Anyone using Ruby? It’s an object oriented scripting language with Perlish syntax … I guess for some people that’s about as close as you can get to Hell, but it sounds pretty interesting to me.
Three years after the initial signing of the treaty to ban land mines, the United States and other Cold War great powers still refuse to join in. Our excuse is that we still need land mines to use in the DMZ between North and South Korea. In the meantime, land mines buried all over the (third) world kill and maim people every day, long after the reasons they were planted in the first place were forgotten.
First X.com bought PayPal, now it looks it’s going down with the ship. Internet banks always seemed like a patently stupid idea to me. Bank accounts are really cheap, anyone with much of a balance can usually have all their service charges waived. Most banks are getting on board with online banking. So what’s the point of an online bank? I wasn’t pleased when X.com bought PayPal in the first place, and it looks like my fears were well founded.
What’s the deal with the Hurd? It’s the Free Software Foundation’s UNIX kernel, designed to compete with … err … live in perfect harmony with the Linux kernel. The article from DDJ on the Hurd contains lots of good technical information, just skip over all of the editorializing and revisionist history. Of particular interest is the detailed comparison of monolithic kernels (like the Linux kernel) to microkernels (like Mach and the Hurd).
The latest Breakfast Table over at Slate, in which David Brooks and Tom Frank discuss the current state of the counterculture looks like it’s going to be interesting.