So it was no good finding a phone at 2am then having to find somewhere that sold phone cards

So it was no good finding a phone at 2am, then having to find somewhere that sold phone cards. I think there has been a conspiracy in the communications industry to make us buy mobiles.The other great thing about this one is that it doesn’t have to have a normal ring. The great thing about it is that it means – which I didn’t realise because I am so stupid! – you can use them in tandem with your own phone. I didn’t know about call divert, thought you had to give everyone in the world your mobile phone. I didn’t know that you can actually send written messages on it, write stupid little notes to my wife and mates. I’m sure it’s meant to send important notes, but for instance some gags are better written than told, so you send them on the mobile.
I suddenly realised I was living in the Dark Ages. Last year, Sun won the right to apply to the International Standards Organisation to make Java a standard.

Commentators queried the idea of having a profit- oriented company owning a standard and being its sole arbiter, and HP was vocal in its opposition.It could even be that the HP JVM is a more visible response; whether it is or not, the programming community will be watching HP and Sun carefully.. All I have to say is “it’s a banana phone” and people know what I mean. For about three or four years, when everyone had a mobile, I avoided having one because I thought it would be the last bastion of my privacy taken from me But now I can’t imagine for one second not having one. Last week, Sun announced the release of the first Java Stations, the computers that underpin a Java network. Curiously, it buried the announcements in a couple of case studies – there was no razzmatazz, no flag-waving and no signs that this was the next big thing in computing.

Given that Sun was running a huge Java conference in San Francisco, called JavaOne, more fanfare might have been expected.And although Toshiba has confirmed that it will make notebook computers designed to run with Java, Mitsubishi has put its plans for Java systems on hold. The feeling is that something is coming adrift, and the timing of the uncertain messages from Sun about the status of Hewlett-Packard’s Java could not be worse.All this is happening against a backdrop of conflicts over standards. “Java is the only serious obstacle in its way of total domination of the desktop.”As it is, the emergence of the system is not setting the IT world alight. “Microsoft’s objective so far seems to have been to fragment the Java market,” he said, referring to its own non-standard version of Java development tools.

Sun is expected to examine the HP spec this week and decide whether it needs to contact its lawyers. The company does not believe it has given anyone the right to “clone” Personal Java.Luigi Fonda, professional services manager for the Java developer Plexus, also had his reservations because of Microsoft’s involvement. Unlike Microsoft, HP plans to release a completely Sun-compatible version of the system, so if there is any fall-out it will not be an exact replay of the existing lawsuit. “This is not fragmentation – it is competition.”Sun is not so sure, and its CEO, Scott McNealy, has confirmed that it will be checking whether the HP version of Java is legal according to the terms of the original licence. “While speculation is circulating that this represents some new kind of rift in Java, the fact is that developing [virtual machines] for specific devices, whether they be HP printers or IBM mainframes, is part of the job for platform vendors,” IBM tated.