IN 1968, 13-YEAR-OLD AMERICAN EIGHTH-GRADER William Henry Gates III and his pals crack a for-profit computer center's accounting files.
Meanwhile, South Korean manufacturers have wiped out Sony's profits on computer monitors, cellphones and other commodities.
He made that promise despite a precipitous decline in sales and profits of computer chips, the layoffs of at least 5,000 workers and the closing of older chip plants in Asia and the United States.
Companies that have accumulated billions of dollars in untaxed overseas profits, from computer companies like Hewlett-Packard to pharmaceutical producers like Eli Lilly, would be given a one-year holiday to bring those profits back to the United States at a small fraction of normal tax rates.
Higher rates reduce the current value of companies' profits, and computer-related companies are particularly vulnerable.
Quantitative funds, after all, are the "black boxes" of investing — portfolios run by managers who generally try to generate profit with computer algorithms that they don't share with outsiders, or even their own investors.
A merger with Compaq, they have explained, would increase Hewlett-Packard's dependence on the low-profit personal computer business while diminishing the role of the company's crown jewel, its printer division.
Rather than trade sitting alone in an office or at home in their pyjamas, a growing number are choosing to work in electronic trading "arcades" or "prop shops" (trading firms that pay them a salary and a slice of profits) offering computers, real-time news streams and the company of other traders, even if they are competitors.The early arcades were grim places.
RTI provided funding assistance to help found the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in 1980, and two years later was part of a joint venture to create Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC), a non-profit whose computer network connected local K-12 schools.
Stacey says that most of his company's profits come from computer repair, and that the rare typewriter job comes as a welcome "mini-vacation" from fighting computer viruses and other invisible electronic ills.
The sect has also vowed to use profits from its computer companies and other ventures to compensate victims of crimes committed by former sect members.
