Matt Loney's Blog

This heavily Digged demo is well worth viewing if you have not seen it. It is the work of Anand Agarawala, an MSc graduate at the University of Toronto. The theory is explained in Anand's paper titled "Keepin' It Real: Pushing the Desktop Metaphore with Physics, Piles and the Pen". Anand describes it as well as anybody thus: Objects can be phycially dragged and tossed around, influenced by physical characteristics such as friction and mass, much like we would manipulate lightweight objects in the real world. But you'll only really get a feel for what it does by viewing the video below.

It looks good, though as with all things tactile you only really know when you have tried it for yourslef. I've tried many desktop metaphores - from creating one from scratch in Hyercard on an Apple Mac, through HP's NewWave, and then into 3D ones with Sun's Project Looking Glass. On the hypecycle, few get past the trough of disillusionment. I rather hope this one does: I like the look of it not because it is 2.5D but because it looks very useful for organising files, a job who's boredom factor frequently defeats me.



Alternatively,, try the hip hop version.

Thanks to everyone who entered our mega Christmas competition this year - we had loads of prizes from notebook PCs and projectors to wireless networking and storage kit, and even a Google Mini search appliance. All the individual competitions are now closed, and we're now working through thousands of tie-breakers - yes, everything from the sublime to the tedious - to pick the winners. Most winners have now been notified and you can see who they are on the competition pages. Hell, you can even send them a congratulatory message if you like through their member page.

And if you didn't win, don't worry. We shall be running plenty more competitions; just keep an eye on our competitions page.

It may not be as good as sharks with lasers, but it the Opticon PDA with built-in bar scanner is likely to appeal more to those implementing stock-taking systems and haven't got to grips with RFID yet.

We don't have pricing, but the Opticon comes with the basic feature-set you'd expect: WiFI, GPRS, Bluetooth, and it's available from Barcoding.co.uk.

Having dinner with James Reinders, head of Intel's software division this week, conversation turned to the wisdom of releasing proprietary software as open source. Intel is currently grappling with the issue for some its software development tools, which you can currently use for free for non-commerical purposes (incidentally, Intel's compilers are on the on the list).

The question Intel is trying to answer is, is it wise to release them as open source? To try to answer this, Intel compiled a list of proprietary applications that have been released as open source; in almost every case, they surmised, it was an act of desperation, regardless of how the company concerned attempted to rationalise the move. This does not imply that open source applications are inferior to proprietary apps, or that making an application open source is necesarily a bad move; it is intended more an observation.

Of course there are companies that make a very nice living from open source, and those who use it in parallel to more conventional business models (MySQL AB for instance). And there are those who, James reckons, had and have a robust strategy (IBM). But the examples of those companies who have released proprietary software under an open source licence not out of desperation, he reckons, are few and far between.

From a 2005 Microsoft conference, to which several employees took video cameras, comes this really pretty funny video. Sadly Bill's dancing - even alongside Napoleon - has lost some of the dynamism it had in the 90s when he took to the stage at the Hard Rock Cafe in Vegas durnig Comdex, but it's still worth five mintues of your time: