Giving hardware away can get users to take a chance on something they might not be willing to pay for. But it also risks leaving the impression that the technology is worth zilch.

That, I think, is the conclusion large numbers of Wired subscribers will draw when they open their mailboxes this month and confront the magazine's little gift to them: a 4-inch, hand-held bar code scanner called the CueCat.

You plug the CueCat into your PC. Then, as you read your copy of Wired and see ads and articles (but mostly ads) that have special bar codes, you're supposed to run your CueCat over the codes, and it will tell your Web browser where to go online for more information.

Designed with consumer-friendly cuteness to look like a little kitty, the CueCat is, according to its parent company's Web site, "the biggest computer innovation since the mouse" -- "like a global positioning system for the Internet."

Let's see: The mouse helped usher in an era of graphical computing, allowing millions of people who might otherwise find command-line navigation forbidding to take advantage of the personal-computer revolution. And the CueCat? Well, if it ever achieves mouselike market penetration -- an extraordinarily unlikely scenario -- it will allow millions of people who might otherwise simply point and click their way across the Web to ... find Web pages by running their scanners over bar codes in magazines and other marketing material.

Somehow this revolution eludes me.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.