You bet, and it's all backported into the 2.6.18 EL kernels. That's why when you boot up said RHEL5.x it picks up that shiny new i7 you have or whatever other piece of new hardware is the rage.

The U.S never lost a single major engagement/battle in Vietnam, from a military perspective it was a crushing victory against the NVA. They had superior firepower, communication and resources. What the U.S lost horribly at was public opinion and social sentiment of the efforts, ultimately ending in withdrawing troops and where you probably derive your opinion. As well all should know, war is won on the political front first, if that backing isn't there then military success is irrelevant.

References:
"Even though the US is said to have won every major battle and killed up to thirteen times as many enemy combatants, the war was a defeat for America."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States

Home invasions are a real threat regardless of where you live. Where I live (N.C) the most influential neighbourhoods are often the most prevalent target - lots of space between houses and the exact sort of thinking you describe here - "it can never happen if you don't live in the ghetto."

It's a rough world out there, be prepared.

I find Kate to be of equal usefulness.

It has a horizontal sidebar approach when opening new files, freeing me from the clutter of having multiple tabs or windows open.

Your office computer has a routable, public facing ip address? Surely your company has heard of NAT?

Is it bad that I leave my window open at night hoping that she will show up?

It's nice to see this come from the Suse folks, sounds like it would be a nice tool for the Suse users/admins that don't want to use something like:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/LiveCDHowTo (which can create another distribution livecd)

The web test drive stuff really looks neat as well.

There are ways to gauge this, looks like it would cost 10.8 billion to create Fedora 9.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/estimatinglinux.php

I would love to know where this $150k/year Linux sysadmin position administrating one server can be found. I would be interested in such an opportunity.

Linux mdadm and FreeBSD's gmirror are both very stable, mature implementations of software RAID - both a viable solution in a production environment.

Especially so if you have servers without dedicated asics HW controllers.

With a properly setup configuration management system you can have it all.

One button, dummy-mode provisioning - os install, configuration files, daemons, monitoring and metrics, authentication and external NAS/SAN storage in one swoop.

I would recommend checking out cobbler/puppet/koan or a tuned cfengine/pxe+kickstart setup.

cfengine is great for what it does. It really just depends on your use case. The only downside is that I am not certain cfengine is still actively maintained.

If you want to customize cfengine you are going to use perl, if you are going to customize puppet you are going to use ruby.

Both are fine, you need to figure out your infrastructure and scalability needs - I have found puppet scales a bit better for large, complex stacks but cfengine is easier for more static, less changing environments.

We use a robust configuration management/provisioning system consisting of puppet, cobbler and koan.

Puppet is easily scaleable for just about any sort of server need, cobbler and koan take care of the heavy lifting for provisioning. It's also fairly easy to write your own puppet types and modules for various tasks.

With one command we are able to provision a server from bare metal (or vm) to a fully working server, complete with SAN/NAS storage, fully operational daemons and authentication.

You mean like E.T. for Atari?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)

with expensive upper management/executive types is they do rove from company to company, doing the exact same thing they did at their previous job.

The notion that it might not work at a different organization never comes up or is questioned, they want be seen making large, sweeping changes.

An example would be shoving some mandate down the pipe like an open floorplan for "collaboration" which in most cases turns into a noisy, distracting work environment that just ends up impeding efficiency rather than enhancing it.

Because this was "so successful" at their last job, the lack of effectiveness at the present can easily be blamed on staff, culture, etc.

For larger, more destructive mandates these guys are usually out the door, resume in hand before the full catastrophic effects have been fully felt or realized.