Fortune: IDG - first company to form joint venture in China

Fortune interviews Patrick McGovern, founder of IDG. Since China has been the reason for the recent economic rebound happening here in the U.S, no wonder for info tech, it can do the same.

"I made my first trip to China in 1978, before it had diplomatic relations with the U.S. I was going to fly from Tokyo to Moscow and noticed that I could take an Air Iran flight from Tokyo to Beijing, and then go on to Moscow the next day. When I got to Beijing, the immigration people told me I had to have a visa. I said, "No, I'm just here for a day in transit." Finally they all went into the back room and wrote out a visa on a piece of rice paper. They said, "Never tell anyone where you got this." So I went into town and saw all these people buying newspapers and magazines, and I thought, "This is a publisher's paradise." When China opened the door for U.S. joint ventures at the end of 1979, I immediately arranged a tour for seven U.S. technology companies. Within three months we had the project approved by the Chinese State Council and the Bank of China. We had our first issue out [of a version of Computerworld] in September 1980.

Does China's economic miracle seem sustainable?

The Chinese are putting tremendous emphasis upon education, graduating something like 700,000 engineers a year, compared with only 70,000 in the U.S. They traditionally save about 40% of their income. So China is going to have lots of talent and lots of capital to put to productive uses. I see its rapid growth continuing for at least the next ten years."

Fortune: Kerry On China

Kerry has been wish-washy again, this time on copyrights.
He has become the defender of big business this time.

"The intellectual-property rights enforcement in China is just unacceptable, period. You have to stand up and say "Look, here's our list of priorities ... and we've got to work together to make it happen." They [the administration] have been very haphazard about engagement with China. Now in the last months, because we've been criticizing them in the course of the primaries, you suddenly see secretary Evans, and you suddenly see Cheney, go over in this flurry of support.... It's a dollar short and a day late."

Fortune: New Economy vs Old Economy

Fortune has some interesting statistics:

"Last year China consumed half of the world's cement output, one-third of the steel, one-fourth of the copper, one-fifth of the aluminum."

"The price of steel rocketed earlier this year, and some suppliers put customers on allocation. Ditto for copper and aluminum. Some contractors in Florida can't get cement at all. Nothing like that has happened in ages."

Fortune: Bill Ford's Move in China

Bill Ford of Ford Motors, co. announces that Ford will triple its output from China to
65,000 vehicles this year.

"So far Bill Ford's profits-over-market share plan has paid off in spades and given him some breathing room. With North America running more smoothly, Ford, Padilla, and the OCCE can focus on weaker parts of the Ford empire. Yet another new president has been installed at Ford of Europe, which, the joke goes, has had more bosses than the Vatican has had popes. Ford also needs to play catch-up in China. In June it announced plans to more than triple output there this year to 65,000 vehicles, but that is still only one-tenth of what GM will make."

WSJ -Private Equity Taps Into China; Savvy Investors Start to Profit Amid Better Market Opportunities

Private equity firms such as J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Carlyle are flocking
to China to get their own scoop:

WHEN J.P. MORGAN Partners, then known as Chemical Venture Group, spent $10 million to buy 20% of a Chinese wood-products company in 1995, such investments by financial investors were rare. Finding a company worth investing in was difficult, as was buying a significant share -- not to mention cashing out.

The company, Plantation Timber Products, at the time wasn't particularly impressive either. It made thick fiberboard in Leshan, a remote town in China's western Sichuan province, about five hours by bumpy road from Chengdu, the nearest major city.

Now, though, a highway has cut traveling time to 90 minutes and Plantation Timber is churning out high-quality boards that go into furniture, as well as wall and floor panels. Its products are sold both abroad and to busy property developers across China through a national distribution network. On June 21, J.P. Morgan sold its stake in Plantation Timber to Carter Holt Harvey Ltd., New Zealand's largest forest-products company, for $134 million.

After a decade of disappointment and delay, private equity in China finally is coming of age. "For those who have patience, there are more opportunities, even though it is still hard," says Henry Cornell, a managing director with responsibility for private equity world-wide for Goldman Sachs.

Private-equity firms raise money from institutions and wealthy individuals, and use the money to invest both in mature companies and start-up businesses.

