When I make ampycillin resistant E.Coli and grow them in amycillin , they don't seem to go much slower than nonresistant bugs on non-selective media.
Measure it. The transformed bacteria do grow slower under selective pressure, about 30% slower in my experience. Picking up desirable traits and getting rid of unnecessary genes quickly is precisely what the plasmid machinery is for. They don't have to insert antibiotic resistance into their chromosomes and maintain it forever if they can just produce beta-lactamase for a little while until the ampicillin is chewed up and then get rid of it. It's not good to carry around a lot of extra baggage in bacteria world.
And how much would the extra time for reproduction really help you if it's growing in you? Even if it doubles it's reproduction time, we're still talking a matter of minutes or hours, and it would still grow exponentially. It's still going to reproduce faster than any cancerous cells, right?
It seems to me that the bigger hurdle for a pathogen is avoiding or defeating our immune systems, that seems like a much more complex challenge than being resistant to an antibiotic, and clearly there is no tradeoff there.
So, you just contradicted yourself. Reproducing faster is one of the ways bacteria combat our immune system. There are other ways too and they are quite good at it, which is why getting pneumonia can be very bad for you if you don't treat it. But they wouldn't be as good at avoiding our immune system if they had to maintain a lot of DNA they weren't using.
The reason why that will be hard is because each distro has a slightly different way of doing things (different menu structure, different shortcuts, different config utilities, etc). You would have to have separate instructions and screenshots for each distro. The only way to be (mostly) distro-agnostic is to use the CLI. That is why most help forums don't bother with GUIs, but it is distinctly not beginner user friendly.
Paying workers to dig ditches and then fill them in again will likely displace workers from projects that are actually useful.
How do you come to this conclusion? If they were working on useful projects, they wouldn't need to be paid to do nothing. I'm not saying I agree with the principle of paying people to do nothing; I just don't understand your logic.
I have never known a p2p app to run as "nobody" on linux. I'm quite the linux advocate, but this is just plain misleading. It is possible to deliberately setup a separate account to run your p2p apps, but none of the major distros do this for you automatically.
On the other hand, it should be fairly trivial to configure some default selinux or apparmor policies that restrict things like p2p apps and prevent them from accessing your documents without explicit permission. Again, though, I don't know of any distro that does this.
No, it handles AD just fine. I use it every day for that. To map UIDs properly you need one of: a replicated/etc/passwd file, schema extensions for AD, or an LDAP server. Depending on what you are doing, I think those are acceptable solutions for most situations, the first one being the most common for one or two file servers hanging out on a Windows domain. But, like you say, Samba 4 will eliminate the need for this and make it that much easier to integrate.
Yeah, I know. Thankfully a new installation is safely locked down so that you can only browse the Microsoft website. Imagine what might happen if you could browse the web freely. You might accidently end up here which everybody knows is a site full of trojans and malware.
No, you cannot uninstall IE. If you try to use Add/Remove programs, it will remove the blue E from the desktop and start menu, but you can still type iexplore.exe and have it start up. There is no way to remove IE from Windows without going through a lot of pain and headache. I think an embeddable HTML rendering widget would be just fine. Why they didn't do that in the first place, I have no idea.
You see, that's why every company that is producing a distribution is trying to get the server market: becuase Linux was and is designed to be a SO for the servers.
No...it's because every company knows servers and the enterprise market is where they can make money (with customizations and support contracts). The desktop just isn't very profitable. In the past, Red Hat worked on the desktop as part of their enterprise package (companies that deployed to workstations needed a usable desktop), and because they had it they would sell it in a retail box, but I don't think it was ever a serious part of their business plan. They eventually realized this and stopped selling the boxed retail versions.
A hungry person is motivated to do something to 'cure' his hunger...get a job, find some way of making money.
...steal from someone, sell his child into slavery, eat his neighbor's dog, or simply become a public health risk due to malnutrition...
Desperate people do desperate things. Do you really want that?
But once the govt. starts paying you for nothing...you no longer have strong motivation to do anything.
Do you know how much you get on welfare? It's hardly first class living. I would say there is plenty of incentive to get off welfare and try to make more money.
I'm for a safety net, not a way of life.
I've known a lot of people who've used the welfare system. Despite comedic characters like George from Seinfeld, the reality is a lot of people either make mistakes or just end up in a bad situation that is hard to get out of. There may be some people abusing the system, but that's more the exception than the rule. If you want people off of welfare, I think it would be better to invest in programs that help people get off welfare rather than eliminate or severely reduce it.
Not all rewards are financial. Some Open Source developers do it for prestige and respect, some do it out of love for the community, some of them just enjoy programming and sharing, and others have motives unknown to me. Some of them are professional software developers who produce Open Source during their free time, while others are skilled hobbyists. None of them are forced to do anything they do, so I think it's safe to say that incentive is not a problem here.
Don't forget all of the developers who are actually paid to work on open source projects. A lot of companies (IBM, Sun, Oracle) and government groups or NGOs like open source software because they can reuse an already existing and mature codebase. It is cheaper for them to contribute to an already existing project than it is to develop something in-house from scratch. What a surprise. Working together to create something is more efficient than creating 100 competing and incompatible implementations of the exact same thing.
Honestly, I'm not sure how to interpret these things because hardness can mean so many different things. But, as the article mentioned, until now (actually a few years ago) an elemental Boron hasn't been known. All known polymorphs had been found to be contaminated with impurities.
Actually it has been synthesized. The structure was determined using a computational method, though. In other words, they couldn't use standard techniques to interpret the x-ray diffraction data and had to use the evolutionary structure prediction method mentioned in the paper.
What I find kind of amazing is the news article mentions a Vickers hardness of 50 GPa. The journal article doesn't mention anything about that, unless it is somewhere in the supplementary materials, but anyway, if the news article estimated correctly based on the reported phase transformation pressures...that's pretty damn hard!
It doesn't support Exchange yet, but Spicebird is a good integration of email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and chat. I've been using the latest beta and it works great. My only problem is that I can't get it to sync the contacts between computers, and I think that's because it requires an ldap directory for that which I don't have setup. Oh well, I like it for the most part. It's much better than Evolution.
Well, you may want to mail the people at Apple and ask them to stop all this disinformation [apple.com].
If you read a marketing blurb, expect to be deceived. Try this instead. In a nutshell, OSX borrowed some ideas from Mach, but it isn't the Mach kernel. It isn't a microkernel, at least not by the strict definition. At best it is a hybrid kernel.
I didn't mean grub2 to be an example of why it couldn't work, just that it's a lot of work to make it work. If you rearchitect the Linux kernel as a microkernel, and then have to spend the next 10 years retweaking everything to get it to the same performance levels it is at today, have you really gained anything from doing all that work? Don't get me wrong. Some things need to be rewritten (grub did). But you have to measure the cost against the gain. I think it is pretty hard to argue against a well-established, and properly designed and maintained monolithic kernel, like Linux. It's not like Linux is plagued by horrible problems that can't be solved without redesigning it.
Trust me: you're not going to pull of a monolythic OS that doesn't know the exact amount of cores there will be on the die
I'm not sure what you mean by this. SMP and cluster computing (grid, cloud, whatever you want to call it) have been going on for years (decades, even) with monolithic kernels. I don't see why multi-core computing would be all that much more complicated. And like I said earlier, virtualization is where everything is going. Intel's 80 core processor will run a bare metal hypervisor and that's it. Everything else will be running in virtual machines, although it will likely be a lot more sophisticated than what we see today.
Well, saying MacOSX is based on Mach is like saying Linux is based on Minix. They are related, but that is as far as the similarity goes. The OSX kernel is very much a monolithic kernel, and I have seen no indication by Apple that they plan to transition toward a microkernel design.
Singularity is an interesting project, but it is still an experiment by Microsoft Research. There are no commercial products with it on the horizon, although there have been hints. I would put it in the same category as L4 and other similar microkernel projects. There might be a niche market in some embedded devices in the future, but that's hardly the "whole OS world."
The thing is, microkernels are being debated by some, but for most the debate is over. There are advantages to microkernels, but not significant enough to offset the cost in performance, not to mention the cost of building a new system from scratch. Look at something like grub2, which is just a bootloader, nevermind a kernel. They decided they needed to rewrite it from scratch in 2002, and they are still working on it. It is probably usable in most distros now, like Ubuntu, but nobody trusts it because it hasn't been proven yet. The original grub (and lilo and just about every bootloader) had thousands of tweaks and workarounds to deal with various hardware, BIOS, and OS quirks. A new bootloader may be simple to write in principle, but it takes a long time for something like that to mature.
So, that was a bit of a digression...anyway, I think the future is pretty clearly going to be in virtualization. Some fairly elaborate stuff is possible, more than simply running an OS on top of a hypervisor, and I think we will start to see it in the next few years as virtualization becomes less of a buzzword and more of a standard practice .
Actually there is the Fluendo MP3 codec which is licensed and legal for use and free distribution. For DVD, there are legal players like LinDVD and PowerDVD, but they aren't free. I didn't realize this until I did a search just now, but apparently you can buy PowerDVD from the Canonical store (for Ubuntu), and other distros probably have something similar.
This has nothing to do with the ability to do graphical boot. That has always been possible. A nice consequence of this new code is that graphical boot becomes easier and more stable, but that's not the purpose. The purpose is to hand over low-level control of the graphics hardware to a single resource, the kernel. That is all.
If you don't want a framebuffer console, you won't be forced to have one (I already responded in another post how to get a regular boot console if your distro defaults to a graphical one). And you will still benefit from the new code because Xorg will use it and won't get borked up as easily. Do you remember the DOS days? Do you remember every software package writing it's own drivers, and endless tweaking of CONFIG.SYS to try to get certain programs to run w/o conflicting with each other, which would happen anyway and lock everything up? It was ridiculous. A kernel to manage low-level hardware events is the right way to do things.
There is a grub flag...I think it is "quiet splash" that these distros use. If you take it out, you get a plain console boot up. I do it with every install because I like to see what is going on when the system boots up.
Uh, says who? There isn't a single working mainstream microkernel anywhere. The only active project I know of that seriously attempts to use a microkernel is GNU/Hurd, and I haven't heard anything from them in quite a while (they were supposed to be using the L4 microkernel, but I guess that fizzled for some reason).
Linux isn't "pushing graphics to the kernel." It is doing exactly what it should have done a long time ago. It is making the kernel handle the job of allocating and managing hardware resources. Graphics drivers have long been left out of the kernel for a lot of different reasons, and that has been a problem for graphics development on Linux. This is just a start, but it is a good one. This is a memory manager for the GPU. Don't worry, OpenGL and Xorg aren't going to make it to the kernel anytime soon.
Good stuff. To be fair, though, the dismal state of linux graphics has been known and complained about for a long time. The problem is, there have been a lot of political hurdles (none of this was possible when Xorg was still Xfree86, and w/o cooperation from companies that write drivers it would also be useless), as well as technical hurdles. I don't remember all of the details, but there was an article on freedesktop.org talking about all of the different things people were working on. Several projects were started over from scratch several times because they realized midway through that it wasn't going to work. So the end result is that development has been slow, but when it is finished it is going to be "done right" and not slapped together just to ship something out the door quickly.
If you're going seriously going to suggest that what paganizer does is necessary or typical, then it's fair game to pick on what Linux users say they have to do to get things working.
I wasn't saying anything of the sort. I was just replying to operaghost. Since you brought it up, though, I will assert that I have never been able to run "Windows out of the box." It has always required updates/drivers/software/configuration, to make it usable. Every OS requires a certain amount of that when you install it from scratch.
(Although I've lost track of the number of times I've asked on Slashdot how to do something in Linux, and, with no hint of sarcasm, the response has been some command. Perhaps things have changed - maybe this year it'll be ready for the desktop?)
Have you considered the possibility that, like on Windows, there are multiple ways to do things on Linux? Slashdot, being a "News for Nerds" site, tends to have suggestions like (apt-get install flashplayer-nonfree) because, to most geeks like myself, that is the quickest, easiest, and most efficient way to install the Flash plugin. However, the gui add/remove applications utility can install almost everything that anybody would need. No command line necessary, just present should you desire it.
Me, yes, because I like to fiddle with things and generally prefer the command line. My parents and several of my non-techy friends just use the gui utilities, and it all works just fine.
But I have to ask: What _is_ the 'cost of giving people the choice'?
Well, support (including testing and troubleshooting), marketing, and Microsoft strong-arming come to mind. I applaud and desire choice, but it is rarely as simple as having an extra install disc lying around the deployment factory.
You do realize that the kernel is the single most important component of the operating system, right? Saying that the kernel is the only thing that is different is like saying the only difference between a Ford and a Chevy is the engine.
Don't get me wrong, I've been wanting to play with OpenSolaris myself, but every feature you listed is relevant to the server or workstation market. The desktop market doesn't care about MTAs and IMAP daemons. Kerberos, LDAP, and Samba are nice, but they have to be more than just present. They have to work well with minimal fuss.
Linux, after stumbling around with this for years, is just now finally getting to the point where it can easily be a drop-in replacement for Windows on a corporate desktop (i.e: authenticating on an AD domain). Sure, it's been possible for a while, the question has always been how much tweaking you have to do to various configuration files including possible changes to the domain controllers depending on what you are trying to do. With nice config utilities and better autoconfiguration, this has recently become a lot easier (but not yet perfect).
In addition, there is the issue of desktop optimizations. The Solaris kernel is engineered for throughput, smp, and big iron, and it is very good at those things. Linux has been through many years of flame wars, new schedulers, low-latency patches, preempt patches, rewritten vfs layers, scsi subsystems, and audio subsystems--all addressing the complicated issues of performance on the server and the desktop. The desktop part of that has really matured in the last year, but even three or four years ago desktop performance was pretty sucky. Remember, for the desktop user, latency (even perceived latency) is a much bigger issue than throughput, and the optimizations for the former are often degrading to the latter.
So, I like the idea of OpenSolaris, but it's going to take a lot more than slapping Compiz and Gnome on it to make it into a good desktop OS. Sure, they will get there eventually, just like Linux (maybe even faster if they can use some of the same approaches Linux has), but it's not there yet.
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When I make ampycillin resistant E.Coli and grow them in amycillin , they don't seem to go much slower than nonresistant bugs on non-selective media.
Measure it. The transformed bacteria do grow slower under selective pressure, about 30% slower in my experience. Picking up desirable traits and getting rid of unnecessary genes quickly is precisely what the plasmid machinery is for. They don't have to insert antibiotic resistance into their chromosomes and maintain it forever if they can just produce beta-lactamase for a little while until the ampicillin is chewed up and then get rid of it. It's not good to carry around a lot of extra baggage in bacteria world.
And how much would the extra time for reproduction really help you if it's growing in you? Even if it doubles it's reproduction time, we're still talking a matter of minutes or hours, and it would still grow exponentially. It's still going to reproduce faster than any cancerous cells, right?
It seems to me that the bigger hurdle for a pathogen is avoiding or defeating our immune systems, that seems like a much more complex challenge than being resistant to an antibiotic, and clearly there is no tradeoff there.
So, you just contradicted yourself. Reproducing faster is one of the ways bacteria combat our immune system. There are other ways too and they are quite good at it, which is why getting pneumonia can be very bad for you if you don't treat it. But they wouldn't be as good at avoiding our immune system if they had to maintain a lot of DNA they weren't using.
The reason why that will be hard is because each distro has a slightly different way of doing things (different menu structure, different shortcuts, different config utilities, etc). You would have to have separate instructions and screenshots for each distro. The only way to be (mostly) distro-agnostic is to use the CLI. That is why most help forums don't bother with GUIs, but it is distinctly not beginner user friendly.
Paying workers to dig ditches and then fill them in again will likely displace workers from projects that are actually useful.
How do you come to this conclusion? If they were working on useful projects, they wouldn't need to be paid to do nothing. I'm not saying I agree with the principle of paying people to do nothing; I just don't understand your logic.
I have never known a p2p app to run as "nobody" on linux. I'm quite the linux advocate, but this is just plain misleading. It is possible to deliberately setup a separate account to run your p2p apps, but none of the major distros do this for you automatically.
On the other hand, it should be fairly trivial to configure some default selinux or apparmor policies that restrict things like p2p apps and prevent them from accessing your documents without explicit permission. Again, though, I don't know of any distro that does this.
No, it handles AD just fine. I use it every day for that. To map UIDs properly you need one of: a replicated /etc/passwd file, schema extensions for AD, or an LDAP server. Depending on what you are doing, I think those are acceptable solutions for most situations, the first one being the most common for one or two file servers hanging out on a Windows domain. But, like you say, Samba 4 will eliminate the need for this and make it that much easier to integrate.
Yeah, I know. Thankfully a new installation is safely locked down so that you can only browse the Microsoft website. Imagine what might happen if you could browse the web freely. You might accidently end up here which everybody knows is a site full of trojans and malware.
No, you cannot uninstall IE. If you try to use Add/Remove programs, it will remove the blue E from the desktop and start menu, but you can still type iexplore.exe and have it start up. There is no way to remove IE from Windows without going through a lot of pain and headache. I think an embeddable HTML rendering widget would be just fine. Why they didn't do that in the first place, I have no idea.
You see, that's why every company that is producing a distribution is trying to get the server market: becuase Linux was and is designed to be a SO for the servers.
No...it's because every company knows servers and the enterprise market is where they can make money (with customizations and support contracts). The desktop just isn't very profitable. In the past, Red Hat worked on the desktop as part of their enterprise package (companies that deployed to workstations needed a usable desktop), and because they had it they would sell it in a retail box, but I don't think it was ever a serious part of their business plan. They eventually realized this and stopped selling the boxed retail versions.
A hungry person is motivated to do something to 'cure' his hunger...get a job, find some way of making money.
...steal from someone, sell his child into slavery, eat his neighbor's dog, or simply become a public health risk due to malnutrition...
Desperate people do desperate things. Do you really want that?
But once the govt. starts paying you for nothing...you no longer have strong motivation to do anything.
Do you know how much you get on welfare? It's hardly first class living. I would say there is plenty of incentive to get off welfare and try to make more money.
I'm for a safety net, not a way of life.
I've known a lot of people who've used the welfare system. Despite comedic characters like George from Seinfeld, the reality is a lot of people either make mistakes or just end up in a bad situation that is hard to get out of. There may be some people abusing the system, but that's more the exception than the rule. If you want people off of welfare, I think it would be better to invest in programs that help people get off welfare rather than eliminate or severely reduce it.
Not all rewards are financial. Some Open Source developers do it for prestige and respect, some do it out of love for the community, some of them just enjoy programming and sharing, and others have motives unknown to me. Some of them are professional software developers who produce Open Source during their free time, while others are skilled hobbyists. None of them are forced to do anything they do, so I think it's safe to say that incentive is not a problem here.
Don't forget all of the developers who are actually paid to work on open source projects. A lot of companies (IBM, Sun, Oracle) and government groups or NGOs like open source software because they can reuse an already existing and mature codebase. It is cheaper for them to contribute to an already existing project than it is to develop something in-house from scratch. What a surprise. Working together to create something is more efficient than creating 100 competing and incompatible implementations of the exact same thing.
Honestly, I'm not sure how to interpret these things because hardness can mean so many different things. But, as the article mentioned, until now (actually a few years ago) an elemental Boron hasn't been known. All known polymorphs had been found to be contaminated with impurities.
Actually it has been synthesized. The structure was determined using a computational method, though. In other words, they couldn't use standard techniques to interpret the x-ray diffraction data and had to use the evolutionary structure prediction method mentioned in the paper.
What I find kind of amazing is the news article mentions a Vickers hardness of 50 GPa. The journal article doesn't mention anything about that, unless it is somewhere in the supplementary materials, but anyway, if the news article estimated correctly based on the reported phase transformation pressures...that's pretty damn hard!
It doesn't support Exchange yet, but Spicebird is a good integration of email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and chat. I've been using the latest beta and it works great. My only problem is that I can't get it to sync the contacts between computers, and I think that's because it requires an ldap directory for that which I don't have setup. Oh well, I like it for the most part. It's much better than Evolution.
Well, you may want to mail the people at Apple and ask them to stop all this disinformation [apple.com].
If you read a marketing blurb, expect to be deceived. Try this instead. In a nutshell, OSX borrowed some ideas from Mach, but it isn't the Mach kernel. It isn't a microkernel, at least not by the strict definition. At best it is a hybrid kernel.
I didn't mean grub2 to be an example of why it couldn't work, just that it's a lot of work to make it work. If you rearchitect the Linux kernel as a microkernel, and then have to spend the next 10 years retweaking everything to get it to the same performance levels it is at today, have you really gained anything from doing all that work? Don't get me wrong. Some things need to be rewritten (grub did). But you have to measure the cost against the gain. I think it is pretty hard to argue against a well-established, and properly designed and maintained monolithic kernel, like Linux. It's not like Linux is plagued by horrible problems that can't be solved without redesigning it.
Trust me: you're not going to pull of a monolythic OS that doesn't know the exact amount of cores there will be on the die
I'm not sure what you mean by this. SMP and cluster computing (grid, cloud, whatever you want to call it) have been going on for years (decades, even) with monolithic kernels. I don't see why multi-core computing would be all that much more complicated. And like I said earlier, virtualization is where everything is going. Intel's 80 core processor will run a bare metal hypervisor and that's it. Everything else will be running in virtual machines, although it will likely be a lot more sophisticated than what we see today.
Well, saying MacOSX is based on Mach is like saying Linux is based on Minix. They are related, but that is as far as the similarity goes. The OSX kernel is very much a monolithic kernel, and I have seen no indication by Apple that they plan to transition toward a microkernel design.
Singularity is an interesting project, but it is still an experiment by Microsoft Research. There are no commercial products with it on the horizon, although there have been hints. I would put it in the same category as L4 and other similar microkernel projects. There might be a niche market in some embedded devices in the future, but that's hardly the "whole OS world."
The thing is, microkernels are being debated by some, but for most the debate is over. There are advantages to microkernels, but not significant enough to offset the cost in performance, not to mention the cost of building a new system from scratch. Look at something like grub2, which is just a bootloader, nevermind a kernel. They decided they needed to rewrite it from scratch in 2002, and they are still working on it. It is probably usable in most distros now, like Ubuntu, but nobody trusts it because it hasn't been proven yet. The original grub (and lilo and just about every bootloader) had thousands of tweaks and workarounds to deal with various hardware, BIOS, and OS quirks. A new bootloader may be simple to write in principle, but it takes a long time for something like that to mature.
So, that was a bit of a digression...anyway, I think the future is pretty clearly going to be in virtualization. Some fairly elaborate stuff is possible, more than simply running an OS on top of a hypervisor, and I think we will start to see it in the next few years as virtualization becomes less of a buzzword and more of a standard practice .
Actually there is the Fluendo MP3 codec which is licensed and legal for use and free distribution. For DVD, there are legal players like LinDVD and PowerDVD, but they aren't free. I didn't realize this until I did a search just now, but apparently you can buy PowerDVD from the Canonical store (for Ubuntu), and other distros probably have something similar.
This has nothing to do with the ability to do graphical boot. That has always been possible. A nice consequence of this new code is that graphical boot becomes easier and more stable, but that's not the purpose. The purpose is to hand over low-level control of the graphics hardware to a single resource, the kernel. That is all.
If you don't want a framebuffer console, you won't be forced to have one (I already responded in another post how to get a regular boot console if your distro defaults to a graphical one). And you will still benefit from the new code because Xorg will use it and won't get borked up as easily. Do you remember the DOS days? Do you remember every software package writing it's own drivers, and endless tweaking of CONFIG.SYS to try to get certain programs to run w/o conflicting with each other, which would happen anyway and lock everything up? It was ridiculous. A kernel to manage low-level hardware events is the right way to do things.
How, if it's initiated early in the boot process?
There is a grub flag...I think it is "quiet splash" that these distros use. If you take it out, you get a plain console boot up. I do it with every install because I like to see what is going on when the system boots up.
the whole OS world is moving towards microkernels
Uh, says who? There isn't a single working mainstream microkernel anywhere. The only active project I know of that seriously attempts to use a microkernel is GNU/Hurd, and I haven't heard anything from them in quite a while (they were supposed to be using the L4 microkernel, but I guess that fizzled for some reason).
Linux isn't "pushing graphics to the kernel." It is doing exactly what it should have done a long time ago. It is making the kernel handle the job of allocating and managing hardware resources. Graphics drivers have long been left out of the kernel for a lot of different reasons, and that has been a problem for graphics development on Linux. This is just a start, but it is a good one. This is a memory manager for the GPU. Don't worry, OpenGL and Xorg aren't going to make it to the kernel anytime soon.
Good stuff. To be fair, though, the dismal state of linux graphics has been known and complained about for a long time. The problem is, there have been a lot of political hurdles (none of this was possible when Xorg was still Xfree86, and w/o cooperation from companies that write drivers it would also be useless), as well as technical hurdles. I don't remember all of the details, but there was an article on freedesktop.org talking about all of the different things people were working on. Several projects were started over from scratch several times because they realized midway through that it wasn't going to work. So the end result is that development has been slow, but when it is finished it is going to be "done right" and not slapped together just to ship something out the door quickly.
If you're going seriously going to suggest that what paganizer does is necessary or typical, then it's fair game to pick on what Linux users say they have to do to get things working.
I wasn't saying anything of the sort. I was just replying to operaghost. Since you brought it up, though, I will assert that I have never been able to run "Windows out of the box." It has always required updates/drivers/software/configuration, to make it usable. Every OS requires a certain amount of that when you install it from scratch.
(Although I've lost track of the number of times I've asked on Slashdot how to do something in Linux, and, with no hint of sarcasm, the response has been some command. Perhaps things have changed - maybe this year it'll be ready for the desktop?)
Have you considered the possibility that, like on Windows, there are multiple ways to do things on Linux? Slashdot, being a "News for Nerds" site, tends to have suggestions like (apt-get install flashplayer-nonfree) because, to most geeks like myself, that is the quickest, easiest, and most efficient way to install the Flash plugin. However, the gui add/remove applications utility can install almost everything that anybody would need. No command line necessary, just present should you desire it.
Me, yes, because I like to fiddle with things and generally prefer the command line. My parents and several of my non-techy friends just use the gui utilities, and it all works just fine.
But I have to ask: What _is_ the 'cost of giving people the choice'?
Well, support (including testing and troubleshooting), marketing, and Microsoft strong-arming come to mind. I applaud and desire choice, but it is rarely as simple as having an extra install disc lying around the deployment factory.
You do realize that the kernel is the single most important component of the operating system, right? Saying that the kernel is the only thing that is different is like saying the only difference between a Ford and a Chevy is the engine.
Don't get me wrong, I've been wanting to play with OpenSolaris myself, but every feature you listed is relevant to the server or workstation market. The desktop market doesn't care about MTAs and IMAP daemons. Kerberos, LDAP, and Samba are nice, but they have to be more than just present. They have to work well with minimal fuss.
Linux, after stumbling around with this for years, is just now finally getting to the point where it can easily be a drop-in replacement for Windows on a corporate desktop (i.e: authenticating on an AD domain). Sure, it's been possible for a while, the question has always been how much tweaking you have to do to various configuration files including possible changes to the domain controllers depending on what you are trying to do. With nice config utilities and better autoconfiguration, this has recently become a lot easier (but not yet perfect).
In addition, there is the issue of desktop optimizations. The Solaris kernel is engineered for throughput, smp, and big iron, and it is very good at those things. Linux has been through many years of flame wars, new schedulers, low-latency patches, preempt patches, rewritten vfs layers, scsi subsystems, and audio subsystems--all addressing the complicated issues of performance on the server and the desktop. The desktop part of that has really matured in the last year, but even three or four years ago desktop performance was pretty sucky. Remember, for the desktop user, latency (even perceived latency) is a much bigger issue than throughput, and the optimizations for the former are often degrading to the latter.
So, I like the idea of OpenSolaris, but it's going to take a lot more than slapping Compiz and Gnome on it to make it into a good desktop OS. Sure, they will get there eventually, just like Linux (maybe even faster if they can use some of the same approaches Linux has), but it's not there yet.