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Strategies & Market Trends : Graham and Doddsville -- Value Investing In The New Era -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yard_man who wrote (1160)	1/30/1999 8:08:00 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1722

Tip, I think the last thing on these guy's minds is building long term value at a co. They are gunslingers who shoot up one town and then move to another, or retire, with tons of blood money in their pockets. But I don't really blame them. There have always been sleazeballs in business. I blame shareholders, as we are paying them to play games to build short term market price. Every time somebody comes out with tarted up eps, the herd only reads the headlines and never asks how the eps were "earned." In all honesty, we cannot expect venal people to do anything other than what it is in their immediate best interest to do. Sometimes we are pleasantly surprised by a new era CEO being a decent person, but it is an exception to the rule. If you pay somebody for short term market action instead of long term building of a co., they will rape the co's future to kick out their bonus numbers right now. If they have to use debt and low quality accounting, they will. If they have to stuff distribution channels, they will. If they have to play games with Esops and share buybacks, they will. But don't get me wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with share buybacks when the stock is priced under fair value. However, borrowing money to buy shares is a scam from day one. And buying at the top of this type of bubble isn't but should be criminal. MB

To: yard_man who wrote (1160)	2/1/1999 10:19:00 PM
From: porcupine --''''>	Respond to of 1722

IBM's new commercial supercomputer doubles speed SOMERS, N.Y., Feb 1 (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. on Monday unveiled a more powerful supercomputer that is part of IBM's plan to extend the use of what it calls "Deep Computing" by business users. The new supercomputer is an example of IBM's effort to commercialize Deep Computing, which is the capacity to tie together unprecented computer processing power and advanced software and algorithms to solve complex problems and derive meaning from vast mountains of data. "The Internet revolution is creating unprecedented quantities of data. The SP excels at helping people turn that data into valuable information," said Rodney Adkins, general manager, RS/6000. "The lines between technical and commercial computing are blurring as both researchers and businesses routinely analyze vast amounts of data," he said. IBM's next-generation RS/6000 SP supercomputer system contains the POWER3 microprocessor, the direct successor to the POWER2 Super Chip inside "Deep Blue," known for its chess victory over world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. IBM said the POWER3 microprocessor can perform up to two billion operations per second and is more than twice as powerful as IBM's preceeding RS/6000 machine. The POWER3 chip is aimed at applications such as computer analysis and simulation programs used by aerospace, automobile and drug manufacturers, the company said. The SP is a scalable system made up of building blocks called nodes, which can function alone or work with hundreds of other nodes. The system allows researchers to throw massive amounts of data-processing capacity at single tasks, or divide the processing power to handle a range of less intensive work. The next generation RS/6000 chip has a retail price of $56,160 for a two-way node, according to an IBM spokesman. As of this month, IBM has shipped more than 5,500 SP systems, with more than 55,000 nodes included, in the five-and-a-half years since the SP first was introduced. ((-- Eric Auchard, New York Newsdesk, 212-859-1840 ))