Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Last year, the Boston subway and bus system (MBTA) used tokens and cost $1.25 per ride. Today, with my car as frozen solid as a JetBlue Airbus at JFK, I decided to take the subway up to Davis Square. They have bought fancy new magnetic debit card machines. You don’t have to carry metal tokens anymore. The cost of a ride, however, has gone up to $2. This illustrates nicely one of the problems with user fees for government services. The government agency starts out by being spectacularly inefficient (MBTA bus drivers, for example, got paid an average of $55,000 in 2004, plus free health insurance and a pension plan vastly superior to anything in private industry). Then they decide that they need to collect user fees of $X. Then they come up with a system for collecting those user fees that turns out to be surprisingly expensive. Then the usage of the system falls due to the higher price. So it turns out that the fee collected per use ends up needing to be double what was originally planned, just to yield the same net revenue.

The deeper question for me is why the subway and bus system in congested Boston charges riders at all.  Anyone who rides the subway instead of driving is doing the rest of society a huge favor by reducing pollution, global warming, and traffic congestion.  The total revenues from bus and subway riders in FY2005 was roughly $240 million.  We have at least 1 million cars that operate in Boston for 250 working days per year.  If we charged drivers $5 per day per car as a congestion reduction fee, or about 1/4 the fee charged in London, that would yield revenue roughly 3X the MBTA token/card sales (assuming that the congestion fee and free MBTA reduced car usage by 40 percent).

If we paid the true costs of our transportation lifestyle, car owners would pay at least $5 per day for driving in the city and T riders would get free coffee and donuts as a thank-you.

I’ve prepared a job posting for a photography intern and would appreciate feedback before it gets more widely circulated.  What did I leave out?

Jessica Livingston’s new book, Founders at work, contains a 28-page interview with none other than the author of this Weblog (plus interviews with a lot more genuinely accomplished folks!).

A friend asks

I have a lady friend who knows less than even the very basic basics of computer use, why and what programs are used for, etc.

Can you recommend a down-to-earth, layman’s terms book or possibly a website instructional that would help her get a firmer understanding of simple, basic computer use and the accompanying jargon that surrounds it?

I scanned the headlines at nytimes.com and thought that “Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits” was another article about Harvard’s new president, announced yesterday.  The new president is a Civil War historian who has been running Radcliffe, reduced to a $17 million annual grants program (they could have adopted this grand scheme from an earlier Weblog posting, but opted for obscurity instead).

Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s first female president, seems never to have offended anyone and has a much lower Google profile than the ousted Larry Summers.  A Google search for “Drew Gilpin Faust” brings up just a handful of scholarly references, none of which are available in full text on the Web.  One of her books is available currently at amazon and the two readers who bothered to comment are blandly unimpressed:  “This book is rather tedious if you are not a fan nor speaker of that odd language known as academia ” and “probably only a woman interested in the history of women would be interested. The entire book is very…well, womanly.”  An older book earns two out of five stars: “jargon-laden prose makes this one a sleeper”.

To judge by the Amazon reviews and the Google search, we are in for some quieter times here in Cambridge.

I’ve drafted three new articles for photo.net and would appreciate comments:

• http://www.photo.net/learn/aerial/primer
• http://www.photo.net/equipment/canon/efs_17-55/
• http://www.photo.net/equipment/canon/24-105/

Thanks in advance for corrections or suggestions for new sections.

Folks:  We’re investing in a major hardware/software upgrade at photo.net.  It would be nice to know if we’re doing better or worse overall when it is done.  What are the best external Web site monitoring services these days?  I want to know what our average time to serve a page is before and after the upgrade.  Would also be nice if Jin’s phone could be called when the site is unreachable.

A question for the Oracle/RDBMS experts… At photo.net, we have an Oracle 9i database approximately 50 GB in size. The I/O stats show that Oracle is doing about 2 TB of reading per day from the disk drives. In other words, the entire database is read 40 times per day or 2-3 times per hour during peak periods. Our server has 16 GB of RAM, of which maybe half are devoted to caching database blocks. I’m wondering if this is too much swapping in the age of relatively cheap RAM. Should we have a server with 32 GB or even more RAM and basically try to keep the entire database in RAM at all times, maybe having physical reads be 4X the database size per day?

Comments would be appreciated.

A friend recently installed Windows Vista on a 3.2 GHz (single core) machine with 4 GB of RAM.  The performance was initially extremely slow.  http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html talks about how Vista encrypts all of the data that flies around internally.  One wonders if a dual-core machine is required to run Vista.  One CPU core can serve the user while the other one encrypts and decrypts.

Anyone else out there running Vista?  Experience?

Arrived home to find a Robinson newsletter in the mail and learned something that was not reported by the general media.  The wife and daughters of James Kim, trapped for a week in the Oregon wilderness by a snowstorm, were discovered by John Rachor, a Robinson R44 helicopter owner, who decided to conduct his own search for the missing family.  Reflecting on the fact that James Kim had died of exposure before the family was spotted from the helicopter, Rachor said “It turned out well; I just wish it had turned out better.”