UpFront

Infomart's Kaii (www.kaii.info) has joined Sharp's Zaurus in the growing field of Linux-based PDAs. Like Zaurus, Kaii will run Lineo's Embedix Plus Linux kernel v. 2.4.2, Trolltech's Qt/Embedded and Qtopia environment and Insignia's Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Unlike Zaurus, it runs on a 160MHz Hitachi SH3 CPU (Zaurus runs on a StrongARM) and uses an on-screen keyboard.

Kaii comes with a choice of color or monochrome 320 × 240 screens, up to 128MB RAM, 32MB masked ROM or Flash, USB interface, RS-232C serial port, IrDA port, CompactFlash Type II slot and an MMC slot.

It also comes with the Opera browser, the Hancom Mobile Office suite and sync software for Linux desktops, OS X, Windows and “PIMs like Outlook”.

Its size is 137 × 73 × 17mm or 5.39 × 2.87 × 0.67in, which is nearly identical to the Zaurus without its keyboard exposed.

Infomart is positioning Kaii as a “low-cost alternative computer or corporate special purpose workstation in cost-sensitive markets like India, China, Eastern Europe, Africa, etc.” Infomart is headquartered in India.

—Doc Searls

Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the US government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure.

—Richard Stallman, on why “trusted” computing shouldn't be

The record companies hold all the cards; if you want to be famous, you have to go the mainstream route. If you want huge success, you have to go the mainstream route. If you want worldwide success, you have to go the mainstream route. And until we see our first Internet & Live Shows Only artist sell a million CDs without a label deal, the major labels will be the only mainstream route available. Don't quote Grateful Dead statistics to me—they're the exception, not the rule.

—Janis Ian

This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.

—Google News disclaimer

I think ultimately we will look for an open-source desktop. I think that's eventually where the industry will go.

—Richard Thwaite, director of IT and ebusiness infrastructure for Ford Europe (which controls 33,000 desktops)

Typically people think about things such as BIND and Sendmail, which are very important; but there is a much more practical sense in which both free and open code helped spread the birth of the Internet. That's the decision made in architecting the browser that reveals source. The source is constantly available. People didn't learn HTML just by buying Tim (O'Reilly)'s books first. What they did was steal each other's web pages, made the tweaks they wanted and then bought Tim's books so they could figure out how to do it better the next time around.

—Lawrence Lessig