As expected. Having been through the tools you mentioned plus ipmasqadm, I never bothered to learn iptables as I expected it to be replaced soon. Shorewall has been my tool of preference for firewalls.

If each self contained application declared what libaries it contains, the OS could have some sort of security auditing agent that identifies exploits on the system. Kinda like portaudit in FreeBSD.

The disk I/O latency can at least for HDDs be reduced if each application statically compiles in its libraries. I think Plan 9 actually does this, see http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/. There is a comparison of the file sizes of some command line tools there, but it would be interesting to know the binary size difference between statically and dynamically linked binaries for modern GUI apps that are using libraries like GTK or QT.

Tape is a great medium for reliable backup of larger data volumes for corporate users, and I believe it will continue to be so for a long time.

For backing up your personal workstation(s) at home tape has been gradually replaced by cdrw and later by dvd±rw. Tape drives for personal backup have not been able to keep up with the growth of disk capacity. Up until the later 90's one could buy reasonably priced tape drives and simply dump the content of ones entire hard drive onto a single cartridge. Unfortunately, todays tape drives that can do that are not priced for the consumer marked.

PS! My six year old Iomega Ditto is still serving its purpose!