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BitC seems to be an effort to get provable correct programs and thus maybe an Operating System which works flawless. They also develop coyotos    which is a step in this direction.

maybe this would be a starting point to have a lightweight OS for Performant Virtual Servers.

im just watching the clojure  (lisp flavored lang for the JVM) presentations from Rick Hickey.
then i found LFE  lisp flavored erlang. i think i already mentioned Tim Burks  Nu earlier.
(Rick Hickey also did dotlisp guess what? yup lisp for .net. there are also others e.g. IronLisp) so now we have a lisp for BEAM, JVM and the Objective-C runtime, seems like  something that was in the air.

combine: there is a need for a dynamic language which is scalable but still can leverage existing code.
thinking a bit further and adding the other main stream approach to scale these days (virtualization) we get pushed to a new light-weight operating system which supports just a VM and basic IO like TCP/IP.

already with these large scale rails setups we have today, i see no point to have a fully featured OS with a 5+M LOC kernel running just to provide a VM which does just some calculating on proxied data from client data to its persistance.

hmm… erlang for minix 3 anyone?

Vidar Hokstad has a nice series on writing a compiler in ruby: http://www.hokstad.com/tag/compiler%20in%20Ruby%20bottom%20upa more general view on computer science is given in this lecture:Building a Modern Computer from First Principleshttp://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7654043762021156507

by searching and  finding free real time quotes i stumbled upon the google blog where they also announce free real time quotes. they also mention the interesting topic of the Prediction market as they made a study about the information flow in their offices (blog post / pdf study).i hope i will find some time to track this topic!