I recommend https://www.syseleven.de/ for a number of reasons:

* Technically highly sophisticated staff whose motto is "Hosting done right"
* Located in Germany (Berlin) with laws applicable in the EU
* Motivated staff in terms of looking at content from a data protection POV
* Staff is known not to budge from unsubstantiated threats
* They will tell you whether your content is legally acceptable

Won't get any better than that.

I am surprised that no one has mentioned a mechanical wrist watch so far.

What an amazing piece of technology a mechanical watch is!

It actually changed the world, respectively the way we look at it. A mechanical watch of high precision and extreme reliability was the only way to determine your position on the globe back in the 18th century, solving one of the biggest problems in understanding the globe and its geography.

I gives me immense pleasure to wear a really nice mechanical time piece, a birthday gift. It's got the most user friendly interface that is, in that it gives you precisely the kind of information you need at a glance.

I can't imagine to replace it with anything of today's visions of wearable computing. Apart from its questionable usefulness in currently discussed models, I know that no one will wear anything like that for longer than the lifetime of the particular product, which you can estimate at 2-3 years, maybe.

I know I will still wear this particular watch in 20-30 years, so this is definitely a technology that I will never give up.

Just like my Kenwood TS930 ham radio transceiver from 1983. It does what it is supposed to do and no other product on the market gives me same features and quality in my particular requirements[1]. So this will be my last transceiver and I won't ever give it up. Got a spare one to make sure I will always be able to maintain this beautiful piece of technology.

Another thing: I bet that in a 100 years from now there will still be completely mechanical grand pianos out there. Despite all modern means of imitating sound, creating effects, simulating and powering concert halls with nifty digital sound processing, there will still be the need of an unamplified instrument that people will enjoy listening to. A piano from good makers such as Steinway, BÃsendorfer, Yamaha, Fazioli etc. is a mechanical marvel. Mostly hand crafted, it achieves a level of perfection, both in mechanical engineering and from an aesthetic point of view, that is a pleasure to play and to listen to.

Oh, and the cassette tape. Still got hundreds of them and a variety of playback devices. Used to tape concerts with one of the professional walkmen from Sony and still listen to these. Won't give up cassettes either.

[1] Full break-in capabilities at high speed morse without any clipping, analogue receiver throughout, i.e. no digital signal processing for maximum signal discernability in pile-ups, fully documented technology with standard components, more or less open source.

Still my thing for focused discussions in German. Been there for the past 20 years, met my current spouse 12 years ago there and still believe it's the most efficient and effective tool of multiple person discussions.

Yeah, still use tin as my newsreader.

Thank you for turning my notebook into a feels-like-a-286 machine by now.

With 10 tabs open it hogs almost 2GB of RAM. Used to be a fraction of it and I haven't noticed any functional improvements between now and then.

Basically it now renders an obsolete machine (T60p) into an obsolete piece of hardware without the need to do so.

Congratulations.

This may be news to you, but there is actually a country called Austria and it's not the one with the kangaroos.

Aw, come on.

A local file system won't really rock one's boat anymore these days. Today it's all about global name space and distributed file systems, ideally made highly available and replicated synchronously in real time on kernel level.

This one was a real waste of time and developer resources.

Since you mention Austria and the merger of Three and Orange, you will be surprised to learn that Three has been my only ISP for the past two years, offering uncapped and unfiltered 100Mbit down and 50Mbit up through wireless 4G/LTE.

Whereas the monopolistic cable provider offers the same speed only in a bundle with HiDef TV at a drastically steeper price. And their quality is crappy compared to my wireless access: obvious filtering, bad deep packet inspection slowing down every encrypted connection etc.

Data caps on mobile have had caps for age. It is only recently that you are at least given the opportunity of buying into an unlimited plan at all. T-Mobile in the US is a case in point: 80USD a month gives you unlimited data. Just make sure you live near one of the towers and there is your new ISP.

CW is dead, buddy.

Dead as in "There are few people left on the planet who actively work CW on a high proficiency level without using a keyboard and a screen reader".

Today you can see ham shacks without a CW keyer as a norm, and if you see a CW keyer, the owner only in rare cases can go beyond 20wpm without breaking a sweat, making lots of errors all along the way and getting frustrated at hearing others do perfect CW, albeit with a keyboard.

To give you a sense of scale: There are no more than roughly 4-500 hams worldwide, who can use an electronic keyer in such a way that they can hold a meaningful conversation on the air at more than 40wpm at an acceptable error rate and who at the same time can follow such a conversation with their ears easily.

I know quite a few members of that minority and they are all like dinosaurs about to die out. The future lies in predictive keying by a computer, high resolution SDRs for decoding and give it another 10 years even the most ardent pro-CW people will make way for other digital modes that can handle all the distinct advantages of CW operating (FullBK/QSK, pile ups and propagation resilience) just as good or better.

Speaking for myself, by now I am fed up with going on the air and either listen to either machine CW or inept operators who never were afforded the luxury of good tutoring and coaching to make their CW better, more precise and fluent.

So, let me rephrase my initial sentence: CW may not be dead, but the true CW operator is a dying species and I can't see any merits to your project when the future is machine-only anyway.

Seriously? Even back in the early 2000s this was not an acceptable resolution anymore. Today this is not more than laughable, except maybe for a smartwatch.

He won't publish it under a free software license...

Disclaimer: I work for these guys: http://www.ovirt.org/Features/DRBD

As somebody said before, this shop sounds like a fragile thing if some of those people leave. If customers depend on it, it might be advisable to switch to standardized tools for managing KVM environments. oVirt is the upstream project to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, i.e. those guys who really know KVM.

http://www.ovirt.org/OVirt_3.0_Feature_Guide

oVirt has pretty much everything he could ever dream of - and it is well documented, so any successor will immediately be able to handle the environment. Of course Open Source, it has a very active community with real experts:

http://www.ovirt.org/Documentation

Can't think of any reason no to use oVirt. It the exact feature set the OP is looking for, addressing his specific needs:

"Having a minimal CLI console available can make the product more attractive to users who use the command line and prefer to avoid using the GUI. It can also provide a simple and fast shell that requires no special client besides an ssh client, without having to connect to the actual VM. Serial console access can also be used for VM troubleshooting at the lower level."

Here you are:
http://www.ovirt.org/Features/Serial_Console_in_CLI

Also, oVirt has a very active community:
http://lists.ovirt.org/pipermail/users/

Take a look, it's free...

Nope, it was Burt Reynolds (and Farrah Fawcett) in the ambulance alright.

Your thousands of servers sound like a way to boast your own ego, no more.

Thousands of server run by a pro do not run Fedora, they run either RHEL or CentOS, depending on how cheap you are.

And of course, for updates to thousands of systems a real admin knows how to use either Spacewalk or Red Hat Satellite, again depending on how cheap you are.

That said, yum update works fine on this machine.

What again was your point?

I have never fully switched to KDE4 because of many of its limitations, the most annoying being the network, memory and CPU load panel displays. In KDE3 one had the option of displaying absolute values in a pre-defined range. Gone in KDE4; all you can see are wobbly displays with relative values that have, err, relatively low value for their actual purpose.

These days I am really happy for the KDE3 fork http://www.trinitydesktop.org/ and ever since it works on Fedora 19 I can now go back to a functional desktop both at work and at home.

And, yes, the middle click works fine ;-)

Is it not?

In the long run this is really going to suck for the Sony engineers, maintaining a fork with a different system compiler.