How is that? They both support full virtualization, and they both support paravirtualization for things like networking and disks (they even use the same protocols for this - virtio). Most of the debate I have seen regarding the two is whether it is better to have a specialized hypervisor (Xen) or use a general purpose, but heavily developed and very much optimized, hypervisor (Linux). The performance benchmarks are six of one and half a dozen of the other so this debate doesn't seem overly relevant.

I'm not sure why you think this is the case, I consider them to be pretty much equivalent. The reason we use KVM is because Xen wasn't up to date enough to run on our brand new hardware. KVM does a fine job as a Xen replacement, and we have been using it as such for years.

But we were all told about the 10 ARM netbooks that would appear on the market by Q3 2009. It is now Q4 so they must exist, and you must be wrong.

I'm pretty sure this is a Microsoft stunt to make their market share look better. If you can't make geeks buy Windows, then make sure they don't buy anything at all because of all the sweet smelling vapourware on the perpetual horizon. Then again I'll blame them for most things, including a sock I lost.

Or listen to swedish death metal, there might be lyrics at some imaginary level, but nothing I can discern. Literally something to scream along to.

One place I worked had a guitar we could use when we wanted. Again, no lyrics, just people quietly playing away to the best of their ability, easily drowned out by headphones if necessary.

There is something about the rhythm, pace and harmony of playing on a guitar for half an hour that seemed to help me make the right changes to the code when I went back to the computer. This was a place where the importance of making the right changes (and preferably only the right changes) was well understood.

You can achieve live migration with iSCSI and AoE too, and if you use a SAN you will probably continue to use one of these network block device protocols.

What DRBD does it make it relatively simple to set up a redundant SAN, using commodity hardware, from which you can export iSCSI devices etc.

Of course if you are going to use local storage for your VPSs it is just as easy to set DRBD up on those hosts and forgo any network block device layer on top of it. Dual primary mode makes live migration in this scenario particularly convenient.

I'm not about to dismiss your experience, but things have changed over the last 15 years so it might not be as relevant as it once was.

In that time processors have become much faster, memory has become much cheaper, commodity servers have also become much cheaper and a lot of software has become free. While that has happened hard disks have become only a little faster. As a result many people consider custom hardware for driving those disks to be unnecessary - generic hardware is more than fast enough and is significantly cheaper.

There might still be some compelling reasons to go with expensive redundant SAN equipment, but for many situations a couple of generic servers full of disks and running Linux and DRBD will do an admirable job. The bottleneck will most likely be the disks or the network, both of which can be addressed by spending some of the vast amount of money saved by not going with typical enterprise solutions.

Like nc? Then you will love socat!

I ditched nc for the better model without a second thought, I'm such a user.

If you have somewhere to host them you could set up some VNC servers running a desktop and all the applications they need. Two people can share the same VNC desktop so you can do the joint development. What this doesn't do is coordinate things at all, but for that I would suggest VOIP as it doesn't need mouse or keyboard input.

One bonus is that they don't have to set up much software, just a VNC client and a VOIP client. Setting up the VNC servers is easy too, you only need to get a host installed with all the right software and then run as many VNC servers as you need on top of that.