John McCain event
Attended John McCain road to convention Rally at O’Fallon. Don’t get me wrong. I am not endorsing any candidate in this election, nor can I vote because I am not US citizen. I am interested in the election politics and have my own opinion though.

The reason to attend the rally was mostly for bragging rights: if the slim chance that McCain wins this thing in Nov., I could brag to my friends that I saw a US president at the scene. Previously the only presidential candidate I saw is John Edwards, well now I wish I have not seen him

Last but not least, I did read the CFA material (esp. Sat.), financial statement analysis, but I was a bit slow in terms of my pace.

The good thing is KenWong, the author of gseeker and gseeker vision, still maintains a personal blog here. To be honest, I found out gseeker vision just today. It was cool.

Another interesting thing I notice is CW asked $20 k for the GSeeker domain name and the content, when Ken and his friend asked to buy. Not a small sum for Ken. (quote gseeker, CW对GSeeker域名及内容的开价是20K，美元。我肯定是没这么多钱买了，但我也远没有想到我的blog竟然能值十几万人民币。)

PS, another blog which I like but no longer up-to-date is letsthinkchina, written by my friend Zhong Siwei.

To fight against the ad bar, I did the following: upgrade the IE to 7. That did not solve the problem. I also looked the new files under “Program Files”, “Windows”, just by looking at the date. I did find a DLL named twkdtsdjdrqdp.dll, but I could not remove it. Did the “regedit”, before the install of IE 7. All these did not work, and we are both upset about that.

Finally my wife did this google search “IE 最顶端有广告栏怎么办”, and we found the solution at this article. The article is in Chinese (I bet probablly because this problem is more common in China). Basically we go to IE Tools => Internet Options => Programs => Manage Add-ons, sort the Add-on by publisher, we saw the unnamed publishers at the top (those are suspects). We found the 1st one being twkdtsdjdrqdp.dll. So we disabled this Add-on. I also went to “.\Windows\System32″ to rename the file to xxx.txt (still could not remove it because it’s being loaded). After that we are good to go.

(Disable Ad ware DLL inside IE, full size pic here)

Why the Ad bar

I looked at thse Ad bar, it’a basically a bunch link to google ad. I believe the author tried to allure people to click on the ads to make money. Another variant of this ad ware is it says “Your IE has security hole” and asks you to download a Google pisaca software”, again the author is trying to making referral fees from Google.

I think the prevalence of those kind of ad bar in China, in a way tells how competitive online ad business is in China.

I believe this should help my readers to navigate the blog. Please let me know if you have any suggestions, ideas. Yes, the free gift certificate thing is still on.

Here is the link to AT&T articles; and here is link to IBM series. Both are in Chinese, and there are 6 articles for each company.

One thing I felt amazing about IBM is this (quote the article):

在小华生执掌 IBM 的二十年里，IBM 的平均年增长率高达 30%，这在世界上可能是绝无仅有的，他的父亲也没有做到这一点。

Translated in English: in the 20 years when Watson Jr. was the CEO of IBM, the average anual growth rate is 20%. No other company has done that. His father Waton Sr. did not accomplish that either.

So what is virtulization exactly? In simple English, it let a computer to simulate many computers for testing new software, configuration, before formal deployment. This will cut the cost of buying all the servers, setting up a big testing lab etc. I read about the software from a book talking about “how to set up software small business”. This is relevant to small business because their budget is more tight compared to big IT giants like IBM.

The talking point in VMware’s S1 prospectus is currently there is less than 10% of servers in the world have installed this software. I remember Home Inns said something similar: in China top 10 hotels brands have 6% of the market share; in the US, top 10 chains have 60% of the market share. We all know the wallstreet is addicted to the growth.

The problem is, EMC stock has already got a nice run (up $4.84) in the past 6 months. Also even if VMware got the top price for IPO, the benefit to EMC is limited because the difference of size. VMware will have 375 m shares, EMC has 2.1 b shares, if VMware priced at $30, that’s means each EMC share will get $30 * 375 / 2100 = $5.36. Keep in mind EMC can not sell the VMware stocks right away.

For the record, some “boom and bust” sillicon valley tech IPOs include Rackable Systems (RACK), a blade system maker, and DivX , the video software maker. On the other hand, Riverbed (RVBD) is one of the strongest. I talked to a friend who works on Networking, his was very impressed with Riverbed’s products.

It appears to me the software business is picking up in China as: 1) The goverment is stepping up the IP law enforcement, amid the pressure from western companies and more importantly, China has more intellectural properties too; 2) Many companies (domestic and international) have the business need for enterprise software from foreign vendors.

As the international software companies doing more business in China, they need to adapt their software to Chinese standards and customs. Some Chinese companies are emerging as the leaders in this business, such as BeyondSoft (PacificEpoch interview) and Worksoft.

I don’t know all legal issues but I am aware many geeks don’t like Microsoft and its people. Once I went to a UNIX user group meeting in which a Microsoft guy did presentation, he got booed frequently.

Back to Google’s complaint, it appears to me Google is starting to eat Microsoft’s lunch, with the launch of Desktop software (Search, Office products etc.);  Mr. Softy certainly want to protect its own turf. Same thing can be said regarding what Microsoft was trying to do in the search market, with its recent buy of aQuantitative? Maybe they both think “the grass is greener on the other side”? 

I also added a language (translation) tool at the right side bar. You can click on the flag to get an instant translation of this blog. This is based on WordPress Global Translator Plugin.

If you are interested in technical details on “related posts”, it is based on WASABI WP Plugin. Remember do this: “If this is your first time installing this plugin please click the link for index table setup script at the bottom of the options page. You only need to do this once when you install the plugin for the first time.”

I installed the plugin for a while but until today did I read this instruction. Oh well, as one of my colleagues said “engineers do not read instuctions”

One thing is for sure, we will not see people lined up in front of Best Buy as they did with Windows 95, Play Station II and III,…Operating system is very much matured market.