Day: November 2, 2006

Categories
Fun

More about RedHat

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last Updated on November 2, 2006 by stlplace

Thought this is funny. The RedHat webmaster must be busy. After Oracle announced the RedHat linux support, now Microsoft joined the party – it announced the partnership with RedHat’s rival, Novell’s SUSE linux. So this is what I saw from RedHat’s web page:

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

 — Mohandas Gandhi

For those not from IT industry, “they” refers to Microsoft. Microsoft did all these “ignore” and “laugh” thing. Now “they” are at “fight” stage.  

Categories
China Stocks

Basics for Investment

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Last Updated on November 2, 2006 by stlplace

I happened to see this “Investment 101” from forun web site, a very small (boutique) research firm. Wish I had read it before jump into market 3 years ago. Oh well, I know even if I read it, I would forget it and make the same mistakes. A lot times we have to learn the lesson the hard way.

It’s an interesting story to find this research firm. So I was listening to the conference call of Ninetowns, the stock I bought at its IPO and bought it again today. An analyst from forun called in and talked in English with a heavy Chinese accent. Sometimes when he got stuck, he used Mandarin with strong Hunan accent . The CEO of Ninetowns can not speak English. So they talked in Mandarin. Another SVP of Ninetowns did the translation. There are only two analysts called in for the questions. The other guy Dick Wei from JP Morgan, is also ethnic Chinese. Note JP Morgan was the underwriter of its IPO in Dec 2004.   

Categories
Stocks

Trade of the Day

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last Updated on November 2, 2006 by stlplace

I sold the remaing Symantec (SYMC) stocks today and I bought an old stock for me: the Ninetown Digital (NINE, recently changed name to Ninetown Internet). Here are my reasoning.

Symantec moved up quite a bit in past serveral months. It reported good earning in Q2, but missed a penny in Q3 due to some weakness in Europe. I think it’s a solid company and may do well in Q4. Note enterprise software companies usually do more sales in Q4 because of end-of-year spending (so is the Wall Street expectation, so don’t expect a big pop). Another reason is Symantec is just too big for me to understand, its main business is from enterprise (storage, security, compliance etc), not just the Norton Anti Virus or Internet Security for individual customers. By the same token, as the world No. 5 software company (by market capital, behind Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Adobe), its stock just does not move too much compared to smaller software companies. I think it’s good for mutual funds or people who just want to get average return without doing much homework.

Continue reading “Trade of the Day”
Categories
Fun

Programmer’s humor

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last Updated on November 2, 2006 by stlplace

This is a good one. I got this from a programmer friend. Open a new document from Microsoft Word, type in the following:

=rand(100,2)

then hit “enter” or “return”. What did you got?

There are many similar interesting hacks in the software we use daily. I think it’s just a way for programmer to express themselves during their daily boring work 🙂