I've written a few genetic algorithm/programming things for "music" over the years. However, not being a musician, I approached it only from an algorithmic perspective. The last of these, called "grammidity" can attempt to evolve sequences of midi events based on a kind of grammar that evolves (loosely based on the ideas behind L-systems). I had it online for a couple of years, but it never evolved much of anything interesting. The source code (java) is on sourceforge and includes ways to evolve "plants" and a fuzzer that generates html and which worked quite nicely to break browsers a couple of years back.
But, if you'd used unix first and used "ls", "dir" would not be intuitive at all. It is always interesting how many people equate "intuitive" to "I learned it already" even when that learning process was often far from intuitive itself.
They probably were working on Windows 8 when they put Windows 7 into freeze. I suspect they've been working on new ideas and features (and misfeatures) for a couple of years now. But the article says that they'll be focusing more on Windows 8 next year, which gives them time to put out the major Windows 7 fires and plan for the next release.
gmail started going down for hours (and for some users, more than a day) at a time on a regular basis.
By "on a regular basis" do you mean twice (and unpredictably) in the last year or so?
"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds