The public has been looking under the hood of the great spinning machine and thinks it has figured something out: If it works for a talent-challenged group like the Spice Girls, why not for me?

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That would throw a spanner into the works of its money-spinning advertising machine.

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In 1764, English carpenter James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, a machine that spun multiple threads of yarn at once, increasing production eight-fold.

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Walking in I pass a dour-looking lady, clipped to the machine by her affinity card, mesmerized by the spinning wheels.

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In the case quoted above, the CIO believed that his IT department had been on a storage buying binge and it was high time to in fact use more of the raw disk capacity on the machine room floor that was already powered-up and spinning.

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