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For what is worth, yesterday the news was on the home page of the 2nd most read italian newspaper:

http://www.repubblica.it/2009/01/sezioni/tecnologia/google-w...

Indeed. This is really sad.

By the way, I would like to know how could he have made $800.000 in damages. Is this the money spent to make the system more secure?

BTW, have you read the novel 'The Loser' by Thomas Bernhard?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loser_(book)

I bet most people here would like it. One of the three main characters is a fictitious Glenn Gould.

Please ignore the comment above. Don't upvote it. Now that I think of it, it doesn't make much sense.

I'm saying that they probably use a general midi sound bank, with sample sounds and limited control. You can only choose instruments from a predefined palette.

I doubt you could generate your own waveforms, apply your own custom effects and so on.

I never researched much into MIDI ringtones so I might be wrong.

Automated comment spam (using scripts) can be easily blocked just by using random form field names.

I'm surprised that this solution has not been adopted yet by the most popular blogging softwares.

Of course, I forgot it. It's a classic.

They were almost certainly prerecorded. Or he could have composed some MIDI tracks.

But seriously doubt that they were synthesized in real-time.

For SuperCollider there's a book which is not out yet (I have read a draft and found it excellent, especially for beginners) but it should be out soon.

You can try to send an email to one of the authors: http://www.music.utah.edu/faculty/faculty_a-z/david_michael_...

He used to send a pdf of the draft version if you asked him, but since the printed book is due soon (by MIT press) I don't know if this is still true.

There's also 'The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music' by Miller Puckette (the author of Pure Data):

http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/techniques.htm

The examples are, obviously, in Pure Data. But it is an excellent book and all the concepts can be applied to any synthesis language/tool.

For Csound there's 'The Csound Book' by Richard Boulanger (MIT Press):

http://csounds.com/shop/csound-book

This is also excellent. Disclaimer: the author is a friend.

Turn it up! Turn it up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3_HHZFi0As

On a more serious note, I'm really a fan of SuperCollider (especially for it's smalltalk-like dynamic language). It's incredibly good for sound design and real-time experimentation.

But for the best quality output, Csound (http://www.csounds.com/) is hard to beat. Here are some people who tried to recreate the same effect in Csound:

http://csound.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/the-thx™-sound-from-c...

http://joesprojectblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/thx-deep-note-ch...

I've been able to do this in the past. It has always happened by chance.

These experiences often left me in a state of well being.

But I've also experience (quite often) what could be called a lucid nightmare: I understand that I'm dreaming and I decide to wake up. I shake myself, I slowly open my eyes and I start to see the room I'm in. Only to discover that I am still dreaming. At this point, fear kicks in and now I really want to wake up. But the cycle repeats three or four times before I'm relly awake, and each time I'm increasingly more scared of not being able to wake up anymore.

Exactly.

Agree.

> We are witnessing a transition in the way the Internet is used. Mobile content requires a tailor made user experience that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional website model. Although we have grown accustomed to navigating the Web by browsing websites on our PC, consumers are showing an affinity for the App Store model.

Couldn't agree more.

Some of us might dislike this but it's hard not to see where the users are going.

At least in the near future. But I can't foresee a reason for turning back to the browser.

Appstores are also a solution to all the speculations about how to monetize content. If the medium is the message, websites (when interacting with them with the browser) are mostly perceived as free content. Appstores are a different brainframe.

Like I said in other comments I'm just observing the trend. I'm not saying that I'm absolutely happy with this.

For non trivial games I always suggest taking the opengl (gl-es) route.

This sample project should get you started: http://www.71squared.co.uk/iPhone/CrashLanding.zip

This is from Apple itself . It has been removed from their site since the audio code is outdated (it's no longer compatible with most recent OS versions).

It also contains some wrapper code to easily load images into textures and to generate textures with a string of text and a specified font and size.

I think you should provide a way for people to contact you.

Wow. I had completely forgotten how cool it was playing with a hand outside the car window as a kid. It really was an aha moment.

A bit dangerous, I know.

In this case, of course, I agree.

The term framework is almost exclusively used for object oriented designs. That's what I was arguing against.

Of course one should make, use and keep improving his own libraries.

And there's nothing wrong in using other people code either. Provided that it is built in a modular standalone fashion and so it can be easily included / replaced / updated / removed without breaking things.

I'm talking about professional development.

And scalability is one of the reason for which you may want to avoid frameworks.

If you're a professional you want to fully understand your data and how it is generated/modified if you want to solve both functional and load scalability issues.

I totally disagree. And I've made complex web apps since when CGIs in C where the only way to have dynamic generated content.

In fact I think it is the contrary: for small sites (and small budgets) frameworks can be ok. For big websites custom code is a must.

The idea that using a framework makes code easier to maintain is the complete opposite of my experience.

Big (serious) projects require a lot of custom logic which you should write yourself anyway. And it is a lot more painful since you have to stick to the framework logic if you don't want to break things as soon as you update the framework version or if you don't want to make the code unmaintainable.

I have made my own libraries which are designed in a modular fashion (not OO) that I constantly improve and reuse. Code is clean and you can easily understand the flow of each section.

A MVC framework is not the only way to have clean (modular) code.

Your reasoning would apply if you aren't good at designing software architecture, which is a recipe for disaster especially on big projects.

If you're a decent enough programmer (web development is really easy compared to other fields) and you really want versatility, coding from scratch without using a framework is still the best decision.

This is not necessarily true for non web apps. I love Cocoa for instance and the MVC pattern is great for most kinds of apps. But not for the web, IMHO. It's overkill.

There are too many unnecessary abstractions from the protocols. The LAMP stack already gives you everything you need. For instance, PHP with mod_php already is a template processor. There's no need to build another one on top of it. Unless you don't know what you're doing, which is bad anyway.

I still prefer to parse the query string myself, to define my SQL queries (and most of the times a single query can replace 4-5 queries generated from a framework so apps are much faster) and to keep the data as clean and separated from the code as I can (data is always much more important than code and it's much better if it is code agnostic).

With web frameworks there's a lot of magic and it's faster to have a web app up and running. But it's a pain as soon as you want to modify the default behaviors. At least in my experience.

Please, see my answer to the comment below.

If I add a widget with the titles and the teasers of your posts on my website - technically - I'm not copying anything.

This is what syndication is for. I choose what to syndicate, to add value to my website. And you gain exposure from appearing on many different websites. That's why most publish just a teaser of each post and not the full body.

Again, I'm not arguing about what is right (or fair) and what is wrong. I'm just saying that the protocol has been developed for this use.

I can understand your complaints. But syndication (the last S in RSS acronym) means exactly that. And that's what the protocol is intended for. Feed readers came later.

Hilarious. Especially the graph.

Nice post.

I'm always fighting with my strive for perfection myself.

And, sometimes, I'm so tired of struggling with this part of my personality that I end up doing even worse than how I would've done if I would have taken that particular task more lightly.

I agree.

We all make mistakes (especially when we're young, but not only). And the Net already keeps the history of most of our faux pas anyway.

More importantly, we all often change our mind as a result of learning new things and seeing things from new and different perspectives. Which is good!

I played a bit with Q (the predecessor language from the same author) a couple of years ago and I found it really interesting.

As far as I remember you couldn't define functions interactively but just recall them.

This one has a proper REPL environment. You can see all the definitions by evaluating 'show' and dump them all on a file with 'dump'.

I'm just a compound interest program.

I guess it will run an updated iPhone OS (not the full fledged OS X) and it will probably have automatic resolution switch to retain the compatibility with the existing apps catalog.