OverMatter

Falling Sand Game

Surprisingly Addictive

ENIAC

"In February 1946, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were about to unveil, for the first time, an electronic computer to the world. Their ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, could churn 5,000 addition problems in one second, far faster than any device yet invented.

The scientists knew that they had created something that would change history, but they weren't sure how to convey their breakthrough to the public. So they painted numbers on some light bulbs and screwed the resulting "translucent spheres" into ENIAC's panels. Dynamic, flashy lights would thereafter be associated with the computer in the public mind."

(ENIAC: A computer is born | CNET News.com)

Alexa Site Stock Market

"Welcome to the alexadex, where players compete for fame and glory by buying and selling shares in sites on the world wide web. The price of a share is set at the site's daily reach per million, according to alexa.com" (alexadex.com)

Listings from the edge

Edgeio (via blogs.businessweek.com, more at Edgeio Blog)

Gmail for your domain

"This special beta test lets you give Gmail, Google's webmail service, to every user at your domain. Gmail for your domain is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain." (Gmail for your domain)

The Pixar Story

"Lucas had originally hoped to get upwards of $100 million for the division and associated intellectual property, but Jobs played hardball and got the price down to $10 million...

Lasseter maintained contact with Disney, and contacted Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney's film division, about creating a Christmas television special. Katzenberg was so enamored with Pixar's shorts and software that he responded by offering to produce three films. The staff at Pixar were floored...

One week after opening day, Pixar went public with a stock price set at $22. The price soared to $50 on the first day of trading, turning Jobs into a billionaire. Pixar went on to renegotiate its contract with Disney and released six blockbuster films that made well over $1 billion."

(The Pixar Story: Dick Shoup, Alex Schure, George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and Disney)

Yum

The Kraft Foods Story

Telegram R.I.P.

"After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams.

On the company's web site, if you click on "Telegrams" in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible:

"Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative."

The decline of telegram use goes back at least to the 1980s, when long-distance telephone service became cheap enough to offer a viable alternative in many if not most cases. Faxes didn't help. Email could be counted as the final nail in the coffin.

Western Union has not failed. It long ago refocused its main business to make money transfers for consumers and businesses. Revenues are now $3 billion annually. It's now called Western Union Financial Services, Inc. and is a subsidiary of First Data Corp.

The world's first telegram was sent on May 24, 1844 by inventor Samuel Morse. The message, "What hath God wrought," was transmitted from Washington to Baltimore. In a crude way, the telegraph was a precursor to the Internet in that it allowed rapid communication, for the first time, across great distances.

Western Union goes back to 1851 as the Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. In 1856 it became the Western Union Telegraph Company after acquisition of competing telegraph systems. By 1861, during the Civil War, it had created a coast-to-coast network of lines."

(LiveScience.com - Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams)

Creating the California Real Estate Bubble

"In 1974, the city of San Jose and Santa Clara County agreed to draw an urban-growth boundary outside of which development could not take place. Inside the boundary growth could continue unabated, but growth outside would be strictly limited. East of San Jose are tens of thousands of acres of marginal agricultural land, and the growth boundary effectively placed these lands off limits to development. Since most other communities in the San Jose urban area are landlocked by San Jose or other cities, this boundary effectively constrained the entire San Jose urban area.

Taking after Ramapo, San Jose said it would add land to the growth boundary when financing could be assured for the urban services needed for new developments. But in 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, which strictly limited the property taxes cities could collect for urban services. This made California cities dependent on sales taxes and therefore reluctant to devote more land to residential areas. As a result, San Jose has never expanded its urban-growth boundary.

Even before Proposition 13, cities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area had approved a variety of growth-management policies, including growth boundaries, density limits, and purchases of land for open space. While growth-management planning is supposedly aimed at protecting environmental quality, it is exceedingly vulnerable to manipulation by not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) advocates whose hidden goal is to boost their property values by limiting the supply of housing for others. As MIT planning professor Bernard Frieden notes in his 1979 book, "The Environmental Protection Hustle," one important limit to growth was a public involvement process that made it so easy for people to challenge proposed developments that "even a lone boy scout doing an ecology project was able to bring construction to a halt on a 200-unit condominium project."8

Berkeley planning professor David Dowall's 1984 book, "The Suburban Squeeze," points out that people living in a neighborhood of $200,000 homes fear that an adjacent development of $100,000 homes will bring down their property values, but they will welcome a development of $300,000 homes. When NIMBYs object to plans, developers respond by eliminating readily affordable housing and proposing to build only expensive houses. For example, one proposal to build 2,200 homes selling for $25,000 to $35,000 on 685 acres in Oakland was, due to public opposition, scaled back to a mere 150 homes that would sell for $175,000 to $200,000.9

Federal, state, county, city, and regional governments were able to tie up a huge amount of potential residential land in the Bay Area as open space. According to Dowall, by 1984 "over 15 percent of the region's total land supply [was] in permanent open space controlled by" various government agencies.10 Ostensibly this was for environmental protection, but the hilltops that were reserved tended to have the lowest values for fisheries, wildlife, and streams. The main effect of such reservations was a significant boost of land prices throughout the region.

Proposition 13 spurred city governments to go farther than ever before in beggar-thy-neighbor efforts to force residential developments into adjacent cities while capturing retail developments, and the sales taxes they generated, for themselves. As one city put up barriers to growth, that growth would spill over into nearby cities, leading them to erect their own barriers. "Santa Clara County cities have become extremely combative," observed Dowall, "fighting back with a variety of growth-restricting mechanisms that have made each community a 'tight little island.'"11

As a result of these policies, California was the first state to suffer planner-induced housing bubbles. By the 1980 census, price-to-income ratios in many California regions, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose, ranged from 4 to 4.5, and Santa Barbara was a staggering 4.8. California was also the first state to suffer the bursting of a housing bubble: between 1989 and 1994, housing prices in most of these regions fell from 15–25%. Fortunately, other parts of the United States thrived, so the nation as a whole did not suffer a severe depression."

(Liberty - Why Do Houses Cost So Much?)