Over the years I have bought a lot of hardware even for a person in IT. I have bought new and second-hand mid-range parts for computers in an Internet café and I have bought a lot of high-end gamer hardware for personal use. One thing I have learned is that no matter how expensive and high quality hardware you get if you buy enough of it you will get a defective piece. I had parts of many different brands fail and I had parts of no-name brands work fine for decades. In my experience the more cutting edge hardware you get the more likely it is to fail. I have had an expensive high-end Asus video card fail and then its replacement fail again. This is why I am no longer impressed by people's stories about their ten year old laptops which still work fine. This is not interesting at all. The interesting part is what happens when the hardware fails because some hardware will fail.

   Just recently I gave an in-depth reply on a forum to a question that I know I have answered before. When you need to give the same lengthy answer more than once you should write an article to save your keystrokes and just link the article the next time someone asks the same question. This particular question was:

   "If I am involved in a web project where I get to make the decision about the technology stack why would I choose .NET. Why would I choose a stack that costs money, makes the project dependent on a vendor (updates, new versions, etc.) instead of use PHP, Python, Ruby or Java. I don't see any serious technical advantages of ASP.NET and the communities of competing technologies are usually bigger and more helpful."

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   Update: Check my follow-up article "Why I Will Never Buy Dell Again"

   In the past year my old laptop which is more than four years old manifested some serious problem. While the internals were still usable (Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz, 4GB RAM, nVidia 8600M) the machine was almost literally falling apart. This is why I was eagerly awaiting Windows 8's release and the hardware that comes with it...

   This week I got a Samsung Omnia W device and I am sure the whole Internet is eager to learn my opinion. I had it for a very short time and I cannot make a real review but I am ready to share first impressions. Keep in mind that this is my first smartphone so I cannot do real usage comparison with other mobile operating systems and devices...

   September saw some pretty important announcements for Windows developers and specifically for .NET developers. With the BUILD conference behind us we can debate who is going to survive the fallout...