There's an app for that.

...while the WebKit JavaScript VM is a bytecode interpreter.

The world has moved on since those days. Squirrelfish was a bytecode interpreter, yes...but Squirrelfish Extreme has been using JIT compilation since 2008. Note that Chrome also uses WebKit, and has been using a different Javascript VM called "V8", and it also compiles just-in-time. On the mozilla side of the fence, Tracemonkey also compiles just in time. The only laggard is IE.

I recon javascript will be used differently now that the runtimes are more capable. Your observation about how Javascript is used today only reflects the limited capabilities of yesterday's browsers. Flash can no longer be thought of as being uniquely optimized for long-running things. Those days are over.

Is there a point you wanted to make without a strawman? I didn't say that all phones had stupid restrictions. I would, however, go so far as to say that devices without stupid restrictions were not available by the carriers in my region at the time, and so you're free to rail against me for living in the "right place" back then...if you really must.

My point was to counter the notion that the industry was not already "turned back" before Apple entered the market. The grandparent is propagating a fiction that the industry was somehow open until the iPhone singlehandedly closed it.

Every cell phone I've ever had has been burdened with stupid restrictions, so Apple isn't really innovating in the Restrictions Department - they've just wrested some of the ability to restrict from the hands of the carriers. The last phone I had was a Motorola e815, which had the ability to do Bluetooth OBEX built into it, but Alltel decided to configure it off so that I couldn't load my own ringtones easily and had to buy theirs.

There was no Year 0 so the indices start from 1 in this case.

I'm always amazed how on a forum brimming with computer scientists, there's always an ample supply of pedants willing to insist that whatever calendar Gregory XIII pulled out of his ass in 1582 by papal fiat is somehow intrinsically less arbitrary than demarcating decades by years that end in zero.

I've checked since you last have, and your notion of when decades end is based upon the year 1 being the first calendar year...which is, of course, entirely arbitrary. So since we're already being arbitrary, why not be a computer scientist for once and just willingly accept the one time when everybody else is willing to start counting with zero like god intended?

Your post has forced me to either respond or not respond. Damn you and your restrictive discourse.

Everybody take note that the defense is not claiming that their garden has no walls, but is only claiming that they are not made of the same material.

Everybody take note here that the defense is not claiming that the garden has no walls, but is only claiming that they are made of a different material.

He's writing a user interface for his walled garden. He was complaining about somebody else's walled garden. That's totally different.

Our current energy policy is costing the lives of soldiers in the desert sands as we speak, and has been for quite a long time.

The slang term is far from being outdated, because it is still in use. Perhaps you have never heard it yourself, but I have.

I first encountered it through a hacker friend of mine in the early 90s in - of all places - Lincoln, Nebraska. He had spent some time out of the state working for the now-defunct maker of Sharebase. He returned to Nebraska after the demise of that company, and told me about the hacker culture and lexicon years before I graduated with my Comp Sci degree in 1993. I didn't know what to make of it at the time, but once the internet hit its inflection point I got online and found the Jargon File, of course.

I remember him using the word "chrome" to describe the GUI user-interface parts of a program (with a somewhat dismissive tone, because he considered to be uninteresting). This was in contrast to the non-chrome parts of programs, which he found more engaging. I have since witnessed it used in this way by several others.

In fact, I worked with a team of programmers on an internal system at a large market research firm who named major releases of a home-grown web templating system - because we thought dotted numbers were boring - after words out of the jargon file. We went through five major releases before this practice was retired: amiga, blob, chrome, dogcow, and eliza.

(Incidentally, one of my colleagues from that team went on to become a Program Manager for Google's browser project...although the browser already had the name before he joined.)

Now here's the kicker: think about what the word "chrome" signifies in Mozilla. It's a URL resource-type designator for referring to XUL markup, right? Well, what is XUL for? It's a markup language for the user-interface aspects of the mozilla browser...the browser's chrome. The hackers behind the mozilla project likely used this word because it was already in somewhat-common usage...and probably to amuse themselves. Perhaps this historical fact is inadequately documented, but to those of us who encountered this part of the lexicon in active use the truth is as plain as day.

Now consider Google's browser. Did they re-invent the rendering engine? No. The bulk of that browser's plumbing - with the notable exception of Lars Bak's javascript runtime and the multiprocess model - was something that they grabbed off the shelf, leaving the main contribution that differentiates the browser is the user-interface aspects of the program...the chrome. While Apple had already brought WebKit to the Windows world, they had utterly failed to make a UI that had any appeal to Windows users. Google created a browser whose chrome was more at-home, as it were. I would not be surprised if this was the genesis of the name.

I've heard people complain that they stole the word 'chrome' from mozilla before. I find that to be an absurd notion, however, given the word's history in hacker slang.

Look up "chrome" in the jargon file. Read the definition. Think about it.

In order to assert your point, you've had to conflate Apple's competitors (Nintendo and Sony) with users of the iPhone SDK. If this were to go before a court, they would ask what Nintendo and Sony could do to compete if apple were to attempt to exercise their market power "soley in terms of price". If they raised the $99 annual fee, as you suggest, this would actually put the iPod Touch in the same market as the Nintendo and Sony platforms (mobile gaming platforms with a high barrier to entry). This cuts against your original attempt to define the relevant market so that the iPod touch stands alone.