There is still a bug on sparc related to gcc 3.2 being the default compiler. It is hoped that it will be fixed this weekend. While debian is not the fastest dist to get stuff out from my experience it tends to be far more solid when it comes out.
During large transitions it typically lags far behind the other commercial dists but it does a better job at the conversion. I have had too many X, KDE, python, ZOPE etc problems on various other dists that I just got sick and tired of it.
Sid is more stable then Redhat and Mandrake are and the software is more likely to just work which is mostly related to better packaging.
I get paid to do other stuff then babysit the boxes so I want software that works all the time and for me and that means using Debian and waiting until the software is ready.
One of the things that is strange about this is I just tried this same thing from a bunch of KDE apps and they all worked just fine pasting into mozilla. I pasted up to ~ 20 megs of text without problems. I did this with mozilla 1.2, kde 3.1 cvs packages, under debian sid.
Konqueror is a generic application for embedding components. It is not a web browser, file browser etc it just embeds those components and they are seperate components. It can also embed koffice, kate, image viewers, audio, video etc. It is not the same thing that IE is. It might look similar but it is not similar.
Umm you know that redhat backports security fixes right just like debian and other dists do? In which case you might be running a fixed version already and the newer rpm could still be the same verison with more fixes backported. If you just trust a security scanner to see if you are vulnerable based on the software version reported then you are going to have problems. Check with your dist and see if the package you have is actually vulnerable to that problem. Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Suse, etc etc put up very detailed information on this kind of stuff.
Very likely you just don't know much about being a system admin and you are in over your head until you learn more. Being a programmer does NOT make you qualified to be sysadmin and being a sysadmin does not make you qualified to be a programmer either.
This is looking like a good time to look at a powerpc platform from IBM especially with those new chips they are bringing out. Every app on my system comes with source and the powerpc is a supported platform. I can't say I have any real ties of loyalty to the x86 platform. If AMD and Intel are both going in this direction then screw them and go somewhere else that is the freedom you have with an open platform like BSD and Linux.
These reasons are why I use debian. It is not the deb format or apt-get etc etc that make debian work so well. It is the work done on making all packages adhere to a standard. Debian works becuase of the quality of the packages and they are of higher quality then I have seen for any other dist. For kde those config entries are in/etc/kde2 and/etc/kde3 depending on which version you are running. Those are the system wide settings and where exactly where I expected them to be.
The debian package maintainers do that with every package I have seen so far. As far as QMail goes you can talk to the author but he has no intent of changing it. QMail works differently from just about everything else out there. Overall I prefer postfix which was far far easier to install.
Gentoo has packages but from my experience they don't have a real policy on where things go that is stricly adhered to. Redhat doesn't mandrake doesn't from my experience either. That is why I choose and run debian on my systems becuase it behaves very predictably. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
I have kde 3.0.2 and if I select a url in the url box in mozilla 1.0 and konqueror 3.0.2 I can not reproduce that. Maybe that is a bug that has been fixed.
Hmm that seems very strange. I have kde 3.x configured on a fair number of boxes and I have found konqueror to be faster to start then mozilla and open new windows by a lot. One of the boxes is running kde 3.0.2 on debian sid with a k6-2 350 and 384M of ram. On another box I have a athlon xp1800+ with 1G of ram and konqueror is way faster then mozilla. It starts in 1s and new windows open with no delays.
When I have checked memory usage I have also found that mozilla uses more memory then konqueror does What I wonder about is that if the packages you are using have not been made very well.
Actually I really like this feature and use it fairly often. I can just select a url and almost instantly that will popup and then I can tell it to open that url in konqueror and almost instantly that will open up also. I am running kde 3.0.2 on debian sid. I do web work and I find that almost anytime I select a url I actually want to open in a web browser.
I certainly don't need the machine I have set up more and less powerful machines then that. How much ram does it have? What version of X? What video card? What services are you running? I have seen people complain linux was too slow on low end systems and when I checked they had a web server running, 2 databases, a mail server, news server, ssh, telnet etc.
I still don't see where people get the idea that x is slower on the same hardware then windows is. That has not been my experience at all with one exception. Overall I have found matrox and ati cards to be faster under linux then under windows for the work I usually do which is a lot of coding under kde.
However like I said I have found one exception and that is nvidia cards. I find that those ran slower under linux then under windows and where not stable under either os with my definition of stabilyt being that the system should easily have several months of uptime under fairly heavy usage.
