"Neil Patel of Canonical did a few mockups to try and capture the spirit of what was discussed, but I think the most interesting piece wasn’t really possible to capture in a screenshot because it’s abstract and conceptual - file and content management. There’s a revolution coming as we throw out the old “files and folders” metaphor and leap to something new, and it would be phenomenal if free software were leading the way."

This would be cool. WinFS failed in some part due to the baggage it has to carry, but these guys have a lot less. And if done right, it would give GNOME/KDE a serious edge.

"In the last couple of years nearly every program comes with its own updating software. Don’t believe me? Try Apple Software Update, Adobe Updater, Google Updater, Mcafee AutoUpdate, and the list goes on. All of these pieces of software have their individualized settings and behaviors with no unified interface which leads to confusion and missed updates–some of which are critical for security."

Indeed I'm sick of all these update checking apps running in the background, cluttering my systray, and annoying me out of context about an update. Building it into Windows Installer would be good I think, which most things are using now.

"So, a few years ago all the cool kids were switching from CVS to Subversion. These days, all the cool kids are switching from Subversion to some form of distributed version control; git and Mercurial seem to be the ones with the largest market shares. This switch is being accompanied by a simply deafening amount of hype about DVCS and how it’s a revolutionary new paradigm and will completely change the way people work and… well, the usual stuff."

Good intro article to DVCS, particularly from a SVN perspective. Now, where are the GUI interfaces...

"Team SOAK (Smart Operational Agriculture Kit) from Australia have been announced as the winners of the 2008 Imagine Cup!!! This is simply an amazing achievement, SOAK members Long Zheng, David Burela, Ed Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya have all come together from different Universities across Australia to create and complete their fantastic project, SOAK ."

Awesome work guys!

"A group of Australian University students, including one of Australia’s most well-known technology bloggers, has progressed to the finals of the Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup software development competition in Paris. Students David Burela, Long Zheng, Edward Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya, collectively called Team SOAK, showcased a solution that helps farmers moderate the use of water on their crops."

Pretty cool... all the best guys!

"They are systematic symptoms of a deeper wrong which most people don't recognise: proprietary software. Microsoft's software is distributed under licenses that keep users divided and helpless. The users are divided because they are forbidden to share copies with anyone else. The users are helpless because they don't have the source code that programmers can read and change."

Surprisingly reasonable, but there still isn't an particularly viable alternative business model. Support puts the focus in the wrong place, as do services often. Why is software different anyway; do we expect Coke to provide their recipe publically? Maybe our economic system is the issue...

"Tomorrow Telstra will start pushing out a software update to half a million customers that will allow users to point their phones at a barcode and be directed to a relevant Web page... Barcodes could allow users to automatically transfer information from business cards to their address books..."

Its taken a while, but this will only be successful if the service that resolves the barcode into content is common between the providers. Having a Telstra barcode, an Optus barcode etc. would seriously hamper the adoption.

"The free office suite OpenOffice is now offering a beta of version 3.0 for testing and it's easier than ever for Mac owners to start using it right away. "

And still just as ugly, particularly on OSX. I wish they'd acknowledge that 1 interface for all platforms just doesn't work for applications more complicated than a few buttons. Even if they get the looks right (which they haven't), there are still subtle differences in UI guidelines.

"While Perth will be the first Australian city with Google Transit, company officials said the search firm was in talks with other state transport authorities and expected the service eventually to be available Australia-wide."

Good luck Google if you're bringing this to Melbourne. Unless you cater for our broken system, all Google Transit will do is remind us what public transport should be.

"Why don't we have all the (applications) on the network - and by the way it's free," Mr Schmidt said in a dig at Microsoft."

Arrogant twat. Nice to see he conveniently forgets that we're actually giving Google all our data for free so they can effectively on-sell it and make more money at our expense. There's no such thing as a free lunch, people.