Being able to solve physics problems analytically depends a lot on what "symmetry". It's kind of a misleading term... basically what we physicists mean by symmetry is that a system is unchanged by changing the value of some property. So a square cut down the middle is symmetric in that both halves have the same shape. As a result we can solve problems involving the square without worrying about which half we're dealing with.
The "spherical cow" case is similar. A uniform-density sphere is great for ballistics problems because you can characterize it with only 2 parameters: its radius and its mass. If it's a realistic cow, it becomes a lot more complicated... its mass is distributed non-uniformly, and it's got a complicated shape (and it can move!!).
The real art in physics is figuring out when you can use approximations! If a cow is orbiting the moon, it's probably an excellent approximation to treat it as a sphere in order to determine its orbit. But if a cow is dropped off a cliff, it's not such a good approximation... since its air resistance will depend a lot on its shape.
Mods, are you on crack? The parent has made a perfectly valid point about the limited physical sophistication of many models of biochemical processes. Definitely not a troll...
I think this design is sort of like an ultra-fast scanning back. A scanning back is a high-end type of digital camera sensor where the sensor has only a very small resolution, but it physically moves and takes a frame at each step. The many resulting frames are then interpolated together appropriately. This can produce EXTREMELY high-resolution images (we're talking 100s of megapixels) but it is sloooow (minutes or hours per exposure). Good for art reproductions and such.
As I understand it, this camera would basically be like a very fast scanning back, because instead of physically moving the sensor for each new frame, the image is changed using extremely high-speed mirrors.
Can anyone who knows more about photographic technology comment on this?
But let's assume that this OOXML thing get through the approval process... with an open standard anyone can make import/export functionality for MS Office documents in non-MS applications. From iWork to KOffice to OpenOffice and whatever else is out there, will there be any need to have MS Office in order to read, edit, and forward on "MS Office documents?" To me, it seems like MS is creating a way for everyone else to erode their market share.
Indeed... that would be nice. Try reading the article to find out all the obstacles Microsoft has thrown down to actually prevent this interoperability from ever happening:-)
Priceless!! I had never heard of this contest before, but for those interested it is a contest to write the "worst possible opening sentence of a novel": http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
The internet is a lot like an information superhighway...
No, the Internet is NOT like a superhighway:-) From Usenet, 1994-ish:
"Think of the Internet as a highway."
There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the "Information Superhighway." They don't know didley about the net. It's nothing like a superhighway. That's a rotten metaphor.
Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the net. . .
A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection. No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone.
AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawnmower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitrogylcerin and idle at 120.
No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirtguns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.
NO OFFRAMPS. None.
Now that's the way to run an Interstate Highway system.
(author unknown)
Interesting! Was most of the GNU development actually done at the MIT labs? I was under the impression that even in that early era, a lot of the GNU development was done by hackers around the country and the world, communicating by mailing lists and IRC. Not so?
Uhm... what was the parent's point? That he wished there was one specific app for GNOME. Ever heard of a port? That's what Exaile is, a port of Amarok to GNOME. Nothing wrong with that.
Linux is not a mess. Having two excellent, well-supported, and actively developed desktop environments is not a "mess". It is a FEATURE.
Linux has about 5 zillion different programmer's text editors... GNU Emacs, XEmacs, vim, Nedit, Eclipse, joe, jed, Anjuta, pico, etc. You don't hear anyone complaining about having all these great choices...
Yeah they provide choice. But why do they(the programs) have to use two different gui libraries?
Why not??? I mean, what's the DOWNSIDE of this? Detractors always say that the Linux desktop would be more advanced if they'd join forces, but I disagree. By competing, learning from each other, and occasionally collaborating, GNOME and KDE have both improved immensely.
If you like GNOME, use a GNOME-based distro like Ubuntu... you'll get all the GTK apps, and you'll be happy with them. If you like KDE, use a KDE-based distro like Kubuntu... ditto. If you occasionally need to install an app from the other toolkit, you can do so with a slight performance penalty. Sure beats the difficulty of running, say, a Mac OS X app under Windows, or vice versa:-)
What's not to like? You have twice as many choices. Instead of seeing Linux as being "split", see it this way: there are TWO high-quality, capable, and actively developed GPL-licensed desktop environments.
