Although I haven't changed my mind ingeneral, I think that there are arguments for configuration managementsystems like Cfengine and Puppet over packaging systems. Apart fromtheir actual existence in usable form, one of them is that CM systemsare going to be inherently more agile than packaging systems.

The drawback of packaging systems is that they fundamentally work onpackages. This means that doing things via them requires a multi-stepprocess; you must assemble your files, build one or more packages fromthem, and finally propagate

Here is a thesis about network computing's lack of success:

The compute power to deliver your applications has to live somewhere,whether that is in the machine in front of you or on a server that sitsin a machine room somewhere. It turns out that the cost of deliveringcompute power in one box does not scale linearly; at various points, itturns up sharply. For various reasons, there is also a minimum amount ofcomputing power that gets delivered in boxes; it is generally impossibleto obtain a

Discussions about Solaris often wind up bringing up OpenSolaris (andsometimes it crops up in other contexts). However, I do not findOpenSolaris particularly interesting.

My view is that right now, OpenSolaris is essentially a technologydemonstrator. You can't use OpenSolaris by itself, because it lackssufficient support to use it directly and sufficient genuine opennessfor sensible people to base stable things on it. You can't use it as thefuture of Solaris, because I'm not aware of any commitment from Sun that