There are some theories out there, which explain things like the galaxy rotation problem, but none is so prominent as Modified Newtonian Dynamics. They do so without the need for Dark Matter. DM is still not a proven thing after all.

What did YOU think, again?

The problem with Dell is, that they were never big into R&D. Dells business consisted always of providing quality PCs with reasonable prices through direct (online) distribution. Not much invention here. It doesn't surprise me, that they lack the vision to invent something (r)evolutionary to differentiate them from competitors. IBM (Lenovo), HP, Apple, Asus, they all tried to diversify lately.

"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win."

Gary Lineker

I cannot search for text with the Firefox' find dialog. But they say, that their documents are now fully part of the HTML infrastructure, so they should be searchable, no? Try their self-introduction for HTML 5 and see, whether you can search for "Highlight me!", which is in the middle of the document.

Or I'm doing something wrong here?

I guess, I'm not very social, I kept my MySpace site for only some month. I'm in keeping my mostly inactive LinkedIn account alive strictly for business networking.

But even I have to chat, when email is overhead or not possible! I knew instant messaging back at univeristy since 1994 by virtue of IRC and the chat facility of ICS (internet chess, does it still exist btw?). I think joined ICQ somewhere in 1998 or 1999 because "everyone did it", but had not much use for it. The ICQ client then was quite decent.

In 2000 I found work at a software company as a consultant. Two years later, a colleague suggested using IM for fast communication within the company and our development partners. I installed IM again and was shocked that it had turned into an unusable mess of bloatware so quickly. It rivalled the Realplayer, which was quite a feat! My colleague said, I should install Miranda. I realized, that IM clients can be substituted as long as the protocol is implemented and the network allows it (AIM vs Trillian, anyone?).

I later used Miranda to also connect to AIM, Yahoo!Messenger and - urgh! - MSN Messenger. Nowadays I use Skype to chat, never used GTalk despite being an early user of GMail, so no experience with XMPP protocol and clients.

As the article says, you can be a valuable developer without being exposed to or needing much math but you will be confined to certain areas. Normal developer work is mostly applied mathematical logic, but advanced math is normally not needed.

I think I belong to this group. I'm a chemist turned programmer/consultant and I now mostly work as a consultant for a company providing UML tools. I had my fair share of advanced math in school and during my chemistry studies, but those courses don't compare in any way to the math lectures provided in computer science. This were (introductory) courses in linear algebra and analysis and they were "pure math". Hard proofs and all instead of calculating or solving equations.

I'm nevertheless thankful for these lessons. They taught me consistent and recursive thinking as much or more so as real programming did.

I used to print out HUGE amounts of paper for reference manuals, emails, technical documentation, meeting notes and proceedings etc., etc. Not so anyymore. I do not exactly know why, but somehow I'm now totally content with reading things on the screen. Probably has to do with wider screens or better tools for annotation and sharing. Or my job has somewhat changed and the need of having several pages side by side has dimished. I honestly do not know.

Did not read TFA, but some years ago there was astory about the smallest possible ELF program, which sounded very similar or the same as the summary of TFA: a tiny program, that doesn't output anything, but doesn't need any libraries either nor does make any sxstem calls. So, it's probably a dupe!

OK, so they introduced contextual knowledge (or "world knowledge" or "semantics" if you will) when they saw, that page rank and keyword based search didn't cut it for many search queries? Shouldn't that have come not as an afterthought but long before? I mean, how can anyone expect, that search would never involve some contextual knowledge to be succesful?

My guess is, that Google of course knows this. What they do is to build up contextual knowledge through their own search engine, how people relate words to each other and not by imposing a predefined rule set or ontolgy beforehand like cyc

.

Sorry, but that means exactly the opposite to me: Google Translation very well understood, that one sentence on every page is in a different language and "reversed" that sentence as well. Wouldn't have been possible, if Google Translate would "understand" exactly nothing about language.

Your statements are wrong on so many levels, that it's hard to even begin with. First, if someone says "X is a mere Y" or "X is nothing more than a clever combination of Ys" than you should be very cautious of this reductionism. Of course humans are biological machines, but we are also much more than that. It shouldn't be too hard to grasp, that knowledge and culture and language brings a whole new quality to this whole realm of biological machines. We really stand somewhat outside of normal evolution.

And you also describe the work of geniuses as mix of well known things, only . Music for example is based on rules, patterns and it can be expressed or represented in mathematical algorithms. But what composers do is much more. They have musical ideas, they reflect on them, they have a story. And they mix their ideas in unexpected ways (you can analyze this after the fact, but you cannot guess them beforehand). The whole is really more than the sum of it's parts, we need an holistic approach, not a reductionist one

It doesn't surprise me that this example of reductionism is not only accepted, but also lauded here in /. No one likes the unexplainable, unexpected genius, only "hard work" is accepted. And only here can truly soulless music can be appreciated because "the concept of a soul is imaginary anyway". You dehumanized yourself here.

Once, Oscar Peterson answered to a student, who wanted to impress him by aping him: "yeah, you know what I do, you know, how I do it, but you don't know, WHY I do it". This pattern extracting, rule breaking (made doing so by other rules) program can ape styles, but can it invent new ones? Can it reflect about, what it does? This program reminds me of a more clever version of Karl Jenkins, whose melodies many people find nice but get boring after some pieces, because you begin to know, what musical knowledge and tricks he deploys.

Yes, there is a lot of mathematics underneath music, beginning from very mechanisms of sound creation, over to function of accords and harmonics reaching out to the structure of larger pieces. Every student of musicology knows that. Every student of musicolgy also has to compose smaller pieces after a particular style. It's really not surprising, that a computer program can do it, too. There is probably years of hard work in what Cope did in wading through compositions and writing the program, I won't deny that. But is that really creative? In the times of Mozart, there were a lot of musicians, who "knew the rules". But Mozart remains unique. If he were alive today and listened to Cope's "Mozart" pieces, he would easily outdo them, by inventing something completely different. Computers can analyze the "what" and can apply the "how", but they cannot reflect about the "why".

Market research fiirm Hitwise thinks, that Bing's market share is (was?) actually falling.