It's a Good Thing (tm).
Personally I think it would be improved if the X library could chain its drawing routines to the approiate desktop environment. And the program uses the X interface and the program then appears like KDE app in KDE and a gnome app in gnome.
I'm afraid this is ass backwards. The X library is the *low-level* library, meaning that KDE and GNOME are chained on top of Xlib, not the other way around. I used to diss X, but now I believe that the low-level X library is also a very Good Thing, as it means that both DEs get a common baseline of features for free: network transparency, 3D acceleration via OpenGL, and X extensions like the multi-monitor extension. That way they don't have to reimplement things that they truly have in common.
In any case, there is a KDE theme that makes KDE apps render themselves with the GTK theme. That way you get visual consistency. Of course, KDE apps don't follow any kind of human interface guidelines, like the GNOME HIG. I think this is one of the reasons I prefer GNOME, on balance. The HIG has led to consistent, simple structure of menus and toolbars across many GNOME apps... which I really like. I think it should become a Freedesktop.org standard and KDE should adopt it as well.
I didn't forget Corona, it's just that it is, well, the export beer... as opposed to Tecate and Sol which I've never had outside of Mexico.
As such, Corona is universally available, mediocre, and I'm kind of sick of it:-) Just like Labatt's and Molson are the Canadian export beers, Guinness is the Irish export, and Heineken is the Dutch export.
If you're wanting Linux to get popular on the desktop, you need a universal API with a universal installation/uninstallation system so that developers can contribute to a seamless experience. Right now, poor users still have to install two entire desktop environments just to run apps from both. On your average desktop Linux system, you have:
* OpenOffice
* Firefox
* KDE
* Gnome
I've heard this argument many times before, and I think it's junk.
People are always complaining about how Linux has *two* competing desktop environments, but what they fail to realize is that both GNOME and KDE are really excellent. You wonder why Linux hasn't standardized on one DE? It's because KDE and GNOME have been fighting tooth-and-nail for the top spot for a decade, and guess what? They have *both* improved leaps and bounds and they *both* offer complete suites of applications and they are *both* credible alternatives to Windows on the desktop, in my opinion.
So maybe we don't have standardization, but we do have two slick and polished desktop environments (okay, I prefer GNOME personally:-). What's not to like about having two good choices?
If a GNOME-ified version of amaroK existed, I'd install it in a heartbeat and kiss KDE goodbye.
Try Exaile!!! It's a clone of Amarok that runs under Gnome. It's brand new, but it runs GREAT already. Very stable, nice UI, pretty fast. I wholeheartedly recommend it... I'd say it's the answer to the prayers of the Gnome users who kept the KDE libs around just to run amaroK.
Unfortunately, people in the US DO drink that stuff. But don't worry, most country's have similarly bad, mass-produced crap. Just thank god you're not Mexico, and don't drink Tacote (Mexican equivelent of Budwiser... really terrible stuff). Remember, Canadians have Molson Ice (sorry, there is SOME good Molson, but some of it is just as bad as Bud).
I agree with your principle in general... but I must take exception as far as Mexico goes! I think Tecate is great. So is Sol. They're the two major mass-produced beers in Mexico, I believe, and I think they're quite good. Let the oenophile flame wars begin:-)
Well, having to use a bunch of external USB devices sorta defeats the purpose of getting a small computer to avoid clutter... I'd rather not have to use a USB wireless device on a desktop computer, for example. It's just a pain. And more expensive than an internal one. And performance is not as good.
I hope they *do* keep at least one PCI slot. And even if they make the unwise choice to get rid of them, the PCI *bus* won't be going away any time soon: the integrated video, USB host, audio, and ethernet devices will surely still rely on the PCI bus.
2 expansion slots, one of which is PCI-E, and an XpressCard slot for Bluetooth and 802.11whatever. Designed for lower power apps.
I was really surprised to read this, actually! There will not be even *one* standard PCI card slot in this thing??? There are so many interesting boards that come in PCI only. Let's say I want to build a very compact data acquisition computer for my lab, to reduce the clutter. Well I'll need a PCI GPIB card to connect to instruments. Or if I want to put this in a recording studio and use a high-end audio card, that'll probably only come in PCI too.
From this photo it appears that the DTX mobo *does* include a single PCI slot, which I am glad to see. But from the article it's unclear. Can anyone clarify this??
Ya... I really think they should implement something like this. There's clearly a demand for these, even at a price of $200-300. If they don't sell OLPCs in the developed world, there will be a gray market of them on eBay, which will benefit no one except for the shady importers.
If there's a "buy one, donate one" system, we rich people will get cool toys, and poor kids will get their computers further subsidized. Good for everyone, right?
I can easily see the OLPC eclipsing the Wii and PS3 as the must-have cool gadget of 2007:-)
I like Apple's hardware too. They *do* design good products, even if they sometimes value form over function, and price them too high. But I hate how they take a cool product and totally lock it down so the user can't easily modify it.
This is a long trend for Apple... it started with "user friendliness" back in the 80s when the Mac floppy drives had no eject button, the monitor was built into the case, etc. Now it's gotten more insidious with DRM all over the place and vendor lock-in with the iPhone. I'm expecting the iPhone to flop given its high price, lock-in, and open alternatives based on Qt and GTK hitting the market around the same time.
... Now I can go back to ignoring Apple for another few years, as usual. Their ability to make cool hardware, and then totally lock it down with self-restricting proprietary software, is nothing short of astonishing to me.
I disagree. There's no laziness involved. Even if there's no monetary cost to testing on other OSes, developers have only a finite amount of time. If they choose to devote it to making their software work on one operating only, that's their business. Since we're talking about open source software here, I will again suggest that anyone who needs to get software working on a variant platform try hacking on it him/her self... it's easier than you think:-)
Especially when they're not getting paid to write the software (as is the case in many FLOSS projects), there's no reason anyone is ENTITLED to have that software work on any other OS.
That being said, many open source projects DO make cross-platform compatibility a goal. For example the GNU tools, the Upstart daemon to replace SysV init (even though it was written by the Ubuntu folks!), GNOME, KDE, etc.
In its original form, Linux is basically a server OS like Unix. They've tweaked the scheduler to make it more responsive as Desktop OS. With some modifications, Linux can be a real-time OS. It has been modified to run on 16-bit processors without MMUs, so it can be an embedded OS for tiny systems. It compiles on x86, x86_64, sparc, ppc, alpha, IBM mainframes of every kind, itanium, arm, mips, and even the OpenRISC open-source-design embedded processor.
But there *are* lots of alternative FLOSS systems in use, I think! One alternative that no one ever mentions, for some reason, is eCos. It's a modular RTOS for embedded systems. A lot of routers use it actually, I had an 802.11b router that was based on eCos. If you need real-time, and don't want the overhead of a "full" operating system, eCos seems like a great choice! (I haven't developed with it myself.)
Well, Linux *does* support some wireless adapters very well, and those are indeed the ones used in most of the Linux-based routers. For example, my Netgear WGR614 router contains an Atheros mini-pci wireless card, well-supported by the MadWifi drivers.
Unfortunately I think that if another non-Linux OS were to become popular developer-wise it might turn out the same way. More developers, more conflicting opinions, more forks. I think ultimately the succesful free OS might be one that's put together by a small core of developers who are able to make one solid desktop operating system. No "light version", no "enterprise version", no separate distributions, just one clearly branded and defined OS with all the requisite compatability and virtualisation to make other OS'es programs run on it.
I think you may be onto something. I believe this is basically the process used in developing Ubuntu, and I think largely responsible for its success: a lot of the development is done by a core of developers paid by Mark Shuttleworth. They've really focused on a solid desktop distro and it shows. They've got enough of a centralized structure and incentives (salaries!) to avoid the forking and bickering of some other distros.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not... but I don't see division for its own sake being a terribly useful thing to try.
There *are* domain-specific distros out there... education-centric Linux distros, LiveCD distros, system administration/rescue distros, distros aimed at old computers, distros aimed at scientific or musical applications, etc. If you want to make a stripped-down email-and-web-surfing Linux distro, why not roll your own Ubuntu-based kiosk distro like this guy did? http://idea.zanestate.edu/archives/2005/05/kiosk-i sh-ubuntu/ If it's really useful, distribute it to others.
The free software community has a long tradition of building on successful software, and only creating something brand new when it's really become clear that a different direction is necessary. For example, the recent replacement of the venerable Init daemon with Upstart in Ubuntu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart).
Except maybe for hardware support, Solaris is not far behind Linux (and probably ahead with Java support)
That's a BIG "except"!!! Hardware support is basically the only thing that has ever held me back from using an alternative OS. It used to be video and CD burners under Linux, now those work flawlessly. Then it was printers, now my cheapo WinPrinter works flawlessly under Linux. Then it was USB keyboards and mice and joysticks, now those "just work" too. The only area where Linux really lags in hardware support these days is wireless card support.
Basically, Linux does everything I want it to, and more. My router can run it, my cell phone can run it, my MP3 player can run it. The only thing Linux doesn't quite do right for me is wireless networking... and switching to Solaris won't help with that.
Other than out of curiosity, why would anyone switch from Linux to OpenSolaris?
Slashdot Mirror
Being able to solve physics problems analytically depends a lot on what "symmetry". It's kind of a misleading term... basically what we physicists mean by symmetry is that a system is unchanged by changing the value of some property. So a square cut down the middle is symmetric in that both halves have the same shape. As a result we can solve problems involving the square without worrying about which half we're dealing with.
The "spherical cow" case is similar. A uniform-density sphere is great for ballistics problems because you can characterize it with only 2 parameters: its radius and its mass. If it's a realistic cow, it becomes a lot more complicated... its mass is distributed non-uniformly, and it's got a complicated shape (and it can move!!).
The real art in physics is figuring out when you can use approximations! If a cow is orbiting the moon, it's probably an excellent approximation to treat it as a sphere in order to determine its orbit. But if a cow is dropped off a cliff, it's not such a good approximation... since its air resistance will depend a lot on its shape.
Mods, are you on crack? The parent has made a perfectly valid point about the limited physical sophistication of many models of biochemical processes. Definitely not a troll...
I think this design is sort of like an ultra-fast scanning back. A scanning back is a high-end type of digital camera sensor where the sensor has only a very small resolution, but it physically moves and takes a frame at each step. The many resulting frames are then interpolated together appropriately. This can produce EXTREMELY high-resolution images (we're talking 100s of megapixels) but it is sloooow (minutes or hours per exposure). Good for art reproductions and such.
As I understand it, this camera would basically be like a very fast scanning back, because instead of physically moving the sensor for each new frame, the image is changed using extremely high-speed mirrors.
Can anyone who knows more about photographic technology comment on this?
Indeed... that would be nice. Try reading the article to find out all the obstacles Microsoft has thrown down to actually prevent this interoperability from ever happening
Priceless!! I had never heard of this contest before, but for those interested it is a contest to write the "worst possible opening sentence of a novel": http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
No, the Internet is NOT like a superhighway
"Think of the Internet as a highway."
There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the "Information Superhighway." They don't know didley about the net. It's nothing like a superhighway. That's a rotten metaphor.
Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the net. . .
A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection. No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone.
AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawnmower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitrogylcerin and idle at 120.
No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirtguns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.
NO OFFRAMPS. None.
Now that's the way to run an Interstate Highway system.
(author unknown)
Interesting! Was most of the GNU development actually done at the MIT labs? I was under the impression that even in that early era, a lot of the GNU development was done by hackers around the country and the world, communicating by mailing lists and IRC. Not so?
Uhm... what was the parent's point? That he wished there was one specific app for GNOME. Ever heard of a port? That's what Exaile is, a port of Amarok to GNOME. Nothing wrong with that.
Linux is not a mess. Having two excellent, well-supported, and actively developed desktop environments is not a "mess". It is a FEATURE.
Completely agreed!
Linux has about 5 zillion different programmer's text editors... GNU Emacs, XEmacs, vim, Nedit, Eclipse, joe, jed, Anjuta, pico, etc. You don't hear anyone complaining about having all these great choices...
Why not??? I mean, what's the DOWNSIDE of this? Detractors always say that the Linux desktop would be more advanced if they'd join forces, but I disagree. By competing, learning from each other, and occasionally collaborating, GNOME and KDE have both improved immensely.
If you like GNOME, use a GNOME-based distro like Ubuntu... you'll get all the GTK apps, and you'll be happy with them. If you like KDE, use a KDE-based distro like Kubuntu... ditto. If you occasionally need to install an app from the other toolkit, you can do so with a slight performance penalty. Sure beats the difficulty of running, say, a Mac OS X app under Windows, or vice versa
What's not to like? You have twice as many choices. Instead of seeing Linux as being "split", see it this way: there are TWO high-quality, capable, and actively developed GPL-licensed desktop environments.
It's a Good Thing (tm).
I'm afraid this is ass backwards. The X library is the *low-level* library, meaning that KDE and GNOME are chained on top of Xlib, not the other way around. I used to diss X, but now I believe that the low-level X library is also a very Good Thing, as it means that both DEs get a common baseline of features for free: network transparency, 3D acceleration via OpenGL, and X extensions like the multi-monitor extension. That way they don't have to reimplement things that they truly have in common.
In any case, there is a KDE theme that makes KDE apps render themselves with the GTK theme. That way you get visual consistency. Of course, KDE apps don't follow any kind of human interface guidelines, like the GNOME HIG. I think this is one of the reasons I prefer GNOME, on balance. The HIG has led to consistent, simple structure of menus and toolbars across many GNOME apps... which I really like. I think it should become a Freedesktop.org standard and KDE should adopt it as well.
I didn't forget Corona, it's just that it is, well, the export beer... as opposed to Tecate and Sol which I've never had outside of Mexico.
:-) Just like Labatt's and Molson are the Canadian export beers, Guinness is the Irish export, and Heineken is the Dutch export.
As such, Corona is universally available, mediocre, and I'm kind of sick of it
I've heard this argument many times before, and I think it's junk.
People are always complaining about how Linux has *two* competing desktop environments, but what they fail to realize is that both GNOME and KDE are really excellent. You wonder why Linux hasn't standardized on one DE? It's because KDE and GNOME have been fighting tooth-and-nail for the top spot for a decade, and guess what? They have *both* improved leaps and bounds and they *both* offer complete suites of applications and they are *both* credible alternatives to Windows on the desktop, in my opinion.
So maybe we don't have standardization, but we do have two slick and polished desktop environments (okay, I prefer GNOME personally
Try Exaile!!! It's a clone of Amarok that runs under Gnome. It's brand new, but it runs GREAT already. Very stable, nice UI, pretty fast. I wholeheartedly recommend it... I'd say it's the answer to the prayers of the Gnome users who kept the KDE libs around just to run amaroK.
I agree with your principle in general... but I must take exception as far as Mexico goes! I think Tecate is great. So is Sol. They're the two major mass-produced beers in Mexico, I believe, and I think they're quite good. Let the oenophile flame wars begin
Well, having to use a bunch of external USB devices sorta defeats the purpose of getting a small computer to avoid clutter... I'd rather not have to use a USB wireless device on a desktop computer, for example. It's just a pain. And more expensive than an internal one. And performance is not as good.
I hope they *do* keep at least one PCI slot. And even if they make the unwise choice to get rid of them, the PCI *bus* won't be going away any time soon: the integrated video, USB host, audio, and ethernet devices will surely still rely on the PCI bus.
I was really surprised to read this, actually! There will not be even *one* standard PCI card slot in this thing??? There are so many interesting boards that come in PCI only. Let's say I want to build a very compact data acquisition computer for my lab, to reduce the clutter. Well I'll need a PCI GPIB card to connect to instruments. Or if I want to put this in a recording studio and use a high-end audio card, that'll probably only come in PCI too.
From this photo it appears that the DTX mobo *does* include a single PCI slot, which I am glad to see. But from the article it's unclear. Can anyone clarify this??
Ya... I really think they should implement something like this. There's clearly a demand for these, even at a price of $200-300. If they don't sell OLPCs in the developed world, there will be a gray market of them on eBay, which will benefit no one except for the shady importers.
:-)
If there's a "buy one, donate one" system, we rich people will get cool toys, and poor kids will get their computers further subsidized. Good for everyone, right?
