is necessary to restoring investor faith in the markets, so let me amplify on remarks below.

He’s right that creative accounting is partially to blame for investor worries about the market, but other factors are investment banker/stock broker conflicts of interest and lax investigative reporting by the business press, especially the tech press. Investors realize that the market is an insider’s game, and cosmetic changes in accounting regulations aren’t going to repair that fundamentally sound perception.

Stock options are tangential to all of this. Executive stock options are necessary since Congress enacted tax codes that require all executive compensation above $1M/yr to be double-taxed, once by the exec and again by the company, since they’re forbidden from writing it off as a business expense.

Stock options for tech workers are an essential element of compensation for engineers taking the risk of joining startups, and startups are key to the tech leadership the US enjoys over other countries. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Engineers’ jobless rate targeted

The IEEE-USA suggests that increased use of H-1B workers and outsourcing engineers jobs overseas, along with the use of temp workers, are causing the rising unemployment for engineers. While the jobless rate for all engineers rose to 4 percent in the second quarter from 3.6 percent in the first quarter this year, the rate for computer scientists, which includes systems analysts, surged to 5.3 percent from 4.8 percent, the IEEE-USA reported.

There you go – IEEE has connected the dots. The pattern I’ve seen is like this: company hires American-born engineer to design software architecture, then fires him and gives the implementation work to a low-paid H1B or green-card engineer.

— Silicon Valley jobless rate rises

Sean Randolph, president of the Bay Area Economic Forum, said investors’ lack of confidence in corporate management could continue to delay the recovery, especially if there are new revelations of wrongdoing or if the federal government doesn’t respond.

Firing some more midget managers would improve the job picture, obviously.

— Mercury News | 07/10/2002 | Bad VC market a good time to start a company

Wireless technology could be the next launching pad, says Graham Watson, a managing director at Deloitte & Touche Corporate Finance.

“It’s been much maligned and suffered badly, but wireless infrastructure is one platform out there that could be a catalyst for a really significant business opportunity,” he says. “Mention wireless or telecom today, and everyone runs a mile. That’s a legacy of the overinvestment from two years ago. But wireless is something that has massive appeal to individuals and corporations. There’s still a huge scope to grow the wireless industry.”

Could be, but VCs are still pumping money into wireless companies whose founders have no track record with PC networking generally; that money’s going nowhere. Instead of trying to build the next Cisco, they should be trying for the next 3Com. Believe me kids, Cisco’s not going away anytime soon.

— I have some time on my hands, as my last employment opportunity ended a week after I broke my wrist, so I’ve decided to do a little analysis of WiFi chipsets currently shipping or sampling. Analysis of these things, and development of closely-related software, is what I do for a living, so this probably isn’t going to be total hogwash.

Here’s the list of the chipsets I’m going to look at:

Resonext
Xtreme Spectrum
Envara
Agere (chips only, due to Proxim deal)
Intersil
Texas Instruments
Atheros
Intel
Bermai
Channel Technologies

Please leave a comment if I’ve left out anybody important, excluding flim-flams, snake oil merchants, and vaporware dealers.

— Reader Terry points to this article in Aviation Week on preliminary findings that UWB interferes with airplane Instrument Landing Systems:

Ultrawideband transmitters temporarily “knocked out” the instrument landing system and traffic-alert collision avoidance systems during some very preliminary tests by NASA Langley.

The test was conducted with UWB transmitters inside the aircraft, where low signal levels are still sufficient to interfere. The Economist article below says this isn’t supposed to happen, but it does. UWB would be an ideal terrorist weapon in its current configuration, so it’s a no-go, except where locked-down.