Paul, I concur with your analysis. However, perhaps a better epitaph
for the tombstone of Youngstown Sheet and Tube would be:
"Hark! Stranger as you pass by.
As you are now; so once was I.
As I am now, you soon will be.
Prepare for death and follow me."
I believe that Intel has heeded the warning and will not be following
Youngstown Sheet and Tube (anytime soon, anyway). IBM appears to have
had a near-death experience, however...still a question of long-term
morbidity in my mind. The epitaph above actually appears on the
gravestone of an early Texan---an ancestor of my first cousin.
My first cousin's name is Paul R. Engle; its likely that the German
"Engel" was modified to "Engle" sometime after immigration. Speaking
of mutation over time, the following (quoted from "Hell's Angels", by
Hunter S. Thompson, Random House, 1967) appears to be derived from the
old epitaph above:
"As you were, I was
As I am, you will be.
---H. Himmler (quotation scrawled on a wall at a Hell's Angel party)".
Speaking of outlaw bikers, I've just picked up a signed first of
"Investment Biker" by Jimmy Rogers. Now, in the end, the Hell's
Angels gave Hunter S. Thompson a vicious beating. I keep "Investment
Biker" in my library contiguous with Hunter S. Thompson books on one
side and Tricky Dick (as in Nixon, not Whittington) books on the other
---this is just to remind myself of the propensity of bizzare,
erratic and potentially dangerous behavior on the part of professional
analysts which may damage small investors who fail to maintain a
sufficiently wide berth. "The attack ended with the same inexplicable
suddenness that it had begun. There was no vocal aftermath, then or
later. I didn't expect one---no more than I'd expect a pack of sharks
to explain their feeding frenzy. I got in my car and sped off,
spitting blood on the dashboard and weaving erratically across both
lanes of the midnight highway until my one good eye finally came into
focus." Incidentally, I find IBM a perplexing company---from one
angle they look like a beached whale, from another angle they look
more like an agile dolphin. For example, I am aware of the bidders
for a relatively large computing center with lots of parallel
processing and a heavy emphasis on sophisticated digital image
processing---the competitors are IBM, HWP, Sun and Silicon Graphics.
(Excuse my vocabulary---it will improve after my informatics
fellowship). Why doesn't Intel produce processors which compete in
this market? Dan Wirt |