I can easily see the OLPC eclipsing the Wii and PS3 as the must-have cool gadget of 2007
I like Apple's hardware too. They *do* design good products, even if they sometimes value form over function, and price them too high. But I hate how they take a cool product and totally lock it down so the user can't easily modify it.
This is a long trend for Apple... it started with "user friendliness" back in the 80s when the Mac floppy drives had no eject button, the monitor was built into the case, etc. Now it's gotten more insidious with DRM all over the place and vendor lock-in with the iPhone. I'm expecting the iPhone to flop given its high price, lock-in, and open alternatives based on Qt and GTK hitting the market around the same time.
... Now I can go back to ignoring Apple for another few years, as usual. Their ability to make cool hardware, and then totally lock it down with self-restricting proprietary software, is nothing short of astonishing to me.
I disagree. There's no laziness involved. Even if there's no monetary cost to testing on other OSes, developers have only a finite amount of time. If they choose to devote it to making their software work on one operating only, that's their business. Since we're talking about open source software here, I will again suggest that anyone who needs to get software working on a variant platform try hacking on it him/her self... it's easier than you think :-)
Especially when they're not getting paid to write the software (as is the case in many FLOSS projects), there's no reason anyone is ENTITLED to have that software work on any other OS.
That being said, many open source projects DO make cross-platform compatibility a goal. For example the GNU tools, the Upstart daemon to replace SysV init (even though it was written by the Ubuntu folks!), GNOME, KDE, etc.
Because Linux is so flexible and modular :-)
In its original form, Linux is basically a server OS like Unix. They've tweaked the scheduler to make it more responsive as Desktop OS. With some modifications, Linux can be a real-time OS. It has been modified to run on 16-bit processors without MMUs, so it can be an embedded OS for tiny systems. It compiles on x86, x86_64, sparc, ppc, alpha, IBM mainframes of every kind, itanium, arm, mips, and even the OpenRISC open-source-design embedded processor.
But there *are* lots of alternative FLOSS systems in use, I think! One alternative that no one ever mentions, for some reason, is eCos. It's a modular RTOS for embedded systems. A lot of routers use it actually, I had an 802.11b router that was based on eCos. If you need real-time, and don't want the overhead of a "full" operating system, eCos seems like a great choice! (I haven't developed with it myself.)
Well, Linux *does* support some wireless adapters very well, and those are indeed the ones used in most of the Linux-based routers. For example, my Netgear WGR614 router contains an Atheros mini-pci wireless card, well-supported by the MadWifi drivers.
By the way, I just found this Comparison of open-source wireless drivers on wikipedia. Very handy!
I think you may be onto something. I believe this is basically the process used in developing Ubuntu, and I think largely responsible for its success: a lot of the development is done by a core of developers paid by Mark Shuttleworth. They've really focused on a solid desktop distro and it shows. They've got enough of a centralized structure and incentives (salaries!) to avoid the forking and bickering of some other distros.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not... but I don't see division for its own sake being a terribly useful thing to try.
i sh-ubuntu/ If it's really useful, distribute it to others.
There *are* domain-specific distros out there... education-centric Linux distros, LiveCD distros, system administration/rescue distros, distros aimed at old computers, distros aimed at scientific or musical applications, etc. If you want to make a stripped-down email-and-web-surfing Linux distro, why not roll your own Ubuntu-based kiosk distro like this guy did? http://idea.zanestate.edu/archives/2005/05/kiosk-
The free software community has a long tradition of building on successful software, and only creating something brand new when it's really become clear that a different direction is necessary. For example, the recent replacement of the venerable Init daemon with Upstart in Ubuntu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart).
That's a BIG "except"!!! Hardware support is basically the only thing that has ever held me back from using an alternative OS. It used to be video and CD burners under Linux, now those work flawlessly. Then it was printers, now my cheapo WinPrinter works flawlessly under Linux. Then it was USB keyboards and mice and joysticks, now those "just work" too. The only area where Linux really lags in hardware support these days is wireless card support.
Basically, Linux does everything I want it to, and more. My router can run it, my cell phone can run it, my MP3 player can run it. The only thing Linux doesn't quite do right for me is wireless networking... and switching to Solaris won't help with that.
Other than out of curiosity, why would anyone switch from Linux to OpenSolaris?