The Plantation Timber sale is one of several this year for foreign investment funds in China and comes just as New York investment banks Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley have presided over the Hong Kong listing of Ping An Insurance Co., China's third-largest insurer, in which the two firms invested 10 years ago. That deal gives the two initial investors a return of 15 times their original investment.

Several developments are making private equity in China a more attractive proposition. For one thing, "exiting" -- or cashing out of -- an investment through a lucrative sale to a strategic investor or a stock-market listing has become easier. In addition, government authorities now are more flexible in agreeing to attractive terms.

Newbridge Capital Ltd., for example, recently purchased a large stake in Shenzhen Development Bank Co., a deal that gives the private- equity firm, an affiliate of Texas Pacific Group and Blum Capital Partners LP, control over a Chinese bank, the first time that has happened. In coming weeks, private-equity firm Carlyle Group says it is aiming to finalize a $400 million investment in China Pacific Life Insurance Co.

"Those two deals will be looked at as a milestone," assuming the Carlyle deal goes through, says Howard Chao, a lawyer who commutes between Shanghai and the U.S. West Coast for O'Melveny & Myers LLP. "They signify the opening gun for private equity in finance in China."

Carlyle alone intends to spend almost $1 billion this year in China. That is about as much as all private-equity funds spent last year in China, according to data compiled by Warburg Pincus LLC. It is a fraction of the total direct foreign investment in China of more than $50 billion last year, underscoring just how difficult it has been to do deals there.

As conditions for private equity in China have improved, so has the choice of investment possibilities. In the past, investors could do little more than inject capital into ailing state enterprises or form joint ventures with partners who often stole from the joint venture to subsidize their own wholly owned operations. Now, outside investors can find local entrepreneurs who have started up companies.

Such returnees speak the same language as their foreign investors while being able to find their way through a bureaucratic maze that still frustrates outsiders. Peggy Yu, a founder of DangDang.com, an Amazon lookalike, has an M.B.A. from New York University and money from both Soft bankCorp.'s Softbank China Venture Capital and International Data GroupInc. of Boston. Kewei Yang, armed with a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University of Maryland, is president and chief executive of Analogix Semiconductor Inc., has offices in Silicon Valley and Beijing, and is backed by IDG, among others.

Along with the returning top executives,There now is a generation of middle managers in China with extensive experience in the Chinese subsidiaries of Western multinational companies.

"We see much better flow, with real companies and real deals," says Arnold Chavkin, chief investment officer at J.P. Morgan Partners, the private-equity arm of New York investment bank J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. "At the state and local government level, entities want to bring in foreign partners. They see foreign investors as a way to help them grow their companies faster."

Investors today scour China for opportunities not only in manufacturing but in a broad array of services that recently have opened up to cater to China's rapidly expanding middle class.

Plantation Timber is an obvious play on the growth of the housing market in China. But the people who use its timber products aren't just in the big cities; farmers in Sichuan are buying its products with proceeds generated from sales of cash crops such as asparagus, according to Cheng Zhang, a senior vice president at Plantation Timber. An investment Carlyle made in Pacific China Holdings Ltd., a department-store chain, is paying off handsomely as China's middle class grows.

Still, the market faces substantial hurdles. Exit strategies remain a challenge, given China's underdeveloped financial markets. Also, Most deals remain small, a frustration for the largest investors. "We like to do deals where we can impact the profit for Goldman Sachs," Mr. Cornell says. "But in China, we are looking at small deals. And there are very few bargains."

Thou-Shalt-See TV - From the Times

these are my favorite reality tv show ideas.

SODOMITE EYE FOR THE MAN RIGHTEOUS BEFORE THE LORD
(BRAVO) Identical to "Queer Eye for the Straight
Guy," except that each episode ends with the Fab
Five being stoned to death. (Note: working title.)

THE DISCIPLE (NBC) Sixteen of America's most pious
compete to satisfy the increasingly personal whims of
the great master Sri Chanamasala (né Larry Schwarzbaum
of Canarsie). Who will be the one this week to get "deprogrammed"?

YAHWEH SCHMO (SPIKE) In this first-ever "divine reality"
show, a group of actors seeks to fool the Omnipotent Lord
of Creation (currently being "retooled").

SHARE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (HBO) Larry David becomes a born-again
Christian, then goes around annoying people in an entirely
new way.

Blacks in College - Composition Study

The New York Times > Education > Top Colleges Take More Blacks
, but Which Ones?: "While about 8 percent, or about 530, of
Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard
law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's
African and African-American studies department, pointed out that
the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West
Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser
extent, children of biracial couples."

Hey, I have known these all along, I know bunch of them from
Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan, Zimbabwe. Now the paper picked it up...

Microsoft Fights Back - On MSN Email Storage

"Although spam volume fluctuates daily, measurements
show a combination of Microsoft technologies and solutions
typically block nearly 3 billion pieces of spam a day
from reaching customers' inboxes"

This is from a statement from MSN, provider of hotmail.com.

Peronally, I got my first email address from hotmail.com.
I still remember that was when I was a sophomore in
college trying to ride the internet train. No spam
at all at that time. That was the golden times even
though one webpage take about 1 minute to load in
the fast pentium machine offered in my library, thanks
to OCLC service.

Anyway, not hotmail has become less attactive. Then Microsoft
fights back by increasing the storage to 250 MB and increase
the attachement size limit to 10MB (same as gmail offers,
so I guess gmail should do better than that). I guess
MS's next move is to add search function to its email
service as well. Also, don't know if hotmail is running
on MS boxes yet, since they used to be run on freebsd as
what I heard.

Jack Ryan - Swing Vote

From AP
"Well-educated, articulate and glamorous-looking, Jack
Ryan was considered the GOP's best hope for reinvigorating
an Illinois Republican Party demoralized by a corruption
scandal and devastating 2002 election losses."

obviously, Jack went to several chic clubs in NY, NO and
Paris trying to have sex with his now former wife in
public.

Jay Leno has a quote here:

"Jack Ryan, I've heard of going after the `swing vote,'
but this is ridiculous!"

So much for the famously conservative senator hopeful,
what do you expect? Just remember the explicty infamous
sex tape of the croatian star singer,
SEVERINA VUCKOVIC, who has quicky transform
herself from a religious moderate,
conservative woman to a top-notch Porn Star,
pretty much the most famous one in europe at least. Her
videorecording is now the hottest item on the internet
and blackmarket in the continent. A google search using
keyword "croatian severina" ranks a porn sites as top
3 picks. What a metamorphosis! So much for the hypocrisy.

Jesus on a cell

European companies are finding ingenious ways to disguise ugly, but necessary, mobile phone antenna masts. Customers can pick everything from trees to crucifixes.
. . .
The latter crosses the line for some congregations, who are not willing to see Christ on a cross, with antennae sticking out here and there. The mayor of Schwabhausen, in deeply Catholic Bavaria, has come out against such an antenna in his village church. Mobile phone companies are hesitant as well.

"The churches actually don't like it so much," said Susanne Satzer-Spree, a Vodafone spokeswoman.

However, some houses of worship have managed to make their masts part of their identity.

"Everyone recognizes the church now," said Johannes de Fallois, pastor at a church in Neuburg.

The Modern World - 1994 Archive

I found a pretty cool comic strip archive of "The modern world",
check it out (1994 archive) at

Modern World

The chomsky one and the boxer rebellion is pretty funny.

Matching Making - A Multicultural View

Last time when talking with friend, I encountered the
phenomenon of matching making in different culture.

Three major cultures emerges as our topic, the chinese,
the indian and jewish culture.

In china, matchmaking is still popular, especially
in rural and city slum dwellers. In india, it is
common throughout the class hierarchy. In modern
day Israel, it is common among othodox folks.

there is an article about the israeli case yesterday
on New York Times.

here is a snippet.

Ancient Rabbi Becomes a Modern Israeli Matchmaker
By JOSEPH BERGER

Published: June 22, 2004

MUKA, Israel, June 15 — In these days of
matchmaker.com and television's "Bachelorette," there
are thousands of men and women in this country who
look for love in a decidedly old-fashioned way: they
pray at the tomb of a rabbi who has been dead for 2,000 years.

