Comparison to OS X purely at the kernel level ? I'd prefer to see real-world benchmarks (a contentious area in itself..) across a range of operating systems, using identical hardware, but it would only spark endless debate that the methodology favoured one OS over another. Personally, I use all 3 and each has its pros and cons : such a benchmark would have to make a pretty compelling case for me to abandon any of my currently installed operating systems.

OK, I havent read the graphic novel, but the first hour of the movie managed to be both boring and depressing, with none of the positives of something like 'Sin City' to redeem it. Yes, I think I got the 'in' jokes, and the 'sniper on the grassy knoll' scene was incredibly graphic, but I felt trapped in the kind of world that old Inkblot kept ranting about - the screams of a thousand orphans in an abbatoir really did seem to be drilling into my brain. The drilling stopped the instant I left the cinema.

I'm ambivalent on this - we use Perl for most of the back end business logic and Java (GWT and POJOs) for the web front end, and it mostly works. Comms are via the DB - actions, changes of status, flags etc - and we dont have to spend a lot of time trying to second guess the other devs. That said, I'm not so crazy about the fact that one of our legacy apps is written in PHP, almost entirely by one guy, and it bears no relation whatsoever to the rest of the codebase. The day he decides to leave, its 'Hey, I noticed that you did some PHP back in the 90s !' ....