Link to The Skeptical Optimist: Five things China can do with their US dollars
... none of which is to China's benefit. The comments are worth reading too (one suggesting that US could forfeit China's dollars, which are mostly in US treasury securities, in event of war between the two countries).
Another blog post on the site is a chart showing "who owns the US National Debt".
MIT OpenCourse Ware is "a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.". Many of the online courses include lecture notes and assignments. A complete list of courses covering the following subjects is available here.
Some points:
1. The market is in the bubble state now
2. But the market may not have reached its peak yet:
... is added to the page top of my program today:
Honor The Data!
... yes, actually with that annoying blinking text style. I paid a price in year 2004 by holding a large position of HealthSouth, believing it would surge after certain events despite of its continued poor technical showing. Saddly I am now repeating the same mistake again, this time with UTStarcom.
Interestingly the Feb-May period has been the worst performing time for me for the past six years (with the best period being the late fall and early winter).
Visited the brand-new Shenzhen library yesterday. Designed by a Japanese architect and surrounded by the also brand-new City Hall, Book City and Grand Theater (under construction), the library is the fanciest one I've visited. There aren't many books in there though, nor were there many visitors in there - the location is far away from any residential areas. There is a small section for books in foreign-languages. Anyone, including foreigners, can apply for a "reader's card" for free.
Pictures are from CgFinal.
UTStarcom paid RMB 308.35 mil of tax to Zhejiang Province, where the company's headquarter is located, in 2006 (Link to ???????2006??????), vs. RMB 399.34 mil in 2004 (Link to 2004????????????????). Data for 2005 was not found.
[NOTE: tax data above are not validated. Another source states that UTSI's overall China tax for 2004 was over 3 billion RMB.]
Without its official financial reports for last year, the amount of tax UTSI paid in China in 2006 may be an important piece of data for us to evaluate the state of its China business. Despite of the sharp deccline of PAS revenues from its peak year in 2004, the tax bill was only 23% lower (or about 17% in US dollar). More importantly this also seems to suggest that its China business continues to be cash flow positive and has been profitable.
UTSI's stock price closed at $22.15 in 2004 vs. $8.75 in 2006. During the years the Company has diversified its business internationally so that its China division now accounts for only about a third(?) of its total revenue.
The Company is asking Nasdaq to postpone the filing deadline till May 31 and not to delist its stock now. UTSI has been in this situation many times. A couple of years ago it was indeed delisted and its symbol was changed to UTSIE. Delisting didn't have much impact on its share price.
There may be many reasons for the long time the company has taken to fix the books. However the price action in lieu of today's "bad news announcement" is quite telling. 30 minutes into the trading session, it is down only 1.2% with volume of about 95,000 shares. Unless there are other data later today that suggest otherwise, I interpret today's trading as follows:
In the next few days, we will expect a decison by Nasdaq and in six weeks the Company should file the earnings report. If they don't, the price may take a hit as the Company would be in technical default with the bondholders, again!
Google Web Toolkit, or GWT, is something that I've been waiting for for quite some time. It is an open source software toolkit that would simplify and modulize UI design and development for dynamic web applications, which so far have been very difficult to write, test and maintain. The confusion over what framework/languages to use for dynamic web programming is the reason that I have so far stuck with the old-fashioned way of static web programming.
The downside with GWT? You have to use Java. It's unknown whether the code written in GWT can be linked with code in other languages such as PHP or Perl. JavaScript is allowed by using the JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).
Will I start to use GWT now? Probably not. GWT sounds promising, but it's still too early to know whether or not it will become a mainstream toolkit.
PS: A nice, though probably a little bit out-dated, review on GWT: Real-world Experience With GWT on OReillyNet.com (June 2006):
A thumbs up for now. We are still in the early stages of development and figuring things out day by day so I don’t want to claim that it’s perfection or won’t turn out to bite us in some unforeseen way down the road. That said it allows for some pretty compelling application architectures. It really is just like writing a desktop application in Swing or other UI toolkit.
We are generating the entire UI using GWT based on a Controller and IView “screen” or “page” implementations. There is literally *NO* HTML beyond the GWT module import.
That is a very significant departure from almost all mainstream web application paradigms, but if you are comfortable with UI programming it completely abstracts AJAXy/DHTMLy behavior into a very friendly and extensible API.
I guess I would say that if you do most of your web projects with something like PHP, ASP or other template or page-centric language then you may have a bit of a learning curve. If you are already an experienced Java programmer then you’ll probably be able to jump right in without much fuss.
It's an "Agreement in Principle on Draft Investment Agreement". No wonder the Street's excitement was very short-lived. The agreement (on agreement) is subject to final government (cabinat) approval as well as approval by shareholders of IVN and Rio Tinto. [That means I have a say on the matter also, no matter how insignificant it will be. :=)]
Information about Oyu Tolgoi Copper-Gold Complex (the red square near the Mongolia-China border on the map above):
