Matt Loney's Blog

From the Not Safe For Work But You'll Probably Get Away With It department, the deliciously named LoveHoney.co.uk sends us news of the iBuzz Two. And what is this you may well ask. Well, it plugs into your iPod, vibrates in time to music and has his and hers attachments. Getting warm yet? You will.

OK, this is just getting silly. We've only just closed the competition for five MacBooks (see below), we have a survey running (see the ads on the site) that will let you win one of five iPods, and now we're giving away an iPod nano. All those Mac-heads who flame us whenever we mention Apple must be right when they say we hate Apple's products - why else would we give them all away rather than keep them for ourselves?

Anyway, with Vista and Office 2007 due to launch this week, we want to know what your upgrade plans are, and what strategies you are considering. Even if you don't plan to upgrade to Microsoft products, we'd like to know why, and we have a lone 4GB iPod nano to give away to one reader.

Enter the competition by filling in the survey here. It only makes a couple of minutes to fill in, and you could end up with an extra stocking filler for the kids this Christmas. Go on, we'll even let you choose the colour.

This survey is now closed. Thank you if you filled it in - we got over 1,500 respondents which is fantastic. We'll be going through the results tonight (30/11/06) and publishing the results - and the name of the winner - tomorrow.

Our IT Manager Pro competition has now closed, and the final two of our five Apple MacBook winners are Ben Rowe from Birstall in West Yorkshire and Paul Madell from Riverside in Cardiff. The prizes should be winging their way to the winners this week.

You have probably seen the ads for the IT Manager Pro Challenge peppered around ZDNet UK in which we're giving away (among other prizes) five Apple Core 2 Duo MacBooks. We now have our first three winners, drawn at random from those who entered.

They are: David Cumming of Wilby in Norwich, Claire Watson from Clapham and K Prosser from Codsall in Wolverhamption. The winners have been notified and their prizes will be on their way to them shortly.

If you didn't win then don't worry: we still have two more to give away in the coming week. Although the competition says you will win a Core Duo, Apple has now replaced this model with the Core 2 Duo so this is the model we'll now be giving away. You can enter the competition here.

Lord Sainsbury's departure as science minister will be hailed by software developers. He was the instrumental in steering the ultimately failed European patent legislation. My lasting impression of him will be trying to explain to a packed room of developers at the DTI Conference Centre on the subtleties of software patents.

At times the conference broke down into pure panto, for instance:

Lord Sainsbury: Is the advice I gave to the patent office wrong?

The floor, altogether: Yes!

A single voice from the floor: I am not anti-Microsoft, but the fact is that in this industry there is one major monopolist and you are in the business of granting monopolies and anyone who knows their misbehaviour in the past knows that there is a grave risk the work of many people in this room would become worthless. [The proposed patent system] could be abused.

Lord Sainsbury: Is it abused now?

The floor, altogether: Yes!

And later, from the floor: We can’t afford patents

Lord Sainsbury: Is it a big problem at the moment?

The floor, altogether: Yes!

And so on. You could almost imagine the Widow Twanky creeping around behind him in wrinkled stockings. To be fair, Lord Sainsbury did briefly manage to get a friendly laugh out of the crowd when someone mentioned shopping basket patents. "Now you're getting into an area I can understand" quipped the science minister, which would have been really would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic.