Leasing or Purchasing?

最近和一位朋友聊起在美洲买车的时候,提到了Leasing。德国人通常在私人购物的时候会考虑Instalment Plan而对于Leasing似乎不是很感兴趣，谈得也少。由于最近被逼换车，所以不得不花点时间来研究一下了。

Benefits of commercial leasing

For businesses, leasing property may have significant financial benefits:
* Leasing is less capital-intensive than purchasing, so if a business has constraints on its capital, it can grow more rapidly by leasing property than it could by purchasing the property outright.
* Capital assets may fluctuate in value. Leasing shifts risks to the lessor, but if the property market has shown steady growth over time, a business that depends on leased property is sacrificing capital gains.
* Leasing may provide more flexibility to a business which expects to grow or move in the relatively short term, because a lessee is not usually obliged to renew a lease at the end of its term.
* Depreciation of capital assets has different tax and financial reporting treatment from ordinary business expenses. Lease payments are considered expenses, which can be set off against revenue when calculating taxable profit at the end of the relevant tax accounting period.

Disadvantages

There are some significant drawbacks:
* If circumstances dictate that a business must change its operations significantly, it may be expensive or otherwise difficult to terminate a lease before the end of the term. In some cases, a business may be able to sublet property no longer required, but this may not recoup the costs of the original lease, and, in any event, usually requires the consent of the original lessor. Tactical legal considerations usually make it expedient for lessees to default on their leases. The loss of book value is small and any litigation can usually be settled on advantageous terms. This is an improvement on the position for those companies owning their own property. Although it can be easier for a business to sell property if it has the time, forced sales frequently realise lower prices and can seriously affect book value.
* If the business is successful, lessors may demand higher rental payments when leases come up for renewal. If the value of the business is tied to the use of that particular property, the lessor has a significant advantage over the lessee in negotiations.

www.qingshen.de is back!

After a long silence, www.qingshen.de is back. There are still some settings need to be reconfigured, but the website works in principle.

I have been suffered with routing my server to the internet. My pains was ended by giving the try up. Now my website was settled on the server from a web hosting provider. Although it took me sometime to get it running, it's cheap enough from me to pent my efforts :) I am now enjoying the stable life.

Gallery Updated: Ph.D. Celebration

Got sometime several days before to sort the photos shooted in my Ph.D Celebration. And they can be found in my photo gallery.
I should thank my colleague Jan, Kelana and David for their photography. It was really a nice moment :)

Blog.QS is now hosted here by myself …

Dear Friends and Guests,

here I am glad to announce that Blog.QS will be hosted here by myself from now on. The data are completely immigrated to the new server, which also hosts the Wiki.QS and Gallery.QS and you can access the new Blog.QS via:

http://blog.qingshen.de or
http://qshen.dyndns.org:33333/blog/

Wordpress.com does provide nice, riendly and stable services for the blogers and I owe thanks to their efforts. However, the flexibility of the service are somehow limited. For example, you can barely install a desired new plugin at the server, which is somehow resonable. But, I still strongly expect to integrate my gallery with it and finally I decide to host the blog by myself.

Since I am satisfied with the blog software used at wordpress.com, I will keep using the same code released at wordpress.org. The immigration of the data runs very smoothly and works like a charm. Thanks again to all the people working for wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The only pity is that the comments can not be exported from the web interfaces. It could be resolved by contacting the webmaster of wordpress.com, but I gave it up since I did not have many comments.
Although the immigration of the data are already done, I need to configure some new plugins and themes. It might be a little bit unstable in recent days and I sincerely beg your patience :D Again: the Blog.QS at http://qingshen.wordpress.de won't be updated anymore :P

yours,

Sandy

Dr.-Ing. & Germany beat Argentina

After a long nervous waiting, I finally passed the final Ph.D. defense on last friday (June 30, 2006). As I said, it was a little bit late to realize the difficulty of the defense, and that made me extremly under stress and nervous during last week.

Unlike the Ph.D. defense in US and China, the defense committee in Germany will score the final defense based on the quality of the dissertation, the talk/presentation of the work and the oral defense/exam. Based on the rumors, the dissertation accounts 60%, presentation accounts 15% and final defense accounts 25%. However what I worried about is only the presentation. Because it was written in the defense regularity that the presententation should be finished within 25 to 30 min, less than 25 min. or over 30 min. will be fatal. Beside that, unfluent talking is also fatal :(

Although my colleagues tried to calm me down by telling me that the committee won't be so strict to a foreign student, I couldn't help worrying about it. Because I just finished first version of the slides on Monday, then practiced the german prolog on Monday evening; on Tuesday I improved the slides to the almost final version and started to practise some parts of the talk; on Wednsday I did practise the whole talk for the first time; on Thursday practising the talk with time limitation. Friday, DEFENSE!!! I nearly couldn't take anytime on preparing for the questions in the oral defense.

Fortuantely, I felt quite calm on friday and after eating a delicious dinner made by 00 I felt even better :D. Based on the latest notification (because of an important soccer match: Germany against Argentina, the defense committee decided to push my defense 30 min. in advance) my presentation will start at 15:25, we left home around 14:30 and bought some TicTac candy (I did actualy want to buy Fishman, but it was coincidently sold out) for refreshing my throat on the way.

When I arrived, another colleague Rafael Radkowski just finished his defense (we start our Ph.D. programme at the same time and fortunately also finished at the same time). I saw he was waiting outside nervously for the announcement of his final score. I greeted him and we had no mood to talk further and I went directly to the meeting room and repared my presentation. After settling the hardware staff, I went out for some fresh air. And just in time, Rafael's final score came out, which was "Ausgezeichnet" ( in english is Excellent). As far as I remember, only 3~5% people got this grade. I felt glad for him and congratulated him with a big tight hug and he wished me good luck. However that gave me even more pressure.

There's nothing special to say about my presentation, I haven't done it ever better than that and finished my talk just when my Presenter viberated, which was set for 26 min. I should thank my colleagues and friends for reacting my talking with their positive expression in their eyes and nodding, which gave me great confidence. The oral defense was easier as I thought, the professors didn't ask many deep theoretical questions. However, the question were very general and covered CS, ME and EE, which might relate to my work. I was confused twice in my defense. Once was by a extreme easy and self-explaining questions. I did beg the professor to ask it both in english and german to make sure that I didn't make a mistake in understanding the question. But it was indeed simple, which became however difficult to response. I had no idea but re-explicated the meaning of the question in another mean. Fortunately, the professor seemed to be satisfied. Another suprising question was the last one, they asked me to predict the results of the upcoming soccer match: Germany <-> Argentina. I was frozen for a while and then answered, " Germany will win" ! After that, I got the "Sehr Gut" grade (in english is Very Good, which is one grade less than Excellent). I was totally satisfied or even much more better than I expected...

After a long queued congratulations, all the friends, colleagues and professors sat together and started to watch the soccer match, which started at 17:00. As I had predicted, Germany did beat Argentina in the final Penalty Shoot-Out. We started the celebration with a dilicious Banquet and "hundered" bottles of beer were drunk in that night...



It's saddly to see germany lost their chance on July 4 to get the 2006 world cup ... :(

准备博士答辩，汗！

博士答辩安排在本月30日。长期以来一直吊儿郎当，也没正经拿个时间来准备答辩。直到上个星期一觉得再不准备就太过分了，才开始做slides。 本以为一两天就能搞定，再加上很多内容也已经多次在会议上present过，实在没把这个任务放在眼里。可是直到做的时候才想到答辩委员会的那几个老家伙对俺底细一清二楚，要想拿老slides改改糊弄过去估计不行。想到这里，狠狠地汗了一把。

次日，赶紧去找老板，问答辩的时候能不能用英语present我的论文，这样能减少不少难度。谢天谢地，老板爽快答应 :D

直到今天5天过去了，我才完成了初稿，还是汗！希望明天能完稿，开始实战练习。现在无聊，没心情干别的事情，来Blog上发泄一通...

网站整顿

前天拜托所里的系统管理员开了一个端口给我。虽然出于安全考虑没有使用80端口，但是不影响使用。总算摆脱了原来使用学校无线网时的不稳定问题。 其实问题不一定出在学校，也有可能是Linux下的那个驱动不是太稳定。

另外起用了subdomain，使得Gallery,Wiki和Blog的访问更加直观便捷。具体为：
wiki.qingshen.de
gallery.qingshen.de
blog.qingshen.de

现在还剩下的问题就是域名解析了，在国内访问的时候常常不能解析www.qingshen.de。 实在是麻烦得很，如果哪位朋友知道解决方法，请赐教了。