3DIs - The final frontier

Grok Headline matches for 3DIs - The final frontier

Space: Final frontier is final resting
place

Space: Final frontier is final resting
place 12/22/2004 01:26 AM
ZDNet Dec 21 2004 12:51PM GMT

IT's Final Frontier

IT's Final Frontier 03/06/2004 02:02 AM
FEATURE: Private IT firms -- especially networking, security and chipmakers -- must play a critical role in NASA's moon and Mars missions, experts say. What's more, NASA has to let them.

Final Frontier Trader

Final Frontier Trader 04/13/2004 04:41 AM
Final Frontier Trader 0.65 released

Final Frontier, the space between our
ears.

Final Frontier, the space between our
ears. 04/16/2004 10:27 AM
A viilage to reinvent the world : Gaviotas "In 1965 Paulo Lugari was flying over the impoverished Llanos Orientales, the “eastern plains” that border Venezuela. The soil of the Llanos is tough and acidic, some of the worst in Colombia. Lugari mused that if people could live here they could live anywhere.....The following year Lugari and a group of scientists, artists, agronomists and engineers took the 15-hour journey along a tortuous route from Bogota to the Llanos Orientales to settle."

"...they would need to be very resourceful. So they invented wind turbines that convert mild breezes into energy, super-efficient pumps that tap previously inaccessible sources of water [powered by a child's playground seesaw!], and solar kettles that sterilize drinking water using the furious heat of the tropical sun....They even invented a rain forest!" (from "Gavio tas - A village to reinvent the World", by Tim Weisman) Amidst the strife of war torn Columbia, Gaviotas persists and even flourishes. " "When we import solutions from the US or Europe," said Lugari, founder of Gaviotas, "we also import their problems."....Over the years Gaviotas technicians have installed thousands of the windmills across Colombia....Since Gaviotas refuses to patent inventions, preferring to share them freely, the design has been copied from Central America to Chile."

Gaviotas is real, yes, but it is also a state of mind - as if Ben Franklin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Leonardo Da Vinci - all of the great those giants who reinvisioned the possible - were reincarnated : as a small Columbian village on a once-desolate plain. &qu ot;Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called Paolo Lugari the "inventor of the world." "

Electrovaya sets sights on final
frontier

Electrovaya sets sights on final
frontier 06/30/2004 10:50 PM
globetechnology.com Jul 1 2004 3:13AM GMT

Star Trek Enterprise : The Final
Frontier

Star Trek Enterprise : The Final
Frontier 02/05/2005 09:42 PM
"Star Trek: Enterprise...will end its four-season run in May, broadcaster UPN says."

Entertainment News: Now, explore the
final frontier with 'Star Trek's' online
game!

Entertainment News: Now, explore the
final frontier with 'Star Trek's' online
game! 09/08/2004 11:59 PM
Keralanext.com - Wed Sep 8, 05:36 pm GMT

Final Frontier: Private Enterprise
Counts Down For Space Travel (Investor's
Business Daily)

Final Frontier: Private Enterprise
Counts Down For Space Travel (Investor's
Business Daily) 06/18/2004 07:18 PM
Investor's Business Daily - At 6:30 a.m. Monday, a unique aircraft will fire up its turbojets and take to the skies for a record-breaking flight over California's Mojave Desert.

Search, the Final Frontier - Planning
Search Budgets

Search, the Final Frontier - Planning
Search Budgets 08/12/2004 03:00 PM
Source: Search Engine Guide - Finding a balance between intelligent online advertising options and intergalactic online advertising costs will be a challenge for small business owners in the coming years. As with most challenging business problems, the best decisions come...

Peoplesoft spurns Oracle's final final
offer

Peoplesoft spurns Oracle's final final
offer 02/10/2004 02:48 AM
On the curious grounds that it's undervalued

What is Frontier?

What is Frontier? 06/27/2004 04:46 AM
Bouche la be! 27 Septembre 2001 6:20 - c'est aujourd'hui. Votre vote: ah bon .. Userland fraternity .. What is Frontier? .. FrontierFrontier .. Frontiers .. software .. Frontier

frontier.userland.com
track this site | 3 links

Open Frontier

Open Frontier 05/17/2004 08:44 AM
Dave Winer: At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Does anybody remember Domino Go WebServer?  Anybody?  Bueller? The thought process that Dave describes exactly mirrors the thought process that IBM went through a few years back when it decided to participate in Apache.

The next search frontier

The next search frontier 06/14/2004 04:35 PM
Source: cnnmoney - Investors' focus right now is mainly on the Web search market and the battles breaking out between Ask Jeeves, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. But later this year, you'll see interest shift to the emerging market for...

