Technology news and Jobs 
VIRTUALISATION Gosling thinks wireless cellphone downloads bad: is he kidding?
VIRTUALISATION Gosling thinks wireless cellphone downloads bad: is he kidding? | Gosling thinks wireless cellphone downloads bad: is he kidding? |
|
| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 06 March 2008 | |
|
Page 1 of 4   
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Why should it be any different with a mobile phone, especially in this day and age where wireless data is cheaper than ever, especially if you are with a carrier that has very generous data download plans at ever cheaper prices, as opposed to a carrier that charges the earth for mobile data? According to an article by fellow iTWire colleague Stephen Withers, called ‘No Java on Java Father’s phone’, James Gosling “dislikes the ‘over the air’ distribution model used for most mobile phone applications” – a dislike which I personally think is ridiculous. Now it has to be said: James Gosling is a legend in the IT industry, whom I fully respect. He is the ‘Father of Java’, has an incredibly esteemed history which you can read a short bio of at Sun Microsystems’ website, although his bio notes that he has a Ph.D, is currently a VP and Fellow at Sun Microsystems, built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems, window managers, a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called 'Emacs' for Unix systems. He was a lead engineer of the NeWS window system in his early days at Sun, did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine and is currently a researcher at Sun labs where his primary interest is software development tools. James Gosling is in Australia for the Sun Microsystems ‘Tech Days Australia – A Worldwide Developer Conference Event’ from the 4th to the 6th of March and was the keynote speaker on the 4th, and presumably attended other sessions and/or media events in Sydney and Melbourne during the event. Stephen wrote two stories featuring James Gosling, one on Java and Blu-ray, and the another on there being no Java in Gosling’s iPhone. I did a serious double take when I read the article “No Java in Java Father’s phone”, which I have quoted select paragraphs from, the following information: “I was glad to learn that Gosling shares my dislike of the "over the air" distribution model used for most mobile phone applications, favouring instead Internet-based distribution to personal computers followed by installation via Bluetooth to avoid excessive data charges and to provide an automatic backup of purchased applications.” The article continued that: “He [Gosling] blames carriers for this situation, suggesting they were too concerned about leaving money on the table rather than fitting in with people's habits.” Gosling is then quoted as saying: “Some carriers also made the mistake of thinking they could provide all the software people would want, rather than encouraging the creativity of third-party developers.” Stephen ended by saying: “All I know is that while I've added some applications to my Java-capable Sony Ericsson phone, none of them were acquired over the air. Why would you incur substantial mobile data charges on top of the purchase price when the marginal cost of downloading over cable or ADSL is zero?”. So, why do I think this doesn’t make any sense in 2008? Please read onto page 2. |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
