It's an old enough language, that when Java was written, Java took a lot of cues from Obj-C.

What language features do you have in mind specifically?

Now I honestly don't know anything about Objective C, but if you asked me of the origins of Java, I'd point to SIMULA, C++, and BETA.

No, Google Translate get's it wrong. The article actually only says that certain *parts* of the project were delayed till 2006:

Ein Ziel, das nicht zu schaffen war, unter anderem, weil *einige* Ausschreibungen für das Projekt erst 2006 anliefen.

Which roughly translates to:

A target that could never be met, partly because *some* contracts only went out to tender as late as 2006.

Jeez. You brought this back up from your capture file. This is the exact same quote I replied to half a year ago or so...

Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't recall having ever discussed anything relating to this with you. But true, I've linked to Bill Buxton's write-up before, and I figure I'd better apologize in advance, cause I'll probably do it again. Even though it wasn't written yesterday it's still an excellent piece.

Yes, I'm quite aware of the central theme of the article, I've actually read it, and if you hadn't been so eager to reply, you might have spotted that I did include the paragraph you echoed a second time.

But thanks for your reply, and despite the harsh tone, I doubt we disagree about anything here at all.

Though Steve Jobs' habit of claiming ownership of all great inventions rubs me the wrong way (this year Apple invented videotelephony), Apple deserves credit for their work on the iPhone; it was nothing short of a revolution.

Well played sir, well played. However:

[...] my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touchin 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. [...] Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:

Westerman, Wayne (1999). [...] U of Delaware PhD Dissertation

Bill Buxton isn't just some random Microsoft employee, he's one of the pioneers of the industry, and has been working with multi-touch systems since back in the early eighties.

Contrary to popular belief Apple didn't invent multi-touch

Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touchin 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:

Westerman, Wayne (1999). Hand Tracking,Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface. U of Delaware PhD Dissertation: http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf

In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."

Microsoft borrowing ideas from Apple again?

It's probably the other way round. Nice troll though.

[...] tell me that's not some kind of proprietary, non-standard connector

I would expect this to be the standard 30-pin PDMI connector also found on the Dell Streak.

Crash reports probably include the script that was running and maybe the binary file running but how could it access the source code of an arbitrary task/thread/program?

According to TFA Heckman gave a presentation of XSS and SQL injection attacks. So, I imagine that what we're talking about here is Microsoft receiving a dump of IE process memory, which of course will include the malicious script.

Furthermore, how can you tell if this is a malware developer or the first unfortunate victim? Or even an outlier victim whose machine was luckily not correctly configured for the attack?

If you get a sequence of error reports from the same IP within a short period of time, where the only difference is that the script bringing IE down has been modified slightly, you've probably got the developer at the other end of the line. (Online source control on a budget? ;-)

Are you saying that they're actually developing this stuff in a Microsoft IDE (like Visual Studio) that actually phones home source code upon program crash? That sounds like a guaranteed way to keep me away from Visual Studio.

Where did that come from?