I have been using linux for 6 years or so now and during most of that time I have used matrox or ati cards and have found x to be faster then windows even when running kde. For a brief time I ran an nvidia card and I won't but another thing from that company. Too unstable to get work done and they don't perform well enough under 2d for x.
Overall I have been doing web design for a while and all of our pages are 100% spec and there are a lot of reasons for that.
The first problem is that thinking IE is the only standard is a self fulfilling prophecy. The more you design for IE the less you see other browsers and thus the more you can design for IE since you don't see other browsers. I have seen this a lot of rewriting a customers page that was designed for IE only by another company typically increased the number of customers a fair bit.
When you piss someone off most of the time they will tell 10 other people that x company pissed them off. However if you make something good and cool they typically tell only 2-3 people. So how can it be a good idea to ignore these other browsers that are down in the 5-10% area? That would lower the overall usage of your site by a staggering amount which I have seen that it does.
Finally I have seen sites that only work on IE and block you if you are not using IE. Guess what guys search engines for the most part are not IE. Google is most certainly not IE. Ooh your company page is really good and will really help your company now that it is not on the search engines. Also sites that are 100% spec move up in the various search engines faster. I don't know exactly why but I do know that it happens.
Overall the data is the same between many views of a website so why not just do server side browser detection and change some of your layout code for each of the browser groups you need to make for you site to make it render correctly in all of them? The data is the same between all of them and changing your layout code should be fairly easy in any dyanmic environment. Then you can serve back to the browser whatever version best suits that browser and overall I have found that usage of web pages using that rises dramatically. Also with that we tend to see far more opera, netscape 4.x, konqueror and mozilla users and thus the percentage of IE drops a fair bit.
I absolutely agree with this. Overall I open up opera only to test if a page works and I send it the same version of the page that I send IE because of how limited its CSS support is.
I usually have an output filter for konqueror and mozilla based browsers, an ie one which opera gets also which does not use some of the nicer features the newer browsers are capable of and a backwards compat site for just about everything else with each version being 100% spec according to the w3c.
Without more attention to developers I don't see why I should spend any time with opera. I find almost none of my customers use it and almost no hits on the sites come from it. I see more hits from konqueor then I do from opera. (Also in case you are wondering when opera cloaks at another browsers it still puts its ident string at the end and my script still pulls that out and IDs it as opera and not another browser.)
I tend to use konqueror as my reference platform becuase I find it to be very picky about rendering bad code at least with the doctype I give it and once I get stuff fully debugged there then the other browsers will usually render the page correctly except for features that other browsers don't support.
In my own experience I have found konqueror is often faster then opera especially when working with large forms.
As for tabbed browsing I don't like it at all. I prefer using virtual desktops under KDE and task grouping.
The strange this is that konqueror is not a web browser is it just a kpart display tool. By default it uses khtml for its drawing however you can have it use the mozilla rendering engine also for drawing which works just fine. On my copy of konqueror I just click on view -> view mode -> kmozilla and that works without problems. You could remove konqueror completely and most apps on kde wouldn't even notice since they embed the kpart not konqueror.
I have never used drivers that matrox made so I have no idea how their drivers have worked. I ust the drivers that come with xfree86. Also tv out is not a selling point for me so that has not made any difference to me either. However I can see why you would not like their cards for that reason. I like their cards because I find them to be extremely stable and when you are doing software devel having the video card destroy a test run really bites.
I have to disagree with this idea. I used to have some random crashes under linux when using the nvidia drivers and when I dual booted to windows also. When I replaced the nvidia card with an ati card all of the crashes went away. I had tried lots of nvidia drivers and they all had the problems.
Even more annoying was that I found that the nvidia drivers would break up the audio on my sblive. I would get all these crackles in the audio which where very annoying. When I replaced the nvidia geforce with a radeon all of those problems went away. Overall I am not impressed with nvidia quality at all. ATI is better but for a really stable video card I would go with matrox. On a box I have with a G200 X has NEVER crashed. I have never had a single issue with that card.
Re:Don't judge Perl based on the article
on
Happy Birthday Perl!
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have to disagree with you to a certain extent I have seen a fair number of people that knew C, C++. perl, python, java etc and the one thing they had in common is that they wrote C in every language.
The point is that learning the syntax of a language is very different from understanding the real powers, drawbacks etc of a language. For example in python I find multiple inheritance, introspection, object capabilities to be very useful features.
However with my experience in C++ if I had to do something in C++ I would do it it a different way this C++ has a different language philosohpy and design.
Overall knowing the syntax of many languages is okay but I think for real understanding you should master 1 or a few languages. From personal experience I have noticed that a master at a language can run circles around those that learned it in a few days and also build very elegant solutions someone with less experience could not easily do. Many times the differences in productivity are drastic. Not 10% to 20% but more like an order ot two of magnitude difference.
Konqueror is NOT a web browser, file browser,
text viewer, image viewer etc. However it is an app
that can embed any kpart in it. What you are using
when viewing the web is khtml which is available
to any kde application. When you view a text file
you usually embed kedit or kate. For the filesystem
you are using the various kio slaves depending on
what you use it for. Viewing a web page in konqueror
is just like embedding konsole is kate or kate in
konqueror or various text objects in kdevelop or khtml
in kdevelop and so on.
Given how badly the government did on its last security evaluation they are hiring the company with about the worse security track record ever to help them? Isn't this like the blind leading the blind? Well I guess this gives a good indication as to what kind of "penalty" MS will get from the trial since it looks like they have managed to buy off the current administration.
This just seems like one of the most phenomenolly stupid ideas the government could make with respect to computers though given the current adminstration I am sure they could figure out some way to outdo themselves. Though I really don't want to see what they do to outdo themselves.
This absolutely should have been released as soon as it was found. And shame on CERT, Redhat, WU-ftpd authors etc for trying to hide it. This is inexusable because the crackers and kiddies have probably had it for several weeks now. If you find a security flaw report it immediately publically so that those that could be affected can turn off the service if that is what it takes.
However considering the quality record of wu-ftpd if you are running it on your box you don't care about security already so it could be worse. Overall people should probably be use proftpd or maybe even zope for their ftp server.
On a plus note there are wu-ftpd packeges in incoming for sid and those might have the fixes people need to debian boxes. If you are running wu-ftpd and refuse to use something else try those.
My experience is very different. With 2.4.10 my systems would hit swap pretty hard after a few days and would slow down a good bit. If I did something that would really load them down ie a load average above about 20 the systems would essentially freeze for 20 minutes or so and sometimes just never come back. With 2.4.10 all that behavior seems to be gone. I am also a software developer. Mainly I write python code for zope. This is a on a k6-2 500 with 768M of ram.
I have had no problems so far with the new VM and way too many with the old one.
I have been running 2.4.10 as a server and it has been working far better for me under high loads then any other 2.4.x kernel has so far. This is mostly a zope server but it runs a few other things also. Often I will get the load average at 5-10 for a few hours however I have enough memory in the system such that it only goes into swap maybe 100M or so on a 384M of ram box with about 1G of swap available.
I have also been using 2.4.10 with preemption and reiserfs on my desktop box and I have had the load average up over 20 for a few hours while working on stuff and was into swap about 500M with 768M of ram and also have had no problems. I am getting no lockups at all on the new vm and it seems to be using memory a lot better then before. It is releasing swap when it is no longer neeeded and it is working much better under high loads.
Congratualions you just described the OS/2 System object model. It does pretty much exactly what you said however it had more features then just that. Apps could also register themselves as filters or conversion routines. So you could right click on a au file and convert it to a wav without having to open any application. It was never really taken far enough but damn it kicked ass.
What I like about kde is that it seems to be growing closer to the os/2 object model over time but with some nice newer additions. However I feel metadata on a file is not likely to appear in linux for a while simple because of lack of good filesystems for it. It looks like reiserfs4 will support that but it is a year off at best.
X15 is very fast because someone tried to put a webserver in kernel space ie Tux and because of that experiment bottlenecks were found in the kernel and fixed that allowed many apps to become faster.
I see it as a good idea of trying to stick things in kernel space with the idea that it will never actually be put in. Think of this as a profiling project with real world data. At one point someone was talking about integrating CORBA into the kernel. I think this is a good idea since it really shows where things can be sped up.
This is one of the advantages of having the sourcecode. You can try something like this and see how it works and it helps spur development a lot. Right now I think efforts like this are going to be where a lot a linux's advantages come from over the next few years.
Actually you are partly right and mostly wrong. They forked linux not to get it as secure as w2k but to make it a secure operating system. Since they had the source code to work with they have worked on adding features to linux to make it secure in a way that other operating systems can not be guaranteed to be.
With their linux dist they get many eyes looking at it and they can do anything they want with the source code to make it as secure as possible.
Given the choice of mostly secure which the nsa can get with w2k and redoing parts of linux to make it actually secure which would you choose? It seems obvious which one the nsa chose. Also they are more changes in their linux dist then just the kernel.
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There is still a bug on sparc related to gcc 3.2 being the default compiler. It is hoped that it will be fixed this weekend. While debian is not the fastest dist to get stuff out from my experience it tends to be far more solid when it comes out.
During large transitions it typically lags far behind the other commercial dists but it does a better job at the conversion. I have had too many X, KDE, python, ZOPE etc problems on various other dists that I just got sick and tired of it.
Sid is more stable then Redhat and Mandrake are and the software is more likely to just work which is mostly related to better packaging.
I get paid to do other stuff then babysit the boxes so I want software that works all the time and for me and that means using Debian and waiting until the software is ready.
One of the things that is strange about this is I just tried this same thing from a bunch of KDE apps and they all worked just fine pasting into mozilla. I pasted up to ~ 20 megs of text without problems. I did this with mozilla 1.2, kde 3.1 cvs packages, under debian sid.
Konqueror is a generic application for embedding components. It is not a web browser, file browser etc it just embeds those components and they are seperate components. It can also embed koffice, kate, image viewers, audio, video etc. It is not the same thing that IE is. It might look similar but it is not similar.
Umm you know that redhat backports security fixes right just like debian and other dists do? In which case you might be running a fixed version already and the newer rpm could still be the same verison with more fixes backported. If you just trust a security scanner to see if you are vulnerable based on the software version reported then you are going to have problems. Check with your dist and see if the package you have is actually vulnerable to that problem. Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Suse, etc etc put up very detailed information on this kind of stuff.
Very likely you just don't know much about being a system admin and you are in over your head until you learn more. Being a programmer does NOT make you qualified to be sysadmin and being a sysadmin does not make you qualified to be a programmer either.
This is looking like a good time to look at a powerpc platform from IBM especially with those new chips they are bringing out. Every app on my system comes with source and the powerpc is a supported platform. I can't say I have any real ties of loyalty to the x86 platform. If AMD and Intel are both going in this direction then screw them and go somewhere else that is the freedom you have with an open platform like BSD and Linux.
These reasons are why I use debian. It is not the deb format or apt-get etc etc that make debian work so well. It is the work done on making all packages adhere to a standard. Debian works becuase of the quality of the packages and they are of higher quality then I have seen for any other dist. For kde those config entries are in /etc/kde2 and /etc/kde3 depending on which version you are running. Those are the system wide settings and where exactly where I expected them to be.
The debian package maintainers do that with every package I have seen so far. As far as QMail goes you can talk to the author but he has no intent of changing it. QMail works differently from just about everything else out there. Overall I prefer postfix which was far far easier to install.
Gentoo has packages but from my experience they don't have a real policy on where things go that is stricly adhered to. Redhat doesn't mandrake doesn't from my experience either. That is why I choose and run debian on my systems becuase it behaves very predictably. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
I have kde 3.0.2 and if I select a url in the url box in mozilla 1.0 and konqueror 3.0.2 I can not reproduce that. Maybe that is a bug that has been fixed.
Hmm that seems very strange. I have kde 3.x configured on a fair number of boxes and I have found konqueror to be faster to start then mozilla and open new windows by a lot. One of the boxes is running kde 3.0.2 on debian sid with a k6-2 350 and 384M of ram. On another box I have a athlon xp1800+ with 1G of ram and konqueror is way faster then mozilla. It starts in 1s and new windows open with no delays.
When I have checked memory usage I have also found that mozilla uses more memory then konqueror does What I wonder about is that if the packages you are using have not been made very well.
Actually I really like this feature and use it fairly often. I can just select a url and almost instantly that will popup and then I can tell it to open that url in konqueror and almost instantly that will open up also. I am running kde 3.0.2 on debian sid. I do web work and I find that almost anytime I select a url I actually want to open in a web browser.
I certainly don't need the machine I have set up more and less powerful machines then that. How much ram does it have? What version of X? What video card? What services are you running? I have seen people complain linux was too slow on low end systems and when I checked they had a web server running, 2 databases, a mail server, news server, ssh, telnet etc.
I still don't see where people get the idea that x is slower on the same hardware then windows is. That has not been my experience at all with one exception. Overall I have found matrox and ati cards to be faster under linux then under windows for the work I usually do which is a lot of coding under kde.
However like I said I have found one exception and that is nvidia cards. I find that those ran slower under linux then under windows and where not stable under either os with my definition of stabilyt being that the system should easily have several months of uptime under fairly heavy usage.
I have been using linux for 6 years or so now and during most of that time I have used matrox or ati cards and have found x to be faster then windows even when running kde. For a brief time I ran an nvidia card and I won't but another thing from that company. Too unstable to get work done and they don't perform well enough under 2d for x.
Overall I have been doing web design for a while and all of our pages are 100% spec and there are a lot of reasons for that.
The first problem is that thinking IE is the only standard is a self fulfilling prophecy. The more you design for IE the less you see other browsers and thus the more you can design for IE since you don't see other browsers. I have seen this a lot of rewriting a customers page that was designed for IE only by another company typically increased the number of customers a fair bit.
When you piss someone off most of the time they will tell 10 other people that x company pissed them off. However if you make something good and cool they typically tell only 2-3 people. So how can it be a good idea to ignore these other browsers that are down in the 5-10% area? That would lower the overall usage of your site by a staggering amount which I have seen that it does.
Finally I have seen sites that only work on IE and block you if you are not using IE. Guess what guys search engines for the most part are not IE. Google is most certainly not IE. Ooh your company page is really good and will really help your company now that it is not on the search engines. Also sites that are 100% spec move up in the various search engines faster. I don't know exactly why but I do know that it happens.
Overall the data is the same between many views of a website so why not just do server side browser detection and change some of your layout code for each of the browser groups you need to make for you site to make it render correctly in all of them? The data is the same between all of them and changing your layout code should be fairly easy in any dyanmic environment. Then you can serve back to the browser whatever version best suits that browser and overall I have found that usage of web pages using that rises dramatically. Also with that we tend to see far more opera, netscape 4.x, konqueror and mozilla users and thus the percentage of IE drops a fair bit.
I absolutely agree with this. Overall I open up opera only to test if a page works and I send it the same version of the page that I send IE because of how limited its CSS support is.
I usually have an output filter for konqueror and mozilla based browsers, an ie one which opera gets also which does not use some of the nicer features the newer browsers are capable of and a backwards compat site for just about everything else with each version being 100% spec according to the w3c.
Without more attention to developers I don't see why I should spend any time with opera. I find almost none of my customers use it and almost no hits on the sites come from it. I see more hits from konqueor then I do from opera. (Also in case you are wondering when opera cloaks at another browsers it still puts its ident string at the end and my script still pulls that out and IDs it as opera and not another browser.)
I tend to use konqueror as my reference platform becuase I find it to be very picky about rendering bad code at least with the doctype I give it and once I get stuff fully debugged there then the other browsers will usually render the page correctly except for features that other browsers don't support.
In my own experience I have found konqueror is often faster then opera especially when working with large forms.
As for tabbed browsing I don't like it at all. I prefer using virtual desktops under KDE and task grouping.
The strange this is that konqueror is not a web browser is it just a kpart display tool. By default it uses khtml for its drawing however you can have it use the mozilla rendering engine also for drawing which works just fine. On my copy of konqueror I just click on view -> view mode -> kmozilla and that works without problems. You could remove konqueror completely and most apps on kde wouldn't even notice since they embed the kpart not konqueror.
I have never used drivers that matrox made so I have no idea how their drivers have worked. I ust the drivers that come with xfree86. Also tv out is not a selling point for me so that has not made any difference to me either. However I can see why you would not like their cards for that reason. I like their cards because I find them to be extremely stable and when you are doing software devel having the video card destroy a test run really bites.
I have to disagree with this idea. I used to have some random crashes under linux when using the nvidia drivers and when I dual booted to windows also. When I replaced the nvidia card with an ati card all of the crashes went away. I had tried lots of nvidia drivers and they all had the problems.
Even more annoying was that I found that the nvidia drivers would break up the audio on my sblive. I would get all these crackles in the audio which where very annoying. When I replaced the nvidia geforce with a radeon all of those problems went away. Overall I am not impressed with nvidia quality at all. ATI is better but for a really stable video card I would go with matrox. On a box I have with a G200 X has NEVER crashed. I have never had a single issue with that card.
I have to disagree with you to a certain extent I have seen a fair number of people that knew C, C++. perl, python, java etc and the one thing they had in common is that they wrote C in every language.
The point is that learning the syntax of a language is very different from understanding the real powers, drawbacks etc of a language. For example in python I find multiple inheritance, introspection, object capabilities to be very useful features.
However with my experience in C++ if I had to do something in C++ I would do it it a different way this C++ has a different language philosohpy and design.
Overall knowing the syntax of many languages is okay but I think for real understanding you should master 1 or a few languages. From personal experience I have noticed that a master at a language can run circles around those that learned it in a few days and also build very elegant solutions someone with less experience could not easily do. Many times the differences in productivity are drastic. Not 10% to 20% but more like an order ot two of magnitude difference.
Konqueror is NOT a web browser, file browser,
text viewer, image viewer etc. However it is an app
that can embed any kpart in it. What you are using
when viewing the web is khtml which is available
to any kde application. When you view a text file
you usually embed kedit or kate. For the filesystem
you are using the various kio slaves depending on
what you use it for. Viewing a web page in konqueror
is just like embedding konsole is kate or kate in
konqueror or various text objects in kdevelop or khtml
in kdevelop and so on.
Konqueror just uses the object model.
Given how badly the government did on its last security evaluation they are hiring the company with about the worse security track record ever to help them? Isn't this like the blind leading the blind? Well I guess this gives a good indication as to what kind of "penalty" MS will get from the trial since it looks like they have managed to buy off the current administration.
;)
This just seems like one of the most phenomenolly stupid ideas the government could make with respect to computers though given the current adminstration I am sure they could figure out some way to outdo themselves. Though I really don't want to see what they do to outdo themselves.
Hmm I heard Mars is nice this time of year
This absolutely should have been released as soon as it was found. And shame on CERT, Redhat, WU-ftpd authors etc for trying to hide it. This is inexusable because the crackers and kiddies have probably had it for several weeks now. If you find a security flaw report it immediately publically so that those that could be affected can turn off the service if that is what it takes.
However considering the quality record of wu-ftpd if you are running it on your box you don't care about security already so it could be worse. Overall people should probably be use proftpd or maybe even zope for their ftp server.
On a plus note there are wu-ftpd packeges in incoming for sid and those might have the fixes people need to debian boxes. If you are running wu-ftpd and refuse to use something else try those.
My experience is very different. With 2.4.10 my systems would hit swap pretty hard after a few days and would slow down a good bit. If I did something that would really load them down ie a load average above about 20 the systems would essentially freeze for 20 minutes or so and sometimes just never come back. With 2.4.10 all that behavior seems to be gone. I am also a software developer. Mainly I write python code for zope. This is a on a k6-2 500 with 768M of ram.
I have had no problems so far with the new VM and way too many with the old one.
I have been running 2.4.10 as a server and it has been working far better for me under high loads then any other 2.4.x kernel has so far. This is mostly a zope server but it runs a few other things also. Often I will get the load average at 5-10 for a few hours however I have enough memory in the system such that it only goes into swap maybe 100M or so on a 384M of ram box with about 1G of swap available.
I have also been using 2.4.10 with preemption and reiserfs on my desktop box and I have had the load average up over 20 for a few hours while working on stuff and was into swap about 500M with 768M of ram and also have had no problems. I am getting no lockups at all on the new vm and it seems to be using memory a lot better then before. It is releasing swap when it is no longer neeeded and it is working much better under high loads.
Congratualions you just described the OS/2 System object model. It does pretty much exactly what you said however it had more features then just that. Apps could also register themselves as filters or conversion routines. So you could right click on a au file and convert it to a wav without having to open any application. It was never really taken far enough but damn it kicked ass.
What I like about kde is that it seems to be growing closer to the os/2 object model over time but with some nice newer additions. However I feel metadata on a file is not likely to appear in linux for a while simple because of lack of good filesystems for it. It looks like reiserfs4 will support that but it is a year off at best.
X15 is very fast because someone tried to put a webserver in kernel space ie Tux and because of that experiment bottlenecks were found in the kernel and fixed that allowed many apps to become faster.
I see it as a good idea of trying to stick things in kernel space with the idea that it will never actually be put in. Think of this as a profiling project with real world data. At one point someone was talking about integrating CORBA into the kernel. I think this is a good idea since it really shows where things can be sped up.
This is one of the advantages of having the sourcecode. You can try something like this and see how it works and it helps spur development a lot. Right now I think efforts like this are going to be where a lot a linux's advantages come from over the next few years.
Actually you are partly right and mostly wrong. They forked linux not to get it as secure as w2k but to make it a secure operating system. Since they had the source code to work with they have worked on adding features to linux to make it secure in a way that other operating systems can not be guaranteed to be.
With their linux dist they get many eyes looking at it and they can do anything they want with the source code to make it as secure as possible.
Given the choice of mostly secure which the nsa can get with w2k and redoing parts of linux to make it actually secure which would you choose? It seems obvious which one the nsa chose. Also they are more changes in their linux dist then just the kernel.