An adjournment is likely to prolong the gamesmanship that has taken hold over the fate of the computer maker, which agreed to sell itself to Michael S. Dell and the investment firm Silver Lake for $13.65 a share.
Corruption is so rampant here — and American reconstruction efforts so replete with their own mismanagement — that the fate of the computers could have ended as an anecdote in a familiar, if disturbing trend.
THE fate of the biggest computer merger deal in history Hewlett-Packard's $24 billion purchase of Compaq Computer -- may rest with a self-effacing judge who married his high-school sweetheart, lives near his mother in the rural Delaware town where he grew up and once fined himself $500 for missing a telephone conference call with lawyers.
The fate of the largest computer merger in U.S. history now rests largely with a small Maryland firm.
A scene from a relatively modern shooter game – in which you can look carefully at characters' faces only by training your gun's crosshairs on them – is paused for philosophical reflection on the fate of a subsidiary computer-controlled character, who must forever enter and leave a shop according to strict rules: "This tragic constellation reveals to the hero the limitations of human action".
Its decision could decide the fate of the merger, the computer industry's biggest; of the company regarded as the wellspring of Silicon Valley, founded in 1938 in a garage in Palo Alto by a pair of enterprising young engineers, William Hewlett and David Packard; and, perhaps, of Carleton S. Fiorina, the chief executive of the company and the leading proponent of the merger.
As he manages C.E.S., Mr. Shapiro said he is mindful of the fate of another conference, the computer-focused Comdex event, that discontinued its live events after 2003.
Product innovation is a more powerful tool for seizing and keeping market leadership in a star business than having a big bank balance - look, for instance, at the fate of IBM in personal computers, or of Xerox when faced with competition in desktop copiers from Ricoh and Canon, or at what happened to Kodak.
Yes, there's some high-stakes stuff to work with: sex, spies, surveillance, the invention of computers and the fate of millions of people.
He also said that one of the shipping containers had been opened at some point while in customs, which could explain the fate of the other still missing computers, or not.
