There may not have appeared to have been any personal accountability, but make no mistake if anything had gone wrong with the On-Board Software the EXACT same accountability process would have been initiated to ensure that the same human error did not occur for a second time.
It's also worth noting that GUIDs in this case have nothing to do with persistence but rather with associating urls with behaviour in much the same way as the fnids you'll see on various urls (like flag) on hacker news.
Agreed, the costs of living in London (especially Zones 1 and 2) puts London in the top 20 of most expensive cities to live in the world. However, If you're going to pay a youngster £30k they will not (and should not) be expecting to live in Zones 1 and 2.
Not answering for everyone, of course, but I find the mac model breaks down when I only want to pull a single window of an app to the foreground.
Envisage, if you will, this scenario. I have multiple terminal windows open in the background connected to various services and my current focus is on my fullscreen IDE of choice. Now my IDE has various pieces of information on it and, given that my short term memory isn't what it once was, I would like to always be able refer to it. So I switch to Terminal and ALL the Terminal windows are pulled above the IDE window, often obscuring the piece of information I wanted to reference.
It's not that the 98-esque model is necessarily superior, it's rather that it's surprising when windows you haven't requested to see are pulled into the foreground. Now this may be due to me having used `window-centric` switching for many years but after 3 years of owning a mac I still find this behaviour frustrating.
No offense but I don't think you get the concept of batteries included. Python has batteries included, Clojure has batteries available.
Even the clojure contrib jar is not included by default and has to be downloaded separately and then clojure needs to be launched with extra command line arguments to setup the classpath properly (or you need to fiddle with the classpath from within clojure), the same goes for any Java library that you want to use.
Those numbers do look a little funny, 22 seconds seems way to high for Ruby 1.8, on my macbook 2.6Ghz it's around 3.2 secs.
Out of curiosity, what were you doing that made your SBCL numbers so high? I've got 1.8.6 (running natively on OSX) clocked at 1.3 seconds and SBCL (linux on VMWare) at 78 ms.
(These times are with the random number generation removed, with them the SBCL time jumps to 90ms and 1.8.6 jumps to 4 seconds).
I picked up the language after running sawfish as a window manager. This took me to emacs and from there to Common Lisp. I can highly reommend 'A Gentle Introduction To Symbolic Computation' if you are new to programming and 'Practical Common Lisp' if you aren't new to this field.
If you follow that up with 'On Lisp' and (optionally)
'Lisp In Small Pieces' you cant go wrong.