Well, he had to say something negative about the MS product, or he would've been mocked, ignored, and/or modded down on basis of finding out about a MS product that may actually work.:)
I am one of those people that pay for everything. But I don't eat nothing but ramen- perhaps these people need to be made aware of the FAFSA? Subsidized Federal loans are my friends!
Yes, I still work a lot to pay for rent, the loans don't cover tution, but I live comfortably enough! No car, thank god tho.
But in this case, it appears KDE isn't using it- it seems to be using a crappy hack where it takes a screenshot and builds the look of the menu background with it.
Err... You don't need OpenGL or any other 3D interface to get alpha blending. You simply need a graphics system that's better designed than X11. You don't need 3D cards to get alpha channels on the computationally cheap, simply a GUI system that had it in mind when it was designed, rather than relying on hacks like taking screenshots whenever you open up a menu.
I'm working on an OS/environment targeted for PDAs, and transparency works fine without some mega performance hit on a 50 MHz 486. No way in hell I'd try KDE 3 or E on that though. But again, that's simply by virtue of alpha blending being a feature of Squeak/Dynapad and not a hack.:)
Offloading your GUI stuff to a GPU makes fine sense, it doesn't matter that Apple did it first and that M$ copied them, and if KDE copies both M$ and Apple. It's still a good enough idea, even if you've got a relatively cheap GUI- your GPU isn't really being used unless you're playing a game, so why not put it to use?
But they're not real transparency, unless you're using a hacked X server. When the window becomes transparent, I'm assuming that it either takes a screenshot of everything else under it quick, or just shows the wallpaper (like in an eterm)?
It's even prettier when you have effects like this with a display architecture that actually supports them, like Squeak's Morphic or Mac OS X. In both, I can make any window transparent, and see what is below them. Not just a static look at what's below, like with these KDE menus or moving windows in E, but a live view. And because it's part of the architecture and not a cheap hack to get around limits of X11, they don't require cycles like E tricks do.:)
In Squeak, you can take this one step further. I can change the color of *any* GUI object I want, and getting transparency is just a matter of specifying the alpha level. It's good fun, I tell you! I typically have my email client and irc client taking up the same real estate, perfectly covering the other... I have both translucent, so if I'm in IRC, I can see when I get a new email, and when I'm doing email, I can see when the channel wakes up. Not only pretty, it can be useful and takes up no extra CPU.:)
Maybe evas will have some fun stuff like this, finally getting it to all of you X11-heads.
Well, I'm dumping Linux and going back to OS X as soon as I can back up some stuff, so I'll have real transparency there- I just wondered how Qt got around the limitations of X11.
I generally prefer not to have to switch to the mouse just to close a window, but then again, I browse using keyboard buttons not a scroll wheel.
It could easily be implemented yes. Learn some GTK+ and get to it.:)
Opera 6 does this too, but on Opera 5 (latest opera for Linux/PPC) it doesn't. It's annoying as hell to have a bunch of windows/tabs off the screen due to a fixed-width tab size.
How does it work in KDE/Qt? There were a few screenshots that showed real-look transparency, in menus for example. Through the menu, you could see the windows below it and/or the desktop. Prior to this, with the exception of a hacked X server, the only transparency I've seen is the transparent-to-root-window like with an eterm or gnome-terminal.
Is whoever took this SS using a hacked X server, or does Qt now have it's own display sub system that does rendering for all Qt Windows, including let Qt applications share real a alpha channel with eachother?
Yup, I'm running Debian 3.0 on an iBook 500 MHz. I could try the monitor spanning, but I can try to do it this week. I'm in the middle of a project so I don't be able to try it tonight. I'm not sure where my VGA cable is either.:/ But if I find out, I'll reply to this message and report- if there are any other iBook2 users runing Linux (I know there are!) please let us know!
I don't think it's synical at all. Cynical, perhaps.:P
But seriously, since these are real scientists doing (mostly) good science, with real funding from organizations like the NSF, I wouldn't be surprised if the primary contributers used parts of their budgets for the site. Other than that, there are plenty of ways to get money for non-profit science sites.
Have a look around, there are quite a few scientific organizations without banner ads. That's because, unlike a lot of sites with banners, they're doing something of some real value.:)
It doesn't take a lot of grant money to keep a page like this going for a year. The contributers and webmaster(s) probably contribute their work for free. Having a machine or two and a decently fast line doesn't take $10k a year.
