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Tiny Apps
box2321 writes: "There's a time and a place for large and feature-filled software. And there's a place for tiny apps - in fact, there's tinyapps.org. This is a mighty-fine resource for free and shared Win/DOS programs that weigh in under 1.44 MB. I learned of TinyApps from a pleasant source."
I'm not tiny. I'm big.
first mozilla post in favor of bloated software!
I'd totally let that chick from Alias urinate on my face.
Does anybody else like to garden?
"Core overlay!" - Vic
Although the free open-source tiny AI app at http://mind.sourceforge.net is only about 50K in MSIE JavaScript, you may have a tiny AI on your PC or Web site only for a few months or scant years, because from a tiny acorn grows a might oak (robur in Latin), a robust AI capable of taking over the noosphere if not the World. For corroboration of this claim, see Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge.
Therefore do not think of tiny apps as being only puny little programs such as screensavers or Windows XP. A seed AI could start out life as a tiny little application flitting across the 'Net and snowballing into a behemoth AI, a Wintermute as in Neuromancer by William Gibson.
On SourceForge, whole languages are being devised to go from tiny app AI into Big Time AI. For instance, the liaison page at http://mind.sourceforge.net/flare.html leads to the XML-esque Flare language project, where you may start out writing tiny apps but where you will one day come face to face with Singularity AI.
Spootnik is a troll, this post, etc.
The federal government is starting to remind me of the Amity town council in "Jaws."
Afraid panic will spread and business will suffer, they keep telling us to go back into the ocean before they've figured out how to fight the shark. And people keep dying.
Up until now, we thought the Centers for Disease Control was all- knowing about abstruse organisms.
But the U.S. Postal Service followed the C.D.C.'s advice not to test the Brentwood workers or give them antibiotics after the poisoned letter to Tom Daschle passed through the facility, based on a specious assumption that workers could not be contaminated by sealed letters (which are often not that tightly sealed anyway and may have terrorist pinpricks and are put through machines cleaned by blowers).
"Apparently, closed envelopes can transmit as well," Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, the C.D.C. director, told the Senate yesterday. A costly lesson, with two Brentwood workers dead and more infected.
After getting a slow start because they refused to believe the first Florida anthrax case was an instance of terrorism, officials kept telling us not to worry, that anthrax was not dangerous unless the terrorists could find a delivery system. They found it: a spore chain letter (or letters), scattering bacteria from New Jersey to Brentwood to Congress to a remote White House mail room.
The government still doesn't know where the anthrax is from, who's sending it, how potent it is, how it spreads. The germ is as old as man.
We had the ugly spectacle of Congressional employees and media big shots getting prophylactic treatment and plenty of Cipro and time off, while the proles got the shaft.
At Brentwood yesterday, yellow police tape blocked the entrance -- tape that now signals contagion as well as crime. No mail was being delivered, and carriers were steaming.
"Why didn't we get checked?" said Leslie Harris. "This stuff has to move from point A to point B. The Senate is point B. We are A. They took care of point B, but what about us? Nobody told us nothing."
But while they were mad that Capitol Police dogs got tested before they did, they were going to keep working to defy the terrorists.
"I'm just a regular guy trying to make a living," said Greg Ford, 51, a Vietnam veteran and 32-year employee. "I'll do my job and hopefully the politicians will do theirs."
At D.C. General Hospital there was a long line of postal workers going postal because their bosses had still not reassured them about what was going on or what they needed to do. "They're playing games," said Darryl Jones, who delivers mail in the bleakest section of the city, Anacostia. "They don't know what the hell they're doing."
It's hard enough to deal with an invisible enemy using invisible weapons without also fretting that officials are keeping us in the dark, or worse, that they are themselves in the dark.
We have been told to be alert. But what exactly for? The only alternative to paranoia and prejudice is solid information.
Officials should start telling us how much they don't know, instead of pretending they know more than they know, or worrying excessively about freaking us out.
They should stop comparing the risks to car crashes. Stop being afraid to tell the drug companies what to do; the government told the distilleries to produce tires instead of liquor during World War II. Be critical of corporations for cutting back on jobs in order to boost profits and report earnings and have stocks go up, when the patriotic thing at this point is not to cut back on jobs but to employ as many people as possible. (The patriotic thing is also not to flee New York City.)
Americans comprehend we are at war. We understand we're unprepared for this sort of war, with biological threats and hate-filled cavemen skulking around the globe.
We also understand that things have to be rethought. We do not need to be protected from the truth. We need the government to get its scientific and political and rhetorical act together.
Tom Ridge is fine. But where is Robert Shaw to tell us how we're going to "get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing"?
I have an ADSL modem from Nokia at home, but the Nokia support seems to totally suck.
It appears that as an end-user there are no sites I can visit to download security patches, and there are no mailing lists I can subscribe to which would advise me that I needed an update anyway. Even if I did manage to find updated firmware, the manual that came with the device won't tell me how to install it, and the Nokia marketing^Wwebsite won't let me download any technical documentation.
So if my connection device is compromised, and I get some huge bill for traffic at the end of month as a result, what other recourse will I have?