...

be aware this "shrine" is very close to the "golan
heights".

Anyway, can this traditional way of matchmaking
competing with the modern "social network" such as
friendster? I think as long as the information
technology hasn't infiltrate the rest 3 quarters
of the global population, the people in bangledash
will be still living their own way looking for
matrimony.

Book Review: The Cash Nexus by Niall Ferguson

This time I am only going to talk about Chap 10 where Ferguson
reviews the current and past bubbles of the stock market.

These bubbles seem to have some common features, such as
1. new means of production, either internal combustion engine,
electricityor the internet/computer

2. flow of money from new investers, serving as the cannon
fodder of the existing investors who benefit.

3. flow of money supply from the debt (bond) market to the
stock market

4. flow of money supply from foreign sources

5. loose credit from the central banking authority

These symptoms appears again and again. The book was written
around sep 2000, at that time the Dow Jones index is around
10,000, in sep 02,it dipped to around 7500, but now it revert
back to around 10,5000 fueled by the growing defense demand
and recovering global economy.

It is interesting that the book talked about famous people
investing in the stock market. Newton lost big time and Marx
made a killing, bragging it to his confident, Engels. But the
description of the South Sea and Law bubble seem to be mundane
and not very exciting or maybe I just heard too much about it.
A financial history of bubbles and bust should be more lively
in an educational fashion.

NewDotNet Runied My Day

Today is a tragic day for me, at least for the first half of my day.
After waking up, I found a new directory under my win98 box (don't
laugh, I did still use win98 10 hours ago). It is
c:\program files\NewDotNet

Immediately I belived I found a new spyware, but the thing I didn't
know is that how malicious this spayware is. It is not a spyware,
it is a SWATware, it is powerful enough to make you cry out loud.
Dio Mio...

I am a veteran of spyware, so I though I know how to get rid of this
niuanse. First, I use
msconfig.exe to disable it from my startup script.
Then I restart my machine into "command prompt" mode, try
I "deltree" the whole directoy. After booting again in the normal
mode, I "smartly" delete all the entry with "NewDotNet" in it.

I though I was done. Then I found my network connection is down.
This is like a bomb just exploded around my ears. What did I do...
First I though this NewDotNet may be some new product of the Microsoft
.net platform. After some internet research, I found the true face
of this malicious NewDotNet.

Supposely this spyware has a real business model. This is
to circumvent ICANN official domain name such as .com or .net
by adding several non-exiting new domain names such as ".shop"...
To do that (since TCP/IP doesn't support these new domain names),
they release a "plug-in" to hijack the Windows Socket service
in Microsoft Windows. So all the windows socket calls are mediated
through this spyware before executed. It is like a hook, after
hooked, it see if the request is for the ".shop", if yes, they
do their own domain name resolve, if not, send them to the regular
windows socket. Just for this, I think Microsoft should sue them
for infingment on their software. But I guess MS is lazie-faire on
this one. Anyway, since it totally messed up the whole Windows Socket
protocol stacks, so if someone use brute force to remove them
from the file system and registry, network stack is broken and the
connection is down.

I wasn't thqt easily beaten of course, I tried several online fixes
and "offical fixes" release by the NewDotNet. Everything failed.
Then I start to rebuild the network stack by removing "Dial Up
Network" and Reinstall them (Microsoft Knowledge Base recommended
this)

see

Microsoft Support

After I removed the "dail up network", my ping works with ip
addresses, but not other services such as telnet. Also, my Microsoft
Network always works, such as samba, microsoft file sharing.
I guess these are through NETBEUI and IPX, not TCP/IP. Anyway,
now, I have the real problem, I have losted the win98 CD and I also
deleted all my .cab files from the
c:\windows\options\cabs.

Now I am royally fucked, I cannot even ssh and read my email
even though I can still access my unix file systems using Samba.
What I am going to do?

It is at this moment, I reformatted my harddrive and installed
windows 2000.

Peace reins again my mind and mozilla for ever and ever.

Movie Review: Rosa Luxemburg (1986) by Margarethe von Trotta

If you don't know the name Rosa Luxemburg, you may want to do
some internet search before reading this review. She is
the legendary socialist agitator with the nick name
"Bloody Rosa" (German: Blutige Rosa). She was a leader
of the German Communist Party and was later assasinated
during the failed Spartacus Revolt of January 1919.

The annual commemoration of the murder of Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht (who was assasinated at the same time)
on the first weekend in January was a tradition in the
former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and
even today attracts up to 100,000 people.

Monument to Karl Liebknecht & Rosa Luxemburg built
by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a sombre modern
architecture I encounter in my architecture class.
This monument was later destroied by the Nazi regime.



OK. enough background, now the movie review (contains
detailed plots, stop right here if you don't
want to be ruined for the movie)

This movie concentrate the timeline between Rosa's arrest
in Warsaw and her death in Berlin. Most of the accounts
happened in Berlin, invloving party politics for SPD, German
Party of Social Democracy. You need to kind of familiar
with the sitation to appreciate the movie. Some synopsis here.

Karl Kautsky, leading theoretician of the Second International
and running the newspaper. Mentor of Rosa, but departed since
Kautsky want to remain in the SPD leadership and Rosa drift
left. his wife, Luise Kautsky,was a close friend of Rosa
Luxemburg. Their mutal letters were published after Rosa's
death. Both of them live in the same district, Berlin-Friedenau.

August Bebel, cofounder of SPD, prefer palimentary politics instead
of revolutionary means.

Leo Jogiches, long-time friend and sometime lover of Rosa, murdered
while trying to find Rosa's murderer.

Clara Eissner, best friend-in-arm of Rosa, later founded KPD,
German Communist Party.

Paul Levi, Rosa's Lawyer and comrade. later compiled memorial
book of Rosa.

Now the movie traces through her most formative periods using the
format of remembering her years in the prison after the
WWI. She grew up at a lower middle-class family in Poland,
where she tried to teach her maid how to read and write when
she is still a child, no more than 10 years old.
This counts one of the most touching moment of the whole
movie for me. Then she met her lover of her life, Leo who
she treated more as a comrade than a romatic lover. The
movied is filled with poetic words taken out from her letters
from prison which is both beautiful and touching, portraying
a woman with a very delicate heart even tough her belief is
unshakable. She can be distraught after suspecting and confirming
the unfaithfulness commited by Leo during his escape from
Poland to Berlin. She can be the romatic sweetheart when embracing
the much younger lover, Kostja Zetkin. She can be the ranting
agitator when she is on the podium rousing the revolutionary
zeal of the proletarians. And she can be the confiding friend
when she is trying to provide a Tolstoy book, Anna Karenina to
a prison maid. In all, this movie profile this extrodinary
woman from multiple facets. You can tell from the story line
and rythme that it is directed by a woman. Only a female director
put so much emphasis on a garden scene, a military exercise when
sauntering in the woods, women's right issue in the dinner table
and final touch of a river glittering in the moonlight. Brava!
indeed. Von Trotta is still very active in today's German Movie
and TV industry, I am looking forward to seeing more works like
this one.

Also the music score is awesome, especially when Rosa is on
the podium, the music seems to follow the contents of her
speech attentively. Good work.

The movie is released by New Yorker Video in VHS in 1994.

Migrating Your PINE email to gmail

Finally, I got a gmail account, which has been stiring some
controversy and huss around the internet. I guess I got it
pretty late, compared to other avid bloggers. So when I got
it, the gmail website already pretty unstable and give
you the "oops, I did it again!' kind of error messages.

Several catches of this gmail thing:

1. first, it is thing by invitation only thing. And,
this invitation is sort of having its own algorithms.
According to my friend's survey, this invitation is
sent out to every new gmail user (as of June 19th, 2004)
after they become a gmail member for 5-6 days. You
don't need to be an active user to get one. But
recently since the system become unstable, it seems
that they stop giving it out. We will see how this
thing evolves again. But hopefully I can get some
more invitation to give out.

2. You cannot send attachment with more than 10MB which
is a pain for a computer freak like me. 10MB? n*****, please.

Here is the real deal. I used to use PINE on UNIX to
receive my emails through IMAP. Now I am able to
migrate all my email on PINE to my new gmail account.
This is how I do it.

