More Windows Server 2008 information

Some more miscellaneous information regarding Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Server 2008, from an eWeek article:

• WS2K8 will be the last 32-bit server operating system Microsoft produces -- the rest are going to be 64-bit only.
• Windows Server 2008 will be multicore ready -- it's going to be interesting to see how much concurrency they can build to the APIs. This also means uniprocessor kernel builds are now history.
• Licensing/pricing is done by licensing by socket, not by core, so no change there.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 (Release 2) is scheduled to appear in 2009.
• For system-level developers, there are going to be "enhanced thread pool mechanism, new synchronization APIs, private namespaces and hard resource quotas" (source).
• SMB (the network file sharing protocol) will be updated to 21st century, and will be called SMB2. Woohoo!

Numerous other kernel improvements are also to be served to us. Sounds great!