keep in mind that NTFS remains proprietary and Microsoft can break it for newly written files any time it suits their business purposes to do so. All it takes is one update.
Yes and no -- they must stay backward compatible with the currently deployed versions. That gives a comfortable time window (for instance, if M$ were to decide today to introduce a new filesystem "feature", they would probably give patches for WinXP and 2K3, but not for 2K ; and by the time everybody applies the patch, we can only hope that the Linux NTFS project will catch up with the new "features").
In April, I did order a laptop from Dell (Latitude D610) without any O/S. You cannot select on the website without O/S, but if you pick up your phone and ask them, you can get almost whatever you want. In my case : the slowest (=cheapest) CPU, the fast graphics card (which, on the website, comes only with the fastest CPU), without O/S (and some other bells and whistle which are not worth mentioning here).
Also, you can order most (if not all) Dell servers without O/S, too.
They call that N-Series (you have a nice N-Series sticker instead of the designed for Windows XP sticker).
I can't get access to the article, but I guess that the story is about the shutdown of FooNet. FooNet isn't a "real" hosting solution ; it's a cheap shell provider for script kiddies who want to have their own ircd. They might also provide "serious" hosting services ; but as soon as one provides shell services for such a targetted audience, she knows that she will have to handle some specific problems - DDOS, flood, etc.
And according to what I know about the FooNet shutdown (if that's the same story), there was thousands of DDOS "drones" located at the datacenter, and the staff of the datacenter failed to shut them down. That sounds very dubious to me, but you might want to check this for another side of the story...
Quoting :
"Perhaps the blackest of the black hat networks is finally gone, raided by the FBI. Foonet was home of spammers, packet kiddies, script kiddies, carders, and other illegal activities, as documented in the links below."
PS: if the shutdown mentionned isn't the FooNet one, ignore this post:-)
Twins have different finger-prints... It has nothing to do with your DNA
I once again made a fool of myself:-( I once read that in ancient times;-) before genetic testing was possible, people sometimes used finger-prints to know if twins were "real" twins (I think in english it's "maternal" twins ; i.e. with same DNA).
Further reading taught me that maternal twins had similar finger-prints, but that they were different nonetheless - and different enough to be a ground for biometrics. Same thing for retina scan technology : the blood vessels at the back of the eye are different, even with real twins (I found some good explanations just by googling twins retina scan if you want to know more about that and twins and biometry in general).
This is not supposed to be funny, but... How do biometrics enthusiasts pretend to avoid abuse from twins ? I'm not thinking about something obvious like "Ha ha, I stole my brother's money", but rather something like "See, I could not be at this robbery, because my retina was scanned 1000 miles ago from this place at the same time!" Courts (and other people, too) have to be very careful about this kind of "proofs".
As a PhD student, I often have to look for papers in the computer science field ; and very often, CiteSeer yields better results - or, rather, different results, but with a very good cross-referencing system. You can directly jump to the other papers cited by the paper you're reading, and you can see which papers did cite it, too.
The URL : http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
That said, I often find very interesting ideas in scientific papers, but sometimes things can't be implemented with current technology (I'm still talking about computer science domain, since that's what I know), or sometimes, the good idea in the paper is obsoleted a few years later.
For instance, I remember a scheduling algorithm to read disk blocks in a Video-On-Demand server : it was maybe very clever when it was written, when they had to feed 155 Mbps with a computer having 16 MB of RAM, but today, you have maybe 10 times more throughput, but 100 times more RAM - so you can use simpler, memory-hungry, buffering methods.
The problem is, that it's difficult (IMHO) to say "OK, this paper is theoretically interesting, but we can't implement this today, BUT we will probably be able to do it in a few (dozen) years", because you don't know what will and won't evolve (in my previous example, it was easy to predict that network bandwidth and memory size would increase, but it was maybe harder to guess that MPEG4 and DivX would allow the bitrate of a video stream to stay low...)
What makes linux so difficult to adopt in the business world is that there are too many choices and just confuses the market..
Also, a lot of IT managers don't know what Linux can do for them. Some IT manager working in a big TV/movies company was surprised to learn that mplayer was able to read Windows Media 9, Realplayer, quicktime... He didn't know that there was a single application able to read all those formats, and asked me a lot of questions about Linux and mplayer.
And that's not an isolated case ; a lot of sys admins responsible for office computers don't even know that OpenOffice exists, or they believe that it's broken, or clunky... We have to show them:-) And Live CDs is a good way to do that. Now, we can build those CDs over any distro out there... One strength of Linux is also this choice (waiting the time when one distro will fulfill every purpose...)
(this is not directly related to the FCC matter ; but this is a long overview of the Telephone situation in France...)
In France, we always had a reliable, but expansive and blood-sucking telco : France Telecom. They are the only way to go for residential users who want a telephone line, and in most place, the only providers of DSL lines (there are some places where you can get Internet thru Cable TV, however).
The French ART (the Authority for Regulations of Telecommunications) however did enforce France Telecom to deploy a technical architecture to allow other ISP to join the DSL hype (to prevent monopolistic situation) ; so they did that - and people had to pay France Telecom to get DSL, and then an ISP to get Internet over their DSL line ! Two bills instead of one, great.
But there was a catch : it was France Telecom who was operating the data connection, so they could limit the bandwidth of the service, and also enforced some silly things (like a daily disconnection). So the ART pushed further, requiring France Telecom to allow other operators to put their equipments in wiring cabinets, and do whatever they want with the copper pair going to the residents, the famous local loop.
(Well, technically, they can't do whatever they want over the wire ; they only have access to the high frequencies. The voice frequencies are still operated by France Telecom, and there are filters (they call them splitters) at each end of the wire - like in regular DSL. But now, the operators can use whatever kind of DSL they like.)
So, one operator, Free (www.free.fr) decided to do funny stuff. For the price of regular DSL, they offered more bandwidth (roughly twice more) with a better ping (twice less), with a funny modem : the freebox. If you're starting to wonder what this has to do with the FCC and VoIP, here we are : the freebox, besides Ethernet connector, has RJ11 connector (for telephone), and a SCART connector (for TV). Those guys are planning to offer TV service real soon now, and they already offer telephone thru their network. Calling from a freebox user to another one is free ; and until end of 2003, calling from a freebox to anywhere in France is free, too. Calling a freebox user is low cost (local communication rate).
So, those guys are deploying an almost-free VoIP network. There must be a catch ; why are other operators not moving ? Well, not everyone can get the golden freebox. You have to be really close to the DSLAM (the telephone concentrator), and in a zone where Free did already install some hardware in the wiring closets. So, it's more like an experiment than a widely available product.
But I betcha some beers that when they go wide-scale, things are going to get messy. Because after wasting billions of euros into Orange (their GSM cellphone network), France Telecom really doesn't need someone to eat their main stream of revenue... So I'm eager to see how things are evolving with the FCC, to compare with what will maybe happen here in a few months/years:-)
FYI, noos is a TV and Internet cable operator, available only in Paris (France), featuring very low prices, and very low service quality, indeed. But a lot of people do use their services because they are cheaper than DSL (especially if you already subscribed to cable TV and/or you don't want to subscribe to the basic telephone service, which is required to get DSL here). Then, later, they complain/rant about their ISP, forgetting to mention that they did want to save 5 euros per month;-)
If you use only UNIX, TinyFugue rocks. It has a very powerful scripting language (but very complicated too - complicated enough for me to start my own Python client, but that's another matter).
If you use only Windows, Zmud is (1) not free (2) quite slow compared to other alternatives. You might then go for JMC (which is lightning fast, has built-in simple scripting, and can use VBscript and other nasty things with plugins).
If you want to MUD from UNIX and Windows, you could try PowWow when using UNIX and PowTTY when using Windows (PowTTY is really the PowWow engine combined with PuTTY, the famous SSH client).
Finally, I noticed that the most important things in a client are (from my point of view) :
multi-command aliases (possibility to send a bunch of commands to the MUD with just one line of input), bindings (possibility to send one or many lines of commands pressing a single key)
variables (possibility to use things like $target in your aliases, and setting $target with a single keypress, for instance)
highlights or marking (possibility to make any line containing the word "critical" in bold red ; or marking in bold a given list of names - which could be the names of your online friends, for instance)
Any decent client should support this (IMHO).
I also ask a few more things from my client (and here is why I wrote mine) : be able to handle random socket connections (to connect to an IRC server or to a group communication server), be able to load images and pan them (to view and scroll the maps from the client, with single keypresses - note that you can also be clever and use Eterm backgrounds for that : Eterm has support for escape sequences to load/scroll backgrounds!), and powerful scripting (I use Python).
Last thing : I don't know what people call "powerful scripting", but for me, it's the possibility to do basically anything and without much hassle;-) for instance looking up name of people you meet in a SQL database, or storing the list of your equipment in internal variables and popup windows, or analyzing your XP rate or the average amount of damage you do with each different weapon versus each different monster, etc.
Same thing here - I have my own little domain name with my own mailboxes, some dozens of users, and sometimes we get spam targetted at 3 or 4 users simultaneously (in our little domain). But I'm pretty sure that nobody did ever sell those addresses !
However, as stated before, some spam software might group the addresses by domain when sending (to save bandwidth on the sender side).
I'm not approving Telstra or anything, however ; don't jump to those conclusions, neither:-)
Since TCP continually tries to get faster, it will always hit a bottleneck, resulting in your connection vacillating between optimal speed and half of that (approximately, I guess it might be worse than this on high-speed networks based on what I've read here).
This explanation must be somewhat simplistic, because everybody already did some 100 mbps transfers on fast-Ethernet LANs (even with a couple of routers), and we did not notice that the transfer speed was oscillating between 50 and 100 mbps.
Also, the latency of the link won't influence things significantly (I have 25 mbps at work, and if I can find something that has at least 25 mbps too, I can do FTP at 3 megabytes/s with constant speed).
Unless, of course, when talking about "high-speed" you mean the 1-100 gbps, and "high-latency" more than 1s... I don't have real life experience with those yet.
The numbers mentionned are clearly wrong (6000x speedup? are we joking?), and this reminds me of an article I read some times
ago, boasting noticeable performance improvements when increasing MTU (packet size) on networks. Of course, larger packets means
less overhead ; but the numbers and figures where completely biased - first, they were only simulations ; second, their "optimized" protocol achieved 100 mbps, and the "plain" FTP achieved not even half of that - well, again, everybody has already achieved 100 mbps speed with FTP, so there must be some "trick" - I mean, some tweaked parameter in the simulation to reduce FTP performance. If this is a real life parameter, very good ; if not, the numbers aren't even worth the bits that describe them...
In any case, the original news seems quite vague and error-prone (again, I tend to be very skeptical when people pretend they achieve high improvements with a protocol that already works at near-wirespeed...)
Grab a mini-ITX fanless motherboard, a fanless case, and you have a really quiet PC this time. No fan, no moving parts. OK, I've got to admit that they lack hard disk and CPU power. But they make really powerful and cool X-terminals. Add a ZIP drive, and you have a quiet 250 mb mass storage. If you're rich, plugin a 1 GB USB "pen drive", you have 1 GB of mass storage. That will be expansive, but this time they are truly quiet, and the cases are nice looking (looks a bit like a PS2, but lightly smaller). But don't think playing warcraft 3 with those things...
Exactly, when there's nobody to hear it, it makes no noise:-)
I applied this simple principle for my home PC, featuring tons of hard disks, huges fans, and other spiffy gadgets ; the case is on one side of a wall, and the keyboard/mouse/screen are on the other side, with just a small hole in the wall to let the wirings go thru. It makes a really dead silent PC. OK, if I want to stick something in the CDROM drive, I have to go to the other room... But with USB2, I'll have cables long enough (and fast enough) to have external CD/DVD drives and other peripherals (printers, scanners...).
xmove allows to do this. Tt creates a "virtual" Xserver ; you run your apps in the virtual server, and then you can attach the virtual server to a real Xserver, and detach/reattach it to another real Xserver. There are some limitations (real servers must have same bpp, for instance...).
Re:Hot swap != big deal, multiproc & linux
on
SGI's Linux Server
·
· Score: 5
Chances are, SGI servers running Linux offer hotswap capabilities thru dedicated hardware. But it's also possible to use software only solutions. There are a few requirements : - the hardware must handle it, I mean, you must be able to add/remove a drive to a IDE bus/SCSI chain without everything going mad. Most hardware I met doesn't care if you remove a (umount'ed) drive. - the software must handle it. With IDE drive, there are ways to force Linux to redetect hard disk geometry (with 2.2 kernels, use modules, with 2.0 kernels, there are unofficial kernel patches to do that. check http://www.enix.org/~skaya/ for an ugly patch allowing to do hotswap with your secondary IDE channel with 2.0.36 kernels)
If you want really good performance/reliability, go for RAID-5. Hardware support is not required anymore. Linux supports software RAID-5 since quite a long time (with the appropriate raidtools), but on-the-fly reconstruction is a recent update. And if you want things like LVM ("oh dear, my 80 gigs pool is full, nah, just add another 18 gigs scsi drive, and poof! I have 18 gigs more free"), you will have to play with latest 2.3.* kernels. It's a domain where Linux hasn't reached (yet) the level of others like HP-UX, but it's improving (it's a big work, because there are filesystems consideration underneath - how do I resize an ext2 filesystem, etc)
A last note about SMP Linux boxen : according to Alan Cox if I remember well, Linux scales very well to 2 CPUs, poorly to 4, and not at all to 8. To solve that, give 'em linux coders octo-xeon servers to play with, I promise they will do their best:-)
Slashdot Mirror
keep in mind that NTFS remains proprietary and Microsoft can break it for newly written files any time it suits their business purposes to do so. All it takes is one update.
Yes and no -- they must stay backward compatible with the currently deployed versions. That gives a comfortable time window (for instance, if M$ were to decide today to introduce a new filesystem "feature", they would probably give patches for WinXP and 2K3, but not for 2K ; and by the time everybody applies the patch, we can only hope that the Linux NTFS project will catch up with the new "features").
In April, I did order a laptop from Dell (Latitude D610) without any O/S. You cannot select on the website without O/S, but if you pick up your phone and ask them, you can get almost whatever you want. In my case : the slowest (=cheapest) CPU, the fast graphics card (which, on the website, comes only with the fastest CPU), without O/S (and some other bells and whistle which are not worth mentioning here).
Also, you can order most (if not all) Dell servers without O/S, too.
They call that N-Series (you have a nice N-Series sticker instead of the designed for Windows XP sticker).
I can't get access to the article, but I guess that the story is about the shutdown of FooNet. FooNet isn't a "real" hosting solution ; it's a cheap shell provider for script kiddies who want to have their own ircd. They might also provide "serious" hosting services ; but as soon as one provides shell services for such a targetted audience, she knows that she will have to handle some specific problems - DDOS, flood, etc.
And according to what I know about the FooNet shutdown (if that's the same story), there was thousands of DDOS "drones" located at the datacenter, and the staff of the datacenter failed to shut them down. That sounds very dubious to me, but you might want to check this for another side of the story ...
Quoting :
PS: if the shutdown mentionned isn't the FooNet one, ignore this post :-)
This is not supposed to be funny, but ... How do biometrics enthusiasts pretend to avoid abuse from twins ? I'm not thinking about something obvious like "Ha ha, I stole my brother's money", but rather something like "See, I could not be at this robbery, because my retina was scanned 1000 miles ago from this place at the same time!" Courts (and other people, too) have to be very careful about this kind of "proofs".
As a PhD student, I often have to look for papers in the computer science field ; and very often, CiteSeer yields better results - or, rather, different results, but with a very good cross-referencing system. You can directly jump to the other papers cited by the paper you're reading, and you can see which papers did cite it, too.
The URL :
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
That said, I often find very interesting ideas in scientific papers, but sometimes things can't be implemented with current technology (I'm still talking about computer science domain, since that's what I know), or sometimes, the good idea in the paper is obsoleted a few years later.
For instance, I remember a scheduling algorithm to read disk blocks in a Video-On-Demand server : it was maybe very clever when it was written, when they had to feed 155 Mbps with a computer having 16 MB of RAM, but today, you have maybe 10 times more throughput, but 100 times more RAM - so you can use simpler, memory-hungry, buffering methods.
The problem is, that it's difficult (IMHO) to say "OK, this paper is theoretically interesting, but we can't implement this today, BUT we will probably be able to do it in a few (dozen) years", because you don't know what will and won't evolve (in my previous example, it was easy to predict that network bandwidth and memory size would increase, but it was maybe harder to guess that MPEG4 and DivX would allow the bitrate of a video stream to stay low...)
Also, a lot of IT managers don't know what Linux can do for them. Some IT manager working in a big TV/movies company was surprised to learn that mplayer was able to read Windows Media 9, Realplayer, quicktime
And that's not an isolated case ; a lot of sys admins responsible for office computers don't even know that OpenOffice exists, or they believe that it's broken, or clunky
(this is not directly related to the FCC matter ; but this is a long overview of the Telephone situation in France...)
... So I'm eager to see how things are evolving with the FCC, to compare with what will maybe happen here in a few months/years :-)
In France, we always had a reliable, but expansive and blood-sucking telco : France Telecom. They are the only way to go for residential users who want a telephone line, and in most place, the only providers of DSL lines (there are some places where you can get Internet thru Cable TV, however).
The French ART (the Authority for Regulations of Telecommunications) however did enforce France Telecom to deploy a technical architecture to allow other ISP to join the DSL hype (to prevent monopolistic situation) ; so they did that - and people had to pay France Telecom to get DSL, and then an ISP to get Internet over their DSL line ! Two bills instead of one, great.
But there was a catch : it was France Telecom who was operating the data connection, so they could limit the bandwidth of the service, and also enforced some silly things (like a daily disconnection). So the ART pushed further, requiring France Telecom to allow other operators to put their equipments in wiring cabinets, and do whatever they want with the copper pair going to the residents, the famous local loop.
(Well, technically, they can't do whatever they want over the wire ; they only have access to the high frequencies. The voice frequencies are still operated by France Telecom, and there are filters (they call them splitters) at each end of the wire - like in regular DSL. But now, the operators can use whatever kind of DSL they like.)
So, one operator, Free (www.free.fr) decided to do funny stuff. For the price of regular DSL, they offered more bandwidth (roughly twice more) with a better ping (twice less), with a funny modem : the freebox. If you're starting to wonder what this has to do with the FCC and VoIP, here we are : the freebox, besides Ethernet connector, has RJ11 connector (for telephone), and a SCART connector (for TV). Those guys are planning to offer TV service real soon now, and they already offer telephone thru their network. Calling from a freebox user to another one is free ; and until end of 2003, calling from a freebox to anywhere in France is free, too. Calling a freebox user is low cost (local communication rate).
So, those guys are deploying an almost-free VoIP network. There must be a catch ; why are other operators not moving ? Well, not everyone can get the golden freebox. You have to be really close to the DSLAM (the telephone concentrator), and in a zone where Free did already install some hardware in the wiring closets. So, it's more like an experiment than a widely available product.
But I betcha some beers that when they go wide-scale, things are going to get messy. Because after wasting billions of euros into Orange (their GSM cellphone network), France Telecom really doesn't need someone to eat their main stream of revenue
FYI, noos is a TV and Internet cable operator, available only in Paris (France), featuring very low prices, and very low service quality, indeed. But a lot of people do use their services because they are cheaper than DSL (especially if you already subscribed to cable TV and/or you don't want to subscribe to the basic telephone service, which is required to get DSL here). Then, later, they complain/rant about their ISP, forgetting to mention that they did want to save 5 euros per month ;-)
If you use only Windows, Zmud is (1) not free (2) quite slow compared to other alternatives. You might then go for JMC (which is lightning fast, has built-in simple scripting, and can use VBscript and other nasty things with plugins).
If you want to MUD from UNIX and Windows, you could try PowWow when using UNIX and PowTTY when using Windows (PowTTY is really the PowWow engine combined with PuTTY, the famous SSH client).
Finally, I noticed that the most important things in a client are (from my point of view) :
- multi-command aliases (possibility to send a bunch of commands to the MUD with just one line of input), bindings (possibility to send one or many lines of commands pressing a single key)
- variables (possibility to use things like $target in your aliases, and setting $target with a single keypress, for instance)
- highlights or marking (possibility to make any line containing the word "critical" in bold red ; or marking in bold a given list of names - which could be the names of your online friends, for instance)
Any decent client should support this (IMHO).I also ask a few more things from my client (and here is why I wrote mine) : be able to handle random socket connections (to connect to an IRC server or to a group communication server), be able to load images and pan them (to view and scroll the maps from the client, with single keypresses - note that you can also be clever and use Eterm backgrounds for that : Eterm has support for escape sequences to load/scroll backgrounds!), and powerful scripting (I use Python).
Last thing : I don't know what people call "powerful scripting", but for me, it's the possibility to do basically anything and without much hassle ;-) for instance looking up name of people you meet in a SQL database, or storing the list of your equipment in internal variables and popup windows, or analyzing your XP rate or the average amount of damage you do with each different weapon versus each different monster, etc.
Same thing here - I have my own little domain name with my own mailboxes, some dozens of users, and sometimes we get spam targetted at 3 or 4 users simultaneously (in our little domain). But I'm pretty sure that nobody did ever sell those addresses !
:-)
However, as stated before, some spam software might group the addresses by domain when sending (to save bandwidth on the sender side).
I'm not approving Telstra or anything, however ; don't jump to those conclusions, neither
This explanation must be somewhat simplistic, because everybody already did some 100 mbps transfers on fast-Ethernet LANs (even with a couple of routers), and we did not notice that the transfer speed was oscillating between 50 and 100 mbps.
Also, the latency of the link won't influence things significantly (I have 25 mbps at work, and if I can find something that has at least 25 mbps too, I can do FTP at 3 megabytes/s with constant speed).
Unless, of course, when talking about "high-speed" you mean the 1-100 gbps, and "high-latency" more than 1s... I don't have real life experience with those yet.
The numbers mentionned are clearly wrong (6000x speedup? are we joking?), and this reminds me of an article I read some times ago, boasting noticeable performance improvements when increasing MTU (packet size) on networks. Of course, larger packets means less overhead ; but the numbers and figures where completely biased - first, they were only simulations ; second, their "optimized" protocol achieved 100 mbps, and the "plain" FTP achieved not even half of that - well, again, everybody has already achieved 100 mbps speed with FTP, so there must be some "trick" - I mean, some tweaked parameter in the simulation to reduce FTP performance. If this is a real life parameter, very good ; if not, the numbers aren't even worth the bits that describe them...
In any case, the original news seems quite vague and error-prone (again, I tend to be very skeptical when people pretend they achieve high improvements with a protocol that already works at near-wirespeed...)
Grab a mini-ITX fanless motherboard, a fanless case, and you have a really quiet PC this time. No fan, no moving parts. OK, I've got to admit that they lack hard disk and CPU power. But they make really powerful and cool X-terminals. Add a ZIP drive, and you have a quiet 250 mb mass storage. If you're rich, plugin a 1 GB USB "pen drive", you have 1 GB of mass storage. That will be expansive, but this time they are truly quiet, and the cases are nice looking (looks a bit like a PS2, but lightly smaller). But don't think playing warcraft 3 with those things ...
Exactly, when there's nobody to hear it, it makes no noise :-)
I applied this simple principle for my home PC, featuring tons of hard disks, huges fans, and other spiffy gadgets ; the case is on one side of a wall, and the keyboard/mouse/screen are on the other side, with just a small hole in the wall to let the wirings go thru. It makes a really dead silent PC. OK, if I want to stick something in the CDROM drive, I have to go to the other room... But with USB2, I'll have cables long enough (and fast enough) to have external CD/DVD drives and other peripherals (printers, scanners...).
xmove allows to do this.
Tt creates a "virtual" Xserver ; you run your apps in the virtual server, and then you can attach the virtual server to a real Xserver, and detach/reattach it to another real Xserver.
There are some limitations (real servers must have same bpp, for instance...).
Chances are, SGI servers running Linux offer hotswap capabilities thru dedicated hardware. But it's also possible to use software only solutions. There are a few requirements :
:-)
- the hardware must handle it, I mean, you must be able to add/remove a drive to a IDE bus/SCSI chain without everything going mad. Most hardware I met doesn't care if you remove a (umount'ed) drive.
- the software must handle it. With IDE drive, there are ways to force Linux to redetect hard disk geometry (with 2.2 kernels, use modules, with 2.0 kernels, there are unofficial kernel patches to do that. check http://www.enix.org/~skaya/ for an ugly patch allowing to do hotswap with your secondary IDE channel with 2.0.36 kernels)
If you want really good performance/reliability, go for RAID-5. Hardware support is not required anymore. Linux supports software RAID-5 since quite a long time (with the appropriate raidtools), but on-the-fly reconstruction is a recent update. And if you want things like LVM ("oh dear, my 80 gigs pool is full, nah, just add another 18 gigs scsi drive, and poof! I have 18 gigs more free"), you will have to play with latest 2.3.* kernels. It's a domain where Linux hasn't reached (yet) the level of others like HP-UX, but it's improving (it's a big work, because there are filesystems consideration underneath - how do I resize an ext2 filesystem, etc)
A last note about SMP Linux boxen : according to Alan Cox if I remember well, Linux scales very well to 2 CPUs, poorly to 4, and not at all to 8. To solve that, give 'em linux coders octo-xeon servers to play with, I promise they will do their best