I admit- I got immediately distracted by a sub-link about the overall adjusted cost of the project, where the claimed figure in today's money was $30B. Out of curiosity, I looked up the total cost to date of the F-22 program (which has taken a hell of a lot longer to ship) and the gospel according to Wikipedia claims it's $66.7B. Is there something to be said for shipping under pressure? ;)
We process vast amounts of semi- and unstructured data for customers; if you enjoy solving hard stream-processing problems on the back-end, and hard angular related problems on the front-end, gimme a shout :)
Yeah, using some kind of 'immortal', randomly accessible structure will surely perform better than a linked list; I've had jobs where this was the case (c.f. disruptor). But as performance tweaks go, this one falls into the category of last-resort.
What you gain in speed you lose in sheer simplicity, elegance and power (no linked-lists, no LISP :)
Maybe there would have been 5 years ago prior to the tablet+mobile (iOS/Android) revolution. I agree though; personally I love Debian + Solaris but neither them nor any other *NIX variant has the slick feel of OS X. Not to mention a nice development environment like ObjC+Cocoa.
If you saw a 'hello world' benchmark on shootout.alioth.debian.org you'd laugh and ignore it, so why is there yet another post debating the relative merits of threading models using this dubious criterion?
FWIW I found some serious un-Jobs-like inconsistencies in Lion. I thought the basic mission control concept was sound but there were too many key combinations from Snow Leopard left out, launchpad was a joke and Xcode was made free again. RIP Steve but I'm getting a Lenovo next time around.