A New Frontier for Humanity

Grok Headline matches for A New Frontier for Humanity

Doh, The Humanity!

Doh, The Humanity! 07/21/2004 04:40 PM
Doh, The Humanity! Broken web pages, but in a funny way. [via B.A.'s Weblog]

Journalising humanity

Journalising humanity 04/12/2004 10:02 AM
A photo journal of a UNPA Nurse Practitioner's experiences in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Glasses for Humanity

Glasses for Humanity 09/25/2004 04:00 PM
I had one of those what can I do today moments with the idea of donating in-kind to Glasses for Humanity. 90% of eye glasses are wasted -- and Robert Tolmach's foundation is one of the most cost-effective forms of...

Humanity Stoops to a New Low

Humanity Stoops to a New Low 07/30/2004 07:34 PM
Lost Dog Held for $10K Ransom
An elderly man went out for a walk with his dog, on the way home, the dog disappeared. A friend helped him make some Lost Dog posters and he waited by the phone for some good samaritan to return his only companion.
Instead, he got a call from someone demanding $10,000 or he'd never see his dog again. He gathered up half of his savings and went to pay the ransom. The dognapper brandished a knife, took the money and said the dog was tied up to a post nearby. It wasn't.
He went home brokenhearted until he heard a car door slam outside and his dog came running up to greet him. Now he wonders if the dognappers were putting him on the whole time.

Is There Hope for Humanity?: A
Conversation

Is There Hope for Humanity?: A
Conversation 06/05/2005 11:12 PM

I'm beginning to appreciate that conversati ons are useful ways to explore ideas even if they're with yourself. So here's some more thinking out loud between my two schizophrenic halves, Dave the Idealist and Dave the Skeptic, on the subject of whether humanity has what it takes to get its act together and save the world: Dave the Idealist Dave the Skeptic Yes, I know I liked John Gray's book, found it liberating in fact, but I still believe people are good at heart, and their instincts are right if they can re-learn to listen to them. And remember Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." So your argument is that we're going to save the world either by some massive act of collective altruism, even though such a thing is unprecedented, or by some subversive act by some clever noble clique of do-gooders. You know, some people would say that Bush's neocon born-again cabal fit Margaret Mead's 'small group of world-changers' definition perfectly. If that's what she was referring to, small groups of nazis and megalomaniac idealists, we're in trouble. Or is your 'small group' going to put birth control in the water supply and sabotage civilization until we have anarchy and chaos? -- which is actually the neocons' dream situation, since if that were to happen they'd just take over and feel self-justified in doing so, as they would see you as terrorists. We overcame slavery, we gave women the vote, we invented written language and a lot of other amazing things, including birth control technologies, we've made democracy, an improbable way of running the world, work, and we've found ways to strike a balance in the economy between complete totalitarianism and complete laissez-faire. We're learning what doesn't work, we have unprecedented peer-to-peer grassroots communication and organization, and we have more knowledge available to a larger percentage of the population than ever before. And instead of just writing dystopias, many people are actually proposing practical ways to bring about massive change. The last century featured more murders, more imprisonment, more torture, more war deaths, and greater extremes in distribution of wealth and power than any in our history. Every technology we've invented has a dark side that has been more effectively exploited than its positive applications. And as for communication, the digital divide is wider than ever. You shouldn't judge the state of the world by the view from your rosy little corner of it. Stories are all we are. When we have learned new stories, we have become very different creatures very quickly, in a generation or two. It's our ingenuity, our ability to change and respond to new and intuitively better, healthier, happier ways to live, and learn from each other peer-to-peer that makes me optimistic and hopeful, not new technologies, which I admit are a double-edged sword. Stories also allow fanatics and maniacs to raise huge and bloodthirsty armies, and allow cults, including most modern religions and political parties, to brainwash people to act against both their personal and collective interest. Myths and other stories allow people to tolerate and live in denial of atrocities going on all around them. Religious stories have prompted most of history's most brutal and protracted wars. And we're so adaptable that we learn to live a life of never-ending oppression, subjugation and deprivation, and we delude ourselves that our pathetic lives are good, healthy, deserved, getting better and the only way to live. But we are also capable of forgetting, forgiving and moving on quickly, when a better story, a better way of living, is told to us. And in the last decade a significant minority of the population is on a roll -- better informed, more inventive, more attuned to and knowledgeable about that's needed, what's happening and what's possible than ever before. They're able to use networking technology to make creative, synthetic, analogical and metaphorical leaps, collaboratively, in ways that would have been almost unimaginable even a generation ago. We have already witnessed, in the 1960s, a huge shift in mainstream thinking and worldviews occurring in an astonishingly short period of time, and if we could do something like that again now we have much more powerful tools and much greater knowledge to do it with, so it might actually endure this time. Pure romanticism. The 1960s weren't nearly as rosy and liberated as you remember them. Many guys jumped on the bandwagon in complete ignorance and indifference to the peace and liberation movements -- they were merely attracted by the promise of cheap dope and easy sex. Your faith (and it's nothing more than faith, since there's no solid reasoning behind it) that we could start a similar movement in this century and this time it would endure and bring about ubiquitous change, is simply the left-wing version of the right-wingers' Rapture. People don't change, cultures don't change, and there's an unprecedented level of investment in maintaining the status quo working against any little movement that might threaten that. We are programmed by our DNA to spend almost all of our time and energy living moment to moment and distracted by the minutiae of constant and trivial decisions. And even if this were not so, as Gray argues so articulately we have no 'free will' or collective consciousness. Even as 'individual' creatures we are merely collections of cells, molecules and organs, each doing what they do, largely for mutual benefit, and almost entirely (99.9999%) subconscious. So belief that we can somehow get our personal act together, let alone one at the level of some higher social order, and transform ourselves into what we are not, seems to me the height of folly, a form of leftist religious fanaticism. There you go, relying on science again, that collection of unreliable and creaky models of reality, to make your argument. The whole, at every level of aggregation, is always greater than the sum of the parts. Gaia is much more than just all individual life on Earth. We as individual and wondrous creatures are more than a mere collection of our cells, molecules and organs. And I'm not being spiritual here. Forget about 'consciousness' and these other academic and utterly meaningless concepts. We as individuals, and our planet as an organism of a different order, are mostly what happens between our composite parts. We are sensation, reaction, communication, learning, understanding, and the stories that recall them. Most of what we are at both the creature level and at the Gaia level are what is happening in the intersections, margins and edges around the component parts. That is where our true sense of self and meaning resides, that is where our instincts draw their wisdom, that is what our DNA remembers and tells us to do. Your myopic science, looking at individual organisms in isolation, is no more able to understand the great truths of life, and the nature of our existence, than a collector dissecting dead monarch butterflies is able to comprehend the astonishing transformation of that creature's life, or how it could have 'learned' where and how to migrate when three generations have transpired since the last generation, or how sun and flowers and smells make a butterfly happy and inform its understanding of the purpose of its life. Let's look at this argument. You're saying, I think, that almost all of what we are is subconscious, and that an important part of what we are is our relationships with 'others' outside ourselves. Yes? OK. So then you're saying that what can/will save us is something in our collective unconsciousness or subconsciousness? That deep down 'we' intuitively know what needs to be done, what is happening, and what is possible, and will use that knowledge to collectively do what is in our collective interest. Well, at least that's better than relying on gods. But if we had this great collective unconsciouness or subconsciousness, wouldn't we have been able to figure out, even before Einstein did, that almost all human inventions, notably in the media (since the invention of writing and the printing press), in transportation (since the invention of the lever, the inclined plane, the sledge and the wheel) and in the tapping of stored energy (since the invention of controlled fire) would have more negative consequences for our planet than positive ones, and hence prevent them from emerging? No, don't give me that nonsense that the global population is leveling off because we somehow 'know' it must, since people have repeatedly told researchers the only reason they don't have one or two more kids each is that they can't financially afford it (for now). If we ('we' being either all humanity or all creatures on the planet) are our own collective guiding hand, that guiding hand has done a pretty lousy job over the last 30,000 years. Just because we've lost touch with nature and Gaia, you say? I think it's more likely that we're just an exceptionally fierce and adaptable species which emerged by random accident from the primeval soup and, like all fierce and adaptable species in Earth's history, plagued (in the literal sense of the word, not the moral one) the planet until a meteor came along, or a climate change or new species evolved that preyed on excessive numbers of the plague species, and restored equilibrium and the selected preference of known life for biodiversity. Disequilibrium is neither new or unnatural in the universe. And that, more than the crown of creation, more even than the sum of our 'stories', is what we humans really are.

Technology enabling humanity

Technology enabling humanity 07/10/2004 01:16 AM
Sunday Times South Africa Jul 10 2004 5:20AM GMT

Oh, the humanity: Power Mac G5 gutted,
turned into PC

Oh, the humanity: Power Mac G5 gutted,
turned into PC 01/28/2004 12:05 AM
One PC user has done the unthinkable: gutted a brand new dual processor Power Mac G5 and installed PC components...

Renewing my basic faith in humanity

Renewing my basic faith in humanity 06/01/2004 03:53 PM
Though I'm not saying what I have faith in them to do. Still, Oingo Boingo does say it best, don't they? Nasty Habits and Clowns of Death (since, after all, boys will be boys...) Mmmm, clowns....

Humanity will survive information deluge

Humanity will survive information deluge 12/07/2003 08:20 AM

Doh, The Humanity!: Broken web pages,
but in a funny way

Doh, The Humanity!: Broken web pages,
but in a funny way 07/22/2004 02:56 AM
Doh, The Humanity! .. Dohs

xcom2002.com/doh/viewer.php
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Google contextual ads: working for
humanity

Google contextual ads: working for
humanity 07/23/2004 06:36 AM
Letters special Delicious juxtapositions

Humanity will survive information deluge
- Sir Arthur C Clarke

Humanity will survive information deluge
- Sir Arthur C Clarke 12/09/2003 07:21 AM
interview .. OneWorld

southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/74591/1
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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
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Ubersite - Exploiting Peer-to-Peer
Networking: I have lost all faith in
humanity.

Ubersite - Exploiting Peer-to-Peer
Networking: I have lost all faith in
humanity. 04/11/2004 02:38 PM
Ubersite - Exploiting Peer-to-Peer Networking: I have lost all faith in humanity

ubersite.com/m/29438
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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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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

Frontier-Daemon-Forking-0.01

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

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

China opens the Red Frontier

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

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.

Final Frontier Trader

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

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.

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

3DIs - The final frontier

3DIs - The final frontier 04/27/2004 11:48 AM
3-digit Interstate Highways - Everything you (n)ever wanted to know about the offshoots of the U.S. Interstate system, including naming conventions and the evil I-238. [via Fark]

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.

Africa: The Next Wireless Frontier

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

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.)

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.

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...

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." "

Paolo on Frontier being open sourced

Paolo on Frontier being open sourced 05/19/2004 01:21 AM
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Grok Description matches for A New Frontier for Humanity
GrokA matches for A New Frontier for Humanity

A New Frontier for Humanity

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