In message <200503291903.OAA20926@Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>der Mouse writes
>> I think I have rather more expertise in this field than you,
>
>Oh, undoubtedly.
>
>> and my expert opinion is that I'd have a hard time defending the
>> proposition that Emmanuel's app has any legitimate purpose, outside
>> of toy domains like NETBLT, other than as a DDOS [sensu moi].
>
>Absent the putdown implicit in "toy domains", 


Huh?!? There was no put-down intended. I sincerely hope it was not
taken that way.  The term "toy domain" is in wide use in the research
community to describe work in extremely restricted domains.

What *is* implied is that the domain is so restricted, that solutions
or approaches developed in the "toy domain" may not (or are unlikely
to) scale up to handle the complexities in a more complete or
"typical" or "non-toy" domain.  But when a real-world domain is far
beyond the state of the art, you can do good research in a toy domain.

One well-known example: Terry Winograd's SHRDLU program was a
natural-langauge tty interface to a robot arm. SHRDLU maintained a
restricte English dialogue with the user, and picked up and moved
blocks on a table in response to commands in the dialogue.

Hmm, lets see: http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/ is
more accessible than the book.

That particular domain, "blocks world", is famously a "toy domain".
But I'd once have given my eye-teeth to have done it first.

>I agree - but such
>private network uses do exist, not at all toy. 

[....]

Err, in netowrking, what you describe is exactly what I'd call a "toy
domain".  That says nothing about the uses to which the solution can
be put, though; and nothing negative about the quality or
apporpriateness -- *within that toy domain*.