It’s a work tool. Don’t pretend it’s fun.

“We’ve tried to find a way for our users to appropriately welcome new ”adds“ to their MySpace page,” said Barry Normal, a representative for the social media company that was purchased by News Corp. in 2005 for $580m and last year was on-sold to Specific Media for $US 35m.

“Lurid colors and automatically playing music are the ways of the past. The future is in location-specific, dot-matrix-printed banners,” said Normal.

“The price was right and there was non better time than now.”

Jane Tulliver, the previous owner of the software was amazed at the sale.

“We kind of put it out in the garage sale as a joke,” she said.

“It was a pirated version on a five and a quarter inch floppy. There wasn’t even any original packaging.”

The floppy disk had a price of $3 on it.

“It was a tough negotiation,” said Normal. “We managed to get a ream of continuous letter-sized paper thrown in as well for $2.50.”

“We think our online community will be very happy with the outcome.”

MySpace is now looking to hire staff familiar with DOS 5.1 command line instructions.

This entire piece is fiction

Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, will store for public use the entire contents of the National Institutes of Health’s 1000 Genomes Project, a survey of genetic information from 1,700 individuals that is some 200 terabytes in size. Anyone can access the information for free, and there is no requirement to share any research results.

via Amazon Web Services Big Free Genetic Database – NYTimes.com.

When I was a budding molecular biologist in 1995, we could identify the nucleobases of a segment of DNA. I would take a print-out of some 200 characters’ worth of shuffling the letters AGCT and type them into an email, careful to make no mistakes.

Then I would send that email to a computer in Washington D.C. (I was in Clayton, VIC).

Within 15 minutes I received a reply that told me which proteins would be transcribed from those nucleobases.

I thought it was magical.