You must have a new email account (e.g. at href="http://www.gmail.com/">GMAIL) to use and have checked the email
address is working first. Of course the new account will need room to store all
the email that you send on.

After you start the process, the pine become busy or
unresponsive for a while. So you just need to cross your
finger and wait. Also, it seems that gmail doesn't support
attachments with more than 10 MB.

It is possible to apply PINE commands (such as 'Bounce') to more than one
mail message in a folder at a time. To enable these features you first need to
alter your default PINE configuration on UNIX. From
PINE's Main Menu do as follows:

• Select S (SETUP)



• Select C (Config)



• Type W after which you will be prompted for a word to find



• Type aggregate and press return. You will be taken to the
  entry:
  
  

  
  [ ]  enable-aggregate-command-set
  
  

  
  



• Press return or X to enable the feature and have it checked
  
  
  

  
  [X]  enable-aggregate-command-set
  
  

  
  



• Type W (Where is) after which you will be prompted for a word to
  find



• Type enable-bounce and press return. You will be taken to the
  entry:
  
  
  

  
  [ ]  enable-bounce-cmd
  
  

  
  



• Press return or X to enable this feature and have it checked
  
  

  
  [X]  enable-bounce-cmd
  
  

  
  



• Select E (Exit Setup) followed by Y to save your
  configuration changes

Note that you only have to do this once; the features remain enabled unless
you change them again.

• From the main PINE menu select:
  
  
  

  
  L     FOLDER LIST        -  Select a folder OR news group to view
  
  

  
  



• Highlight a folder then view its contents by pressing Return

You can now select all of messages in the folder, as follows:

• When the normal message index is displayed, type ;
  
  which will bring up a choice of SELECT criteria:
  
  

  
              A select All     N Number   T Text
  
  
  
  ^C Cancel   C [select Cur]   D Date     S Status
  
  
  
  

  
  



• Type A to select all the messages in the folder. Selected messages
  will be marked with an 'X'.

• Type N to select a range which you want
  of the messages in the folder. Such as "1-2999" or "1,3".
  

• Type h to full headers to be sent with
  the messages, this selection is optional but will maintain
  all relevant email headers, which can be important in some
  situations.
  

You can now 'Bounce' all of the selected messages as follows:

• Type A and you will see the APPLY command list:
  
  

  
              D Del     R Reply     Y prYnt      S Save       B Bounce
  
  
  
  ^C Cancel   U Undel   F Forward   T TakeAddr   E Export
  
  

  
  



• Type B to 'Bounce' the messages and you will see
  
  
  

  
  BOUNCE (redirect) ??? messages to :
  
  

  
  



• Type in your new email address and then press Return.



• When asked
  
  

  
  Send ?? messages to 'you@new.email.address' ?
  
  

  
  
  type Y.

Please note that, unlike some other commands, bounce neither marks the message
as 'deleted' nor duplicates it.

The message will arrive at your new email address almost like they had been
sent to that email address in the first place. Repeat the select and bounce
process for other email folders that you need to transfer.

After you migrated all your emails from PINE, either from the
IMAP folder or your local folder from your file system, you
can use the same "APPLY" rule to delete or save the
messages.

OK. Now enjoy your 1GB storage, I already used 99MB just by migrating.

Features of Blog - From Tehran to Princeton, USA

Now I found some features of this blog thing really interesting. For
example, I can click on my favorite book, say La Chute by Camus, to
find those who happen to have the same interest as me. Then I found
one. One 21-year-old female from Tehran, what is the odds for that?
The whole world, there are only 2 people who really like the book
La Chute, which happens to be one of the most famous
french book ever written. Also, in Tehran, I didn't know information
technology has infiltrate that place. This blog thing is really
amazing, shortening the distance between strangers just by several
lightyears at least. Don't know what this thing is going to evolve
into in the future, definitely something really big.
It would be really cool I can report things interesting happens here
in Princeton, but sadly, nothing much happening here except studying,
watching a few movies and reading a few good books. Welcome to see
my website though, it is at

My Homepage

Hope you would like it...

First Blog

This is pretty cool, first blog for me, in the community right now.