No one ever claimed that GNOME isn't useful. Not having well designed UI guidelines doesn't make GNOME useless, it just makes it inconsistent at best, and nearly impossible to use at worse. Which it is, unfortunately. Windows is also quite inconsistent, even though they've had design guidelines for a while. But like with GNOME, they were put out as an afterthought.
I'm not much of a fan of Windows, and I don't use it very often, but it's still more consistent than GNOME. (I use Linux at home and work) Maybe in another 6 years GNOME will achieve the same level of consistency that Windows has now, after the same normalizing process that occured with Windows does with GNOME. Windows is still less consistent than some other options, but it's catching up, no doubt because the HIG were put out.
False that it necessarily follows that the GUIs for Gnome/KDE/Windowmaker are therefore costing us money.
They are. They waste time, and as the adage does, time is money. When I'm at work, that 20 minutes a day I have to spend trying to figure out those inconsistent GNOME apps costs me 20 minutes where I could have been doing real work. Maybe your time is worth nothing, but a lot of us have more to do than dick around with poorly designed GNOME apps.
The Mac OS and the Newton OS are two examples where design guidelines were developed with the OS/GUI system and made available to developers from very early on. It's not surprising that they're the most consistent computing platforms around.
I have Linux installed now, but I've not tried it. I'm switching back to OS X as soon as I get a hold of Jag. [1]
If you could, please shoot me an email and let me know of your success.
I've a feeling that to get it working in OS 9, it involves editing a resource. I think that all ATI 128 (in general, or maybe just all Mobility 128s) share the same extension as a driver. In the extension, there is probably an if-then that gets the gestalt of the machine, and doesn't tell OS 9 that it can do monitor spanning if it's an iBook.
Well, this appears to be yet another instance where they put up an Ask Slashdot when a 30-second Google search mostly suffices: have a look at this.:) Doesn't include a solution for OS X, but definately has our answer.
[1] I used to use Linux as my primary OS when I used a PC, bought a Mac 2.5 years ago for OS X, but switched to Linux for a while to see if it still sucked like I remembered. Seems to suck even more after getting used to Mac OS X.:P
I came across the same info myself- same chip as in older PowerBooks which had the ability to monitor-span. I've a feeling that it's disabled as a part of the driver- to give people a reason to get a PB over an iBook, I suppose.
To get it to work with the iBook, I imagine you'd have to write a new driver for OS X. Perhaps the ATI 128 driver from Linux and docs from ATI (specs) and Apple (DDK, monitors-api for OS X) should be enough? Apple may have done something to disable this feature on the chip itself, or perhaps in OpenFirmware, but I pray that it's just an issue of drivers.
Can Linux/X11 use monitor spanning on a PowerBook with the same chip as in the iBook? If that's the case, perhaps the next step to determine if it's just a gimpy driver in OS X or something in HW/firmware would be to see if the same technique to get dual-head setup for a PowerBook works for the iBook with the same gfx chipset.
Many iBook owners will be forever in your debt if you got this to work. Myself included, at least until I sell my iBook to get an OQO for running Dynapad.:)
It's not evil advertising so much as either a) mozilla sucking or b) something in the slash HTML that really blows. I've run into this sort of thing in Opera 5 on Linux/PPC occasionally as well.
I'm generally for open anything, as long as everyone plays fair, but I can't say that I'm too interested in open hardware, and I certainly don't see some pressing need for it.
Well doc'd hardware is needed though, for sure. That is practical, to get new OSes on new hardware. However, outside of that, open hardware is a lot less pragmatically useful than open source. Most users and coders don't know how to make a change someone else's ugly C code that runs their computer, let alone have the knowledge to make any worthwhile chance. Having to deal with changes like this in BIOS or physical ones is even more far out.
I'm a coder, but I avoid using applications written in languages with a culture of insane layout and poor IDEs, like C, C++ and assembly. Opera is about the only app I use along these lines. Even if it were open source, I couldn't do much to it without spending way to much time for little result.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I prefer logical software development systems and environments, like Emacs and Squeak. If there's a small change I want to make in either of these environments, I can do so quite quickly. I do a lot of Smalltalk programming, granted which helps in this- but I was using Squeak as a customizable environment before I was very experienced in Smalltalk. Likewise, I'm no elisp guru, very far from it, but I can navigate around and find where to make my chance.
For a person who is interested in a sensible computer system that works with me (rather than me working for it), these sort of things are the real power of open source. Not do I not have to worry about company abandoning me by cancelling the product (as in closed-source s/w), I don't have to worry about whether or not some group of coders will change what I want. I may have the source to every app on a Linux system, but the time and energy spent to find out what to do and where to do it is prohibitive, such that I still would have to rely on someone who has invested all of that time+energy.
Hardware is a lot like this to me. I just want hardware that works- if open hardware makes better and cheaper hardware, so be it. But unless I see some practical application to my own usage environments, I can't say I'll get to excited about it.
I'm not sure if I'd characterize Haskell as an aborted brain child. Some people use Haskell. Some people like it. At a lot of schools in the US at least, they teach Scheme, when all the students/faculty have "accepted" C, C++, and Java as "superior" for teaching. Which is blatently bullshit. Algol-kid languages suck, we all know that. (heh, couldn't help it) But the point still stands.
Most people here on/. would say that same thing about Lisp-related languages that you do about Haskell. Esp that they were forced to use it, to their detriment, in an intro CS class, or perhaps in AI. I love Lisp myself, but I also think Haskell is quite interesting, and also can be very useful.
There's no difference between you, "L1sp rules und haskell dr00ls!" and all the slashkiddiez on here that say "perl and C 0wnZ j00! fsck lisp!"
People pretend that the only option is to let these 3rd world children starve, but giving them just enough food to bear a new generation does a lot more torture to them and their children in the end.
If you're interested in the well-intentioned farce that is international aid, I highly suggest reading the book "The Road to Hell" by Michael Maren. It's really sick the way the aid-machine works, and how people who are just interested in getting that warm-fuzzy feeling are not only blind to it, but prefer to keep it that way.
Before you get into any environmental issues, you really must read Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" trilogy- including the books Ishmael, My Ishmael and the Story of B. Could be thought of as environmental books, but not in the typical way. Very easy reads, fiction books that are philosophy/fact very thinly veiled by a boring plot. But what is really being said is more than enough to keep you going.
The first book, Ishmael blows the minds of some, but I can't say it did me. The Story of B was much more valuable to the way that I think.
Also, remember that is what is good for the planet is good for us. While it has it's own worth, deep ecology [1] and gaia type stuff is easily attacked and broken down like any emotion-based thing. All of this stuff (/me waves arms) isn't worth anything if we cannot sustain our own lives and the life support system we call Earth.
[1] This is coming from an ecologist, an actual scientist. Not sure why they call it deep ecology rather than deep environmentalism- ecology is real science and deep ecology is not.
Well, Western greed in the rainforest rather than poverty.
All of those social issues, as well as the way we treat the planet, go a lot deeper. Giving people food isn't a solution. It just lets a new generation of starving people be born- we must attack problems, not symptoms. Putting people in jail doesn't remove the cause, so you'll just have a steady stream of angrier people.
All of your more important issues will be meaning less if we've not anywhere to inhabit.
Indeed, that stuff gets me all fuzzy inside. I'm very far from a hardware person, but this makes me want to get me a board of FPGAs and get'a'hackin. Amazing.
The really cool things about applications of GP/EA here isn't that it learned so much as the solution it came to. Often times, especially when we're thinking about ways to do stuff in hardware, rather than some simple software algorithm, evolutionary computation results in solutions that we humans wouldn't have thought of.
A system that evaluates the effectiveness of a solution and refines it from there, that does so using real-world fitness ends up including factors that an engineer wouldn't have thought of. Perhaps because these variables are unknown, or seeminly insignifigant.
A while back, you'll remember,/. had a story about using FPGAs and EA to program an array of FPGAs to distinguish the difference between "Yes" and "No" (or something to that effect, perhaps on/off). After many generations, the solution it came to not only work, but why it worked wasn't understood by the scientist. The best known human solution for something like that would've taken twice as many circuits. It included factors and variables (like magnetic resonance given off by excluded FPGA chips that weren't part of the circuit, but were still recieving power! when removed, the circuit didn't work) that humans wouldn't normally consider.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, he had to say something negative about the MS product, or he would've been mocked, ignored, and/or modded down on basis of finding out about a MS product that may actually work. :)
I am one of those people that pay for everything. But I don't eat nothing but ramen- perhaps these people need to be made aware of the FAFSA? Subsidized Federal loans are my friends!
Yes, I still work a lot to pay for rent, the loans don't cover tution, but I live comfortably enough! No car, thank god tho.
But in this case, it appears KDE isn't using it- it seems to be using a crappy hack where it takes a screenshot and builds the look of the menu background with it.
Err... You don't need OpenGL or any other 3D interface to get alpha blending. You simply need a graphics system that's better designed than X11. You don't need 3D cards to get alpha channels on the computationally cheap, simply a GUI system that had it in mind when it was designed, rather than relying on hacks like taking screenshots whenever you open up a menu.
:)
I'm working on an OS/environment targeted for PDAs, and transparency works fine without some mega performance hit on a 50 MHz 486. No way in hell I'd try KDE 3 or E on that though. But again, that's simply by virtue of alpha blending being a feature of Squeak/Dynapad and not a hack.
Offloading your GUI stuff to a GPU makes fine sense, it doesn't matter that Apple did it first and that M$ copied them, and if KDE copies both M$ and Apple. It's still a good enough idea, even if you've got a relatively cheap GUI- your GPU isn't really being used unless you're playing a game, so why not put it to use?
But they're not real transparency, unless you're using a hacked X server. When the window becomes transparent, I'm assuming that it either takes a screenshot of everything else under it quick, or just shows the wallpaper (like in an eterm)?
:)
:)
It's even prettier when you have effects like this with a display architecture that actually supports them, like Squeak's Morphic or Mac OS X. In both, I can make any window transparent, and see what is below them. Not just a static look at what's below, like with these KDE menus or moving windows in E, but a live view. And because it's part of the architecture and not a cheap hack to get around limits of X11, they don't require cycles like E tricks do.
In Squeak, you can take this one step further. I can change the color of *any* GUI object I want, and getting transparency is just a matter of specifying the alpha level. It's good fun, I tell you! I typically have my email client and irc client taking up the same real estate, perfectly covering the other... I have both translucent, so if I'm in IRC, I can see when I get a new email, and when I'm doing email, I can see when the channel wakes up. Not only pretty, it can be useful and takes up no extra CPU.
Maybe evas will have some fun stuff like this, finally getting it to all of you X11-heads.
Well, I'm dumping Linux and going back to OS X as soon as I can back up some stuff, so I'll have real transparency there- I just wondered how Qt got around the limitations of X11.
I generally prefer not to have to switch to the mouse just to close a window, but then again, I browse using keyboard buttons not a scroll wheel.
:)
It could easily be implemented yes. Learn some GTK+ and get to it.
Opera 6 does this too, but on Opera 5 (latest opera for Linux/PPC) it doesn't. It's annoying as hell to have a bunch of windows/tabs off the screen due to a fixed-width tab size.
How does it work in KDE/Qt? There were a few screenshots that showed real-look transparency, in menus for example. Through the menu, you could see the windows below it and/or the desktop. Prior to this, with the exception of a hacked X server, the only transparency I've seen is the transparent-to-root-window like with an eterm or gnome-terminal.
Is whoever took this SS using a hacked X server, or does Qt now have it's own display sub system that does rendering for all Qt Windows, including let Qt applications share real a alpha channel with eachother?
That's why we use hotkeys- Ctrl-W is your friend. :)
Touche. :)
:/ But if I find out, I'll reply to this message and report- if there are any other iBook2 users runing Linux (I know there are!) please let us know!
Yup, I'm running Debian 3.0 on an iBook 500 MHz. I could try the monitor spanning, but I can try to do it this week. I'm in the middle of a project so I don't be able to try it tonight. I'm not sure where my VGA cable is either.
I don't think it's synical at all. Cynical, perhaps. :P
:)
But seriously, since these are real scientists doing (mostly) good science, with real funding from organizations like the NSF, I wouldn't be surprised if the primary contributers used parts of their budgets for the site. Other than that, there are plenty of ways to get money for non-profit science sites.
Have a look around, there are quite a few scientific organizations without banner ads. That's because, unlike a lot of sites with banners, they're doing something of some real value.
It doesn't take a lot of grant money to keep a page like this going for a year. The contributers and webmaster(s) probably contribute their work for free. Having a machine or two and a decently fast line doesn't take $10k a year.
No one ever claimed that GNOME isn't useful. Not having well designed UI guidelines doesn't make GNOME useless, it just makes it inconsistent at best, and nearly impossible to use at worse. Which it is, unfortunately. Windows is also quite inconsistent, even though they've had design guidelines for a while. But like with GNOME, they were put out as an afterthought.
I'm not much of a fan of Windows, and I don't use it very often, but it's still more consistent than GNOME. (I use Linux at home and work) Maybe in another 6 years GNOME will achieve the same level of consistency that Windows has now, after the same normalizing process that occured with Windows does with GNOME. Windows is still less consistent than some other options, but it's catching up, no doubt because the HIG were put out.
False that it necessarily follows that the GUIs for Gnome/KDE/Windowmaker are therefore costing us money.
They are. They waste time, and as the adage does, time is money. When I'm at work, that 20 minutes a day I have to spend trying to figure out those inconsistent GNOME apps costs me 20 minutes where I could have been doing real work. Maybe your time is worth nothing, but a lot of us have more to do than dick around with poorly designed GNOME apps.
The Mac OS and the Newton OS are two examples where design guidelines were developed with the OS/GUI system and made available to developers from very early on. It's not surprising that they're the most consistent computing platforms around.
I have Linux installed now, but I've not tried it. I'm switching back to OS X as soon as I get a hold of Jag. [1]
:) Doesn't include a solution for OS X, but definately has our answer.
:P
If you could, please shoot me an email and let me know of your success.
I've a feeling that to get it working in OS 9, it involves editing a resource. I think that all ATI 128 (in general, or maybe just all Mobility 128s) share the same extension as a driver. In the extension, there is probably an if-then that gets the gestalt of the machine, and doesn't tell OS 9 that it can do monitor spanning if it's an iBook.
Well, this appears to be yet another instance where they put up an Ask Slashdot when a 30-second Google search mostly suffices: have a look at this.
[1] I used to use Linux as my primary OS when I used a PC, bought a Mac 2.5 years ago for OS X, but switched to Linux for a while to see if it still sucked like I remembered. Seems to suck even more after getting used to Mac OS X.
I came across the same info myself- same chip as in older PowerBooks which had the ability to monitor-span. I've a feeling that it's disabled as a part of the driver- to give people a reason to get a PB over an iBook, I suppose.
:)
To get it to work with the iBook, I imagine you'd have to write a new driver for OS X. Perhaps the ATI 128 driver from Linux and docs from ATI (specs) and Apple (DDK, monitors-api for OS X) should be enough? Apple may have done something to disable this feature on the chip itself, or perhaps in OpenFirmware, but I pray that it's just an issue of drivers.
Can Linux/X11 use monitor spanning on a PowerBook with the same chip as in the iBook? If that's the case, perhaps the next step to determine if it's just a gimpy driver in OS X or something in HW/firmware would be to see if the same technique to get dual-head setup for a PowerBook works for the iBook with the same gfx chipset.
Many iBook owners will be forever in your debt if you got this to work. Myself included, at least until I sell my iBook to get an OQO for running Dynapad.
It's not evil advertising so much as either a) mozilla sucking or b) something in the slash HTML that really blows. I've run into this sort of thing in Opera 5 on Linux/PPC occasionally as well.
I'm generally for open anything, as long as everyone plays fair, but I can't say that I'm too interested in open hardware, and I certainly don't see some pressing need for it.
Well doc'd hardware is needed though, for sure. That is practical, to get new OSes on new hardware. However, outside of that, open hardware is a lot less pragmatically useful than open source. Most users and coders don't know how to make a change someone else's ugly C code that runs their computer, let alone have the knowledge to make any worthwhile chance. Having to deal with changes like this in BIOS or physical ones is even more far out.
I'm a coder, but I avoid using applications written in languages with a culture of insane layout and poor IDEs, like C, C++ and assembly. Opera is about the only app I use along these lines. Even if it were open source, I couldn't do much to it without spending way to much time for little result.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I prefer logical software development systems and environments, like Emacs and Squeak. If there's a small change I want to make in either of these environments, I can do so quite quickly. I do a lot of Smalltalk programming, granted which helps in this- but I was using Squeak as a customizable environment before I was very experienced in Smalltalk. Likewise, I'm no elisp guru, very far from it, but I can navigate around and find where to make my chance.
For a person who is interested in a sensible computer system that works with me (rather than me working for it), these sort of things are the real power of open source. Not do I not have to worry about company abandoning me by cancelling the product (as in closed-source s/w), I don't have to worry about whether or not some group of coders will change what I want. I may have the source to every app on a Linux system, but the time and energy spent to find out what to do and where to do it is prohibitive, such that I still would have to rely on someone who has invested all of that time+energy.
Hardware is a lot like this to me. I just want hardware that works- if open hardware makes better and cheaper hardware, so be it. But unless I see some practical application to my own usage environments, I can't say I'll get to excited about it.
Yarrrrrrr!
Except people use Mandrake! but not me! NO WAY NO HOW!
I doubt that this will really help UnitedLinux, because no one in the states really uses TurboLinux.
I'm not sure if I'd characterize Haskell as an aborted brain child. Some people use Haskell. Some people like it. At a lot of schools in the US at least, they teach Scheme, when all the students/faculty have "accepted" C, C++, and Java as "superior" for teaching. Which is blatently bullshit. Algol-kid languages suck, we all know that. (heh, couldn't help it) But the point still stands.
Most people here on /. would say that same thing about Lisp-related languages that you do about Haskell. Esp that they were forced to use it, to their detriment, in an intro CS class, or perhaps in AI. I love Lisp myself, but I also think Haskell is quite interesting, and also can be very useful.
There's no difference between you, "L1sp rules und haskell dr00ls!" and all the slashkiddiez on here that say "perl and C 0wnZ j00! fsck lisp!"
People pretend that the only option is to let these 3rd world children starve, but giving them just enough food to bear a new generation does a lot more torture to them and their children in the end.
If you're interested in the well-intentioned farce that is international aid, I highly suggest reading the book "The Road to Hell" by Michael Maren. It's really sick the way the aid-machine works, and how people who are just interested in getting that warm-fuzzy feeling are not only blind to it, but prefer to keep it that way.
Before you get into any environmental issues, you really must read Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" trilogy- including the books Ishmael, My Ishmael and the Story of B. Could be thought of as environmental books, but not in the typical way. Very easy reads, fiction books that are philosophy/fact very thinly veiled by a boring plot. But what is really being said is more than enough to keep you going.
The first book, Ishmael blows the minds of some, but I can't say it did me. The Story of B was much more valuable to the way that I think.
Also, remember that is what is good for the planet is good for us. While it has it's own worth, deep ecology [1] and gaia type stuff is easily attacked and broken down like any emotion-based thing. All of this stuff (/me waves arms) isn't worth anything if we cannot sustain our own lives and the life support system we call Earth.
[1] This is coming from an ecologist, an actual scientist. Not sure why they call it deep ecology rather than deep environmentalism- ecology is real science and deep ecology is not.
Well, Western greed in the rainforest rather than poverty.
All of those social issues, as well as the way we treat the planet, go a lot deeper. Giving people food isn't a solution. It just lets a new generation of starving people be born- we must attack problems, not symptoms. Putting people in jail doesn't remove the cause, so you'll just have a steady stream of angrier people.
All of your more important issues will be meaning less if we've not anywhere to inhabit.
Indeed, that stuff gets me all fuzzy inside. I'm very far from a hardware person, but this makes me want to get me a board of FPGAs and get'a'hackin. Amazing.
The really cool things about applications of GP/EA here isn't that it learned so much as the solution it came to. Often times, especially when we're thinking about ways to do stuff in hardware, rather than some simple software algorithm, evolutionary computation results in solutions that we humans wouldn't have thought of.
/. had a story about using FPGAs and EA to program an array of FPGAs to distinguish the difference between "Yes" and "No" (or something to that effect, perhaps on/off). After many generations, the solution it came to not only work, but why it worked wasn't understood by the scientist. The best known human solution for something like that would've taken twice as many circuits. It included factors and variables (like magnetic resonance given off by excluded FPGA chips that weren't part of the circuit, but were still recieving power! when removed, the circuit didn't work) that humans wouldn't normally consider.
A system that evaluates the effectiveness of a solution and refines it from there, that does so using real-world fitness ends up including factors that an engineer wouldn't have thought of. Perhaps because these variables are unknown, or seeminly insignifigant.
A while back, you'll remember,
Man, I love this stuff.