The Frontier of Oil Refining

The Frontier of Oil Refining 04/04/2005 07:10 PM
Frontier Oil is profiting handsomely from being able to process heavy crude oil. But what's the earnings potential?

Frontier Dreams

Frontier Dreams 05/21/2004 12:50 PM
In the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about the open-s ourcing of the Frontier kernel, and like some other folks it’s made me dream of software that’s close in spirit to the early versions of Frontier, before it became the basis for a content management system.

For those who don’t know, Frontier began life as a scripting system for Macintosh. But not just another language—it included an object database and a relatively rich (for the time) library of verbs. You wrote code in an outliner, which I still think is a wonderful way to write code.

You used it do many of the same things people use Perl and Python (and so on) for today, only it was on Macintosh System 7. Instead of using pipes and Unix-y things for inter-application communication, it used Apple events. (Like AppleScript.) It was very common to use Frontier to do tasks that required scripting one or more other applications.

For instance, your script might grab data from a Filemaker database, format it as text in Frontier, then create a new email message in Eudora and send it. With Frontier’s scheduler, its cron-equivalent, you could make this happen once an hour or whatever. And you might archive the data in its object database and create weekly reports based on that data.

That’s just a for-instance, of course. The gist of it was that it made it possible to do custom things that apps like Filemaker and Eudora would never (quite rightly) have supported on their own.

Sounds like AppleScript, right? Well, yes. But Frontier brought some things that AppleScript doesn’t have. (The browse-able object database, the richer library of verbs, the code outliner, the scheduler, and so on. Frontier is an entire environment on its own, though an open one, aware of the rest of the system.)

My dream app

First thing—I don’t have plans to work on Frontier. I’d love to use the results of someone else’s work, though! As much fun as it would be for me to work on it (partly because the kernel is an old friend, but more so because I know a lot of Frontier users who are cool cats) it just isn’t on my path. However, I’d be happy to make sure my software works well with people who want to script it with Frontier.

Anyway... my dream app goes back to that earlier vision of Frontier. To bring it up-to-date, there are a few things I’d love to see:

Python

Whitespace-aware Python just begs to be written in an outliner. The language is similar in style to UserTalk (Frontier’s scripting language), but, key fact, it’s object-oriented.

The object-oriented thing is a big deal: I’ve gotten so I won’t even consider writing in a procedural language for anything but the smallest of tasks. I want objects.

And Python is just plain cool.

I wouldn’t advocate dropping UserTalk, I’d argue for making Python a first-class peer of UserTalk. There are some challenges to consider, though. Frontier internally is receptive to other languages. (Note that you can write scripts in any OSA language, including AppleScript). But you’d have to make it so Python could access the object database (to store and retrieve data and to call other scripts) and you’d want a way to freeze-dry Python objects in the database.

Cocoa front-end

Okay, obviously I don’t care about classic Mac OS or Windows. I care about OS X.

When Frontier was written, there were no system-supplied user interface controls for tables, outlines, and toolbars. And all applications polled for events (via WaitNextEvent, if I remember correctly).

The first obvious thing to do is replace a bunch of the user interface code with .nib files and standard Cocoa widgets. However, I think I’d retain the existing outliner for writing scripts. (Cocoa and Carbon can co-exist: it’s not a problem.) But all toolbars, the object-database browser, text-editing views, and so on would use Cocoa user interface.

In theory, you’d end up with less code, better performance, and a modern OS X UI.

Bonus points: custom windows

Sometimes you want to create a mini-application, a custom dialog or window backed by a script. Frontier has a long history (at least on classic Mac OS) of supporting this: you could run dialogs from resources, you could run MacBird cards.

In the year 2004, the thing to do would be to run dialogs and windows from .nib files. You’d lay out your user interface using Interface Builder, then run it in Frontier.

How would you handle wiring up actions and outlets to scripts in Interface Builder? Glad you asked. You probably wouldn’t. One way to handle this is to give each item a unique tag in IB. Then your script might have a handler like on itemDidSendAction (itemRef, actionRef). This would be called when a checkbox was clicked, a button pressed, whatever. Your script would, obviously, have to branch on which item sent the action and what the action was. Not quite as slick as wiring up actions, but it would work.

The other side of the coin is outlets. That’s where tags come in. To get a reference to an item, you might write something like itemRef = cocoaWindow.itemWithTag (tag, windowRef). Then you could do things like set the value of a text field like so: cocoaWindow.setStringValueForItem (itemRef, someString).

Double bonus points

Get PyObjC in the mix of all this, and now you’re talking about something extraordinary.

Anyway...

It’s possible that there will be an exciting burst of creativity once the kernel is made open-source. I think that’s totally cool, it it comes to be. For my part, I’d be happy to answer any questions I can for people who work on the code, since I know a little about it.

It’s entirely possible that the things I’d like to see are not the things most people would like to see, and that’s fine. (But I can dream, right?)

P.S. A glimpse into the kernel: The first thing you’ll discover is that, before Frontier was Frontier, its name was Cancoon.

Frontier and Forking

Frontier and Forking 05/22/2004 03:34 PM
It’s become obvious to me (and, I think, to folks like Jim Roepcke) that Frontier has at least two main areas of interest, reflecting its dual heritage.

On one hand, there are fogeys like me who would love a desktop scripting system that totally embraces OS X. We look back at Frontier of ten years ago and say, hey, we want that, only better and updated for 2004.

On the other hand, there are folks using Radio UserLand and running Manila servers that would like improvements to the server and content management features.

(There may be other areas of interest, but these are the ones I’ve identified so far.)

The fogeys (generally speaking) care about an updated user interface, support for more languages, support for scripting more applications (system.verbs.apps.iTunes?), and so on. The idea is a desktop tool that makes it easier to get more work done.

But folks using Radio and Manila care about scalability, running as a daemon, a Linux port, separating the UI from the server, and so on. Those are all valid and important issues.

As a fogey, I don’t even care that it runs on Windows. But if you’re running a Manila server on Win2K, you very much care, quite rightly, that it runs on Windows. As a fogey, I care more about syntax coloring in the script editor than I care about extending the upper limit of database file size. But if you run a Manila server your priorities are the reverse.

That’s just to say that this could potentially be a serious challenge to whoever manages the kernel. There could be pressure to fork it, more so than most other applications, because of the two strongly different directions it could go in.

What approach might the maintainers take?

One possibility is something like Mozilla-like. With Mozilla, there is a base on which different applications are created. Some of those applications (Firefox) are cross-platform, and others (Camino) are not.

This makes sense to me, because it allows the deep under-the-hood parts (the script evaluator, the object database, etc.) to be shared between these hypothetical different versions of the app.

What I would not like to see happen is a complete fork, where folks with different visions take it in different directions without coordination or sharing.

There are so many things I don’t know. Will there be a community of people that want to work on the app? How many fogeys are there, really? (Maybe we’re grossly outnumbered.) What license will be used? Will there be any kind of formal or informal organization charged with maintaining the kernel? If so, what will be their priorities, and how open will they be to different visions?

As I’ve repeated before, I don’t plan to work on the kernel, fun as it would be, since I’m so busy with my own software—but I like thinking and writing about this story, since it could be the birth of a really great open source project, and it has some interesting and unique dimensions. I’m fascinated by it.

CSS3 - The new Frontier

CSS3 - The new Frontier 05/14/2004 07:53 AM
Web Development stands on the edge of mostly unexplored territory — the mysterious realm of CSS3. How will CSS3 radically change the way we create websites? More importantly, what bits of CSS3 are already supported? This article will answer these questions.

A New Frontier for Humanity

A New Frontier for Humanity 06/21/2004 12:41 PM

It's impossible to overstate the importance of this morning's privately funded space flight by Mike Melvill, who piloted SpaceShipOne into a suborbital flight 100 kilometers high. Neil Armstrong took a giant step in 1969, but this was just as important. I have huge respect for NASA, the U.S. space agency. But NASA needs the help of private explorers and industry, and of people like Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founded who funded this mission. We need NASA for the giant endeavors, but we need privately funded space flight for everything else. Congratulations to all.

Banking: The Next Microsoft Frontier

Banking: The Next Microsoft Frontier 11/14/2003 11:31 AM
It's been assumed that Microsoft's devotion to "wireless industry standards" makes its White Paper on Mobile Web Services a good thing. I'll bet the Trojans felt the same warm, comfortable glow about the Greeks and their Trojan Standard horse.

Virgin soars towards new frontier

Virgin soars towards new frontier 12/27/2004 07:37 PM
SpaceShipOne pioneer Burt Rutan gives a glimpse of what fare-paying passengers can expect when they take their ride into space.

