To sum up the main features in technical terms, TUNES is a project to replace existing Operating Systems, Languages, and User Interfaces by a completely rethought Computing System, based on a fully reflective architecture.
Proeminent features built around this reflective architecture will include unification of system abstractions, security based on formal proofs from explicit negociated axioms as controlled by capabilities, higher-order functions, self-extensible syntax, fine-grained composition, distributed networking, orthogonally persistent storage, fault-tolerant computation, version-aware identification, decentralized (no-kernel) communication, dynamic code (re)generation, high-level models of encapsulation, hardware-independent exchange of code, migratable actors, yet (eventually) a highly-performant set of dynamic compilation tools (phew).
You may find precise definitions of these features in the TUNES Glossary (if it lacks a definition you need, please tell, so we should add it; contributions welcome).
These are NOT buzzwords. These are technical terms, and, again, you may find precise definitions in the TUNES Glossary.
We do not choose the above terms because they are flashy or anything; at the time this description was written down, none of them had any particular hype-value. We chose these terms because they describe in concise ways the features we want for TUNES; you sure wouldn't like them to be replaced by fully expanded definitions in layman terms!
If you're not convinced, you may compare to the pitiful list of real buzzwords below, that could sadly be applied to many an existing proprietary commercial operating system:
"A proven 32-bit cutting-edge state-of-the-art industrial-strength Y2K-compliant zero-administration plug-and-play industry-standard Java-enabled internet-ready multimedia professional personal-computer Operating System that is even newer and faster yet compatible, with a user-friendly object-oriented 3D graphical user interface, amazing inter-application communication and plug-in capability, an enhanced filesystem, full integration into Enterprise networks, an exclusive way to deploy distributed components, seamless network sharing of printers and files." (yuck)
The TUNES project being in very early development state, it would be ridiculous to give a time-scale for the availability of some functionality or another.
However, TUNES being a Free Software (aka Open Source(TM)) project, people who feel the need for some functionality whatsoever are free to go ahead and write a TUNES module implementing this functionality, or otherwise wrap an existing implementation for use inside TUNES.