> I'll say it up front: I prefer physical hardware. I know exactly what I'm working with, and there's no spooky stuff going on when I try to track down a proble

> I'll say it up front: I prefer physical hardware. I know exactly what I'm working with, and there's no spooky stuff going on when I try to track down a problem. I roll my eyes as I look at my desk with a multimeter, oscilloscope and pile of hardware with multiple (more or less buggy) board revisions full of jumper wires and cables going to serial pin headers.. I shudder to think about all the open tickets about hardware related issues. Of course, probing boards is only partial help since the other half of hardware lives in drivers that may or may not be based on reverse engineering, incomplete or missing specifications, etc. The network is being odd, sometimes, and I still don't know why, and I can't reproduce it reliably. Sure, virtualization adds more complexity.. but sometimes it's nice to know that hardware is someone else's problem.