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To: DiViT who wrote (38166)	1/11/1999 8:45:00 PM
From: Tim McCormick	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Link didn't work for me, now that is confidential. Tim

To: DiViT who wrote (38166)	1/11/1999 9:12:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

It's the same agreement that they attached to 1998 Q3's 10k. It must have happened before 6/30/97. It ammended the the Quarterly Period Ended June 30, 1997. A change of CFOs. BTW. When a company changes CFOs, it's a good time wash-out anything that would cause earnings or revenue to be less in a future Q. Companies in Hong Kong grow real pessimistic on Mainland China. This trade route was suppose to thrive............................. scmp.com Monday January 11 1999 SCMP/Nomura Business Barometer Sentiment towards mainland tumbles DAVID SAUNDERS Economic conditions in the mainland are expected to worsen during the next six months, according to a survey of companies with strong Chinese business and shareholder connections. Only 18 per cent of respondents to the SCMP/Nomura Business Barometer with mainland-related firms believed the economy would improve in the next two quarters, with 45 per cent saying it would worsen. The results represent a sharp turnaround from the previous quarter's survey when these companies, including H shares, red chips and groups with dominant mainland shareholders, had the most bullish outlook of all respondents. In October, only 29 per cent of respondents anticipated deterioration while 23.53 per cent were expecting an upturn and 41.18 per cent said there would be no change. The outlook for unemployment has also become more gloomy, with 41 per cent of companies in the sector saying their workforce would decrease against only 18 per cent in the previous survey. The increasingly negative sentiment comes after last week's comments by Beijing's Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng, who said there was "no room for optimism" for the economy and hinted at slow or negative export growth. The mainland last month said last year's economic growth had fallen just short of its 8 per cent target. Kevin Chan, head of Greater China economic research at Nomura International, said the change in sentiment reflected the worsening situation across Asia and its growing impact on the mainland's trade. "What you are facing is substantially weaker external demand," Mr Chan said. "The only driver for growth will be the fixed-asset market again, but we can't identify any linkage between fixed assets and corporate earnings so there's no direct benefit." The turn in sentiment also coincides with significant events such as the collapse of Gitic in November and suggestions that other state-owned enterprises may also be financially vulnerable. Almost half of mainland-related respondents believed prices for goods and services would stay flat in the first half of the year, while 38 per cent thought they would fall. The survey found that because of rising real interest rates and dwindling profits, fewer mainland businesses were expecting to increase their non-property investments. More than four-fifths of mainland respondents were expecting further cuts in the prime lending rate, compared with 41 per cent in the last poll. Last week, the SAR Government cut the prime rate by 25 points to 8.75 per cent. Mirroring the survey's broader results, 60 per cent of mainland-related companies expected office rentals to fall compared with 41 per cent in the previous quarterly survey.

To: DiViT who wrote (38166)	1/12/1999 4:01:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Windows CE faces embedded challenge news.com By Stephanie Miles Staff Writer, CNET News.com January 12, 1999, 12:15 p.m. PT Microsoft's Windows CE faces considerable hurdles in the operating system market for consumer and industrial appliances, a new study has found, but Microsoft says many of the findings of the study are already being addressed. Co-sponsored by Microsoft, the new study covers the embedded operating system (OS) market, an increasingly important market as computing devices such as digital TV set-top boxes, dedicated home appliances, and industrial devices proliferate. Unlike the desktop PC world, Microsoft is a challenger in the embedded operating system market. Moreover, the market is a different creature compared to the high-profile Windows-Intel personal computer OS market which Microsoft dominates: Embedded software is often invisible to the user and, as a result, is relegated to a lesser status. Thus far, Windows CE has made its mark mostly in the handheld and set-top box areas, and is emerging as a player in point-of-sale and credit card systems and manufacturing equipment. Microsoft competes in these markets with WinRiver's VxWorks and Integrated Systems' pSOS. But the absence of many of the factors that have led to Microsoft's overwhelming popularity in the desktop world will create obstacles for Microsoft in the embedded operating system market, according to the survey by market research firm Venture Development Corporation. For one thing, Microsoft does not enjoy nearly the developer support it is used to in the PC world. The study found that only 4 percent of embedded developers surveyed cited extensive knowledge of the Win32 APIs. "Not that many embedded developers are familiar with the APIs," said Pedro Zayas, market analyst for embedded systems at VDC. "There's a lot of skepticism among developers about Microsoft's ability to reduce the response time in Windows CE." However, developers who write for the desktop version of Windows are already familiar with the APIs used in developing for Windows CE, according to Microsoft. "Embedded systems developers are used to whatever they've done that's proprietary, but there aren't too many embedded developers out there," said Tony Barbagallo, group product manager for Windows CE. Embedded systems developers currently number about 250,000, compared to 4.5 million desktop developers, according to Barbagallo, and these developers "understand how to port Windows CE to their hardware." Although Microsoft has benefited from the consistent Intel-based hardware platforms PC makers have adopted, industrial manufacturers and other embedded operating system developers favor more heterogeneous hardware, according to VDC's Zayas. "In deeply embedded systems, such as anti-lock brake systems or data collection terminals or military applications, these environments do not require a tight integration between desktop computers and embedded devices," he said. For its part, Microsoft says it is not trying to achieve the same dominance in the embedded market that it enjoys in the desktop world. "There's enough technical differences in this space that no one OS is going to have that kind of broad reach," said Barbagallo. But Microsoft must address technical shortcomings present in the current version of Windows CE, such as poor real-time ability, both Zayas and Barbagallo say. "Windows 2.1 is not strictly ready for embedded development," Zayas said. Windows CE 3.0 does address some of these shortcomings, with improved real-time performance. Microsoft agrees that Windows CE is not necessarily a good fit for every embedded market. "If you take the example of an antilock breaking system, they have 16-32K of memory to work with," Barbagallo said, noting that the smallest version of Windows CE takes up about 250K of memory. "Sheer simple physics says that we can't fit in that application, and we're not trying to--the power of our OS is not to be that small."