Friday Four

1. From "Ooh! Look at me!" to "Oops! I blew it!": Microsoft created something much like Google Earth in the 1990's in order to show off just how big a database its software could handle:

The Earth fit inside a 45-foot by 25-foot Compaq computer in an office building in suburban Seattle. As the East Coast woke up Monday mornings, it would roar to life.

"The temperature in the room would go up 5 to 6 degrees, things would start banging around," Tom Barclay, the man tasked by Microsoft with putting the Earth inside a database, remembers. "You'd really marvel at it."

Unfortunately for Microsoft, nobody in the company would listen to Barclay's admonitions that the project offered a huge business opportunity.

2. In the course of some research, I read the Wikipedia entry on "'Conscious' Business" and found a bit of usage in the following passage amusing:

There's a huge trend towards more sustainable business practices. Environmental sustainability, however, has little to do with conscious business. Organizations can be highly sustainable, but still run in an unconscious way. A conscious business, however, will not maintain unsustainable business practices. [bold added]

Dropping context for a moment, it sounds as if leftists think that something as difficult as running a viable business could be done by someone in his sleep. Conversely (and keeping context), it amazes me how "aware" all these semi-capitalists are of all their leftist marching orders, while apparently having no idea that egoism is a theory of morality that merits their attention. Indeed, the whole idea of "conscious" "capitalism" is based on the idea that profit is, at best, not a concern of morality.

3. In a listing of oddball things people have looked to as economic indicators, we learn of the death of the Playboy Playmate Index. As I'd heard before, the magazine recently decided to stop publishing nude photos in light of the abundance of free material on the Internet.

4. Have you a tweet you'd like to memorialize? Really memorialize? Then Dumb Cuneiform has you covered:

We'll convert [your tweet] to a cuneiform tablet and send it to you in the mail.

Twenty smackers will do it.

-- CAV