Part II For now, sure, I know some math and can stir up some more, and I know some computing and can learn more. So, I've got a 1.8 GHz AMD single core proces

Part II For now, sure, I know some math and can stir up some more, and I know some computing and can learn more. So, I've got a 1.8 GHz AMD single core processor, Windows XP Professional SP3 (I have an official copy of Windows 7 Professional on DVD but have seen no great reason to go to all the trouble to install it and rebuild all my software environment yet), three hard disks, 100 million files, .NET Framework 4.0, a good text editor (KEdit), Visual Basic .NET (comes with the .NET Framework), ASP.NET, ADO.NET, IIS (low level Web server), SQL Server Express, etc. I thought, why not go after about 2/3rds of Internet search, the safe for work part served at best poorly by looking for keywords/phrases? So, how to do that? Not with just routine software! And not with anything commonly talked about for search! I stirred up some math, typed the theorems and proofs into Knuth's TeX, worked up a scalable architecture, and typed in the software. Maybe I should have used Redis, but instead I thought that writing my own session state server would be faster than even understanding Redis. So, my session state server is single threaded ("Look, Ma, no concurrency problems"), for faster lookup rates is trivial to run as several instances as in sharding, and is just some TCP/IP sockets, some de/serialization of instances of my session state class, and uses two instances of a .NET collection class. Simple. It's fast! A server for less than $1500 should be able to keep session state for an hour of inactivity for each user and do the session state work for sending 5000+ Web pages a second. Two standard racks should be able to handle session state for the world. The rest of the software is also readily scalable also from just simple sharding. Currently I have one bug in one Web page -- it's not handling session state just right! But I have the fix in code in another Web page and should copy it over today! My interactive development environment is just KEdit with about 100 macros and some careful use of file system directories. I'm using SQL Server only to record the data from the users and for the results of some batch computations; at one point I actually do make use of a transaction; the data for the searches is drawn from SQL Server with a batch program (run it maybe once a day); some solid state drives (write rarely, read thousands of times a second) should do wonders for the data for the searches. I was about to fix the bug in the Web page but took some opportunities to gather some good initial data. The site will start focused and only slowly grow to be comprehensive -- right, at first do some things that don't scale and please some niche group of users a lot instead of trying to please 2+ billion users a little. Currently the database has only some meaningless data I put in for first testing of the software. It's about time to load in some of the good initial data I have. Then give a critical review, go live, etc. It's getting there. All the work uniquely mine has been fast, fun, and easy, but the whole project has taken far, far, far too long. Why? I worked through about a cubic foot of books and 6000+ Web pages of documentation of Windows, .NET, Visual Basic .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, SQL Server, etc. The main problems: (1) Badly written, obscure documentation (worst bottleneck in the future of computing); (2) computer viruses; (3) SQL Server installation bugs destroying my boot partition requiring rebuilding starting with the XP DVD (barbed wire enema with an unanesthetized upper molar root canal procedure); (4) SQL Server management and administration (e.g., a week of throwing stuff against a wall to see what sticks just to get a SQL Server connection string that will let code for a server side Web page connect with SQL Server); (5) clean, smooth means of system backup and recovery (including for both user data and bootable partitions); (6) Sony DVD drives that quit for no good reason (and inability to buy more IDE DVD drives). Good stuff: (1) KEdit and its macro language; (2) the scripting language Rexx (Microsoft's PowerShell may also be terrific but have yet to move to it); (3) NTFS (fantastic); (4) Visual Basic .NET design, functionality, speed of compilation, compiler error messages, minimal bugs (sweetheart language); (5) what ASP.NET does when it compiles a Visual Basic program (enough for a really nice IDE); (6) NTBACKUP (once understand how to use it, e.g., do have to ask to save "system state", whatever the heck that is, or the saved copy, restored, won't boot -- learn this and how to get around it the hard way, weeks of work); (7) XCOPY; (8) the tools to have server side Web page code write to a log file; (9) Firefox (except for virus vulnerabilities); (10) the classes in the .NET Framework (once learn how to learn about them and use them); (11) Adobe Acrobat (except for virus vulnerabilities); (12) the ability of XP to find device drivers and recognize new devices; (13) Microsoft's anti-virus Safety Scanner (if only from CP67/CMS and Multics, there should be no virus vulnerabilities, but since there are the safety scanner is terrific to have); (14) Knuth's TeX; (15) the Western Digital Passport Ultra 2 TB USB drive! I'm not retired or retiring! Likely I'm still 100% unemployable at anything that would pay enough to let me keep a car going to commute to the job. Y Combinator and VCs want nothing to do with me. But if I can get my Web site up to a search a second, on a server for about $2000, I will be in decent shape financially and on the way to organic growth for my business and much more. Then I'll get a nice house, a building for some cars, at least one Corvette, visit the rest of the family still alive, take off two weeks to pig out on lobster in Maine, get some good grape juice from between Beaune and Dijon, do some cooking, give some dinner parties, go to concerts and operas, continue with the business, go to seminars on mathematical physics, etc. I'll implement and deploy my server farm monitoring techniques and maybe spin it off as a separate business. I have some guesses for some approaches to real AI and might try to implement those. And I will get a kitty cat! We'll see! Good luck on your work with math. Maybe what I typed in here will help; I wish I'd known all that when I started.