New PC frontier: the entire home

New PC frontier: the entire home 11/16/2003 07:21 PM
IHT Nov 16 2003 6:22PM ET

Intel: Spectrum is the New Frontier

Intel: Spectrum is the New Frontier 07/30/2004 07:13 PM
Internet News Jul 30 2004 10:37PM GMT

Internet the new frontier in war on
terror

Internet the new frontier in war on
terror 09/06/2004 09:16 AM
Pretoria News Sep 6 2004 1:11PM GMT

Frontier-Daemon-Forking-0.01

Frontier-Daemon-Forking-0.01 01/23/2004 05:26 PM

'Webisodes' are the new frontier for
Internet ads

'Webisodes' are the new frontier for
Internet ads 06/04/2004 04:04 AM
Globe and Mail Jun 4 2004 8:13AM GMT

Africa: The Next Wireless Frontier

Africa: The Next Wireless Frontier 01/28/2004 09:14 AM
Business Week Jan 28 2004 12:38PM GMT

China opens the Red Frontier

China opens the Red Frontier 03/19/2003 10:46 PM

Better Communication Is NASA's Next
Frontier

Better Communication Is NASA's Next
Frontier 04/14/2004 12:52 AM
NASA will move quickly to improve communications in the agency after the release of a survey showing employees are still apprehensive about speaking up on safety questions.

The Next Frontier: Telephones for
Toddlers

The Next Frontier: Telephones for
Toddlers 04/17/2005 02:31 PM
An unlikely group of entertainment companies is betting on the phone as a high-tech pacifier.

Frontier kernel open-source

Frontier kernel open-source 05/17/2004 01:24 PM
Dave Winer announced that the Frontier kernel—the C code, the internals of the application—will be made open-s ource. I’m glad: I think it’s a good thing for Frontier and Radio and their users.

During the latter part of my stint at UserLand I worked on the Frontier kernel. A big part of my efforts were on Carbonizing it. Timothy Paustian started the job, and handled all the really crazy low-level stuff like threading, then I did user interface stuff and fixed bugs. In some cases I was able to adapt the Aqua appearance, but going all the way with that would probably have tripled the development time. At least.

Anyway, what I love about the kernel is the way it is written in C but is nevertheless object-oriented. (Remember that it was started in the late ’80s, so C was the natural choice.)

The way it’s done is via the use of structs instead of “real” objects. These structs contain function pointers, so one object can inherit from another and have not just different data but different methods.

I found this to be surprisingly elegant, so much so that now, years later, I sometimes get the urge to write in C just so I can use this style of object-oriented programming. (But then the urge passes, and I stick to Objective-C.)

Paolo on Frontier being open sourced

Paolo on Frontier being open sourced 05/19/2004 01:21 AM
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Recording of Digital Broadcasts Is New
Frontier

Recording of Digital Broadcasts Is New
Frontier 09/01/2004 12:52 AM
Technologies that let people record satellite and Internet radio broadcasts digitally are opening a new front in the recording industry's war on music piracy.

The new frontier digital bounty hunters

The new frontier digital bounty hunters 11/05/2003 10:56 AM
Microsoft it seems is set to put it's money where it's mouth is and offer a $250,000 reward leading to...

Sin City Expands Digital Frontier

Sin City Expands Digital Frontier 04/01/2005 06:16 AM
Robert Rodriguez' violent new movie is gorgeously artificial, with a slate-gray palette punctuated by gruesome splashes of color. But it's hampered by its faithfulness to Frank Miller's graphic novels. Jason Silverman reviews Sin City.

Netcraft: Wikis: The Next Frontier for
Spammers?

Netcraft: Wikis: The Next Frontier for
Spammers? 06/08/2004 03:02 AM
Wikis: the next frontier for link spammers .. it’ll happen in the future .. Wiki spamming is the new black .. If Netcraft is right

news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/04/wikis_the_next_frontier_ for_spammers.html
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Electronic Frontier Foundation takes aim
at 10 key IT patents

Electronic Frontier Foundation takes aim
at 10 key IT patents 07/06/2004 05:07 PM
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has identified 10 'most wanted' patents, which it said are too broad, ignore the existence of prior art or are so obvious as to be too trivial for patenting.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Action
Center

Electronic Frontier Foundation Action
Center 05/09/2004 08:55 AM
Write to congress and tell them to support the DMCRA .. Check out this "Action Alert" at the EFF .. tell your representatives .. digital fair use rights .. starting a campaign .. EFF's site

action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2421
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"WSJ.com - Many Advertisers
Find Blogging Frontier Is Still Too
Wild"

"WSJ.com - Many Advertisers
Find Blogging Frontier Is Still Too
Wild" 03/27/2005 04:43 AM

"FAQs about Frontier open source
release"

"FAQs about Frontier open source
release" 05/19/2004 10:25 AM

Grok Description matches for 3DIs - The final frontier
GrokA matches for 3DIs - The final frontier

3DIs - The final frontier

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: