I’ll first link to the following posts:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/08/03/2027207/Was-NET-All-a-Mistake
http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/2830-was-net-all-a-mistake.html
http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/2591-dumping-net-microsofts-madness.html
http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/2465-classic-vb-is-20-and-still-missed-by-many.html

The only comment I have (other than the proverbial “I told you so” RE: Microsoft’s so-totally-planned obsolescence for .NET) is that Delphi is still as low-level and powerful as C++ and still as easy and high level as Visual Basic.

Nobody needs to go back to MFC or VC++…they need to wake up and realize its time they left the Microsoft camp for good.

I am certainly glad none of MY competition is aware of what can be done in Delphi 🙂

I received this email from Corsair today:

Hello Sinan,

My sales department has forwarded your inquiry to me.  I did not receive your purchase receipt, can you please provide it to me? We will arrange a refund so that you no longer continue to be inconvenienced.

Best Regards,

Jamie Macias-Nguyen

Customer Service Supervisor

Corsair

While I wouldn’t entrust my data to Corsair, I have to commend them for doing the right thing.

A refund won’t alleviate the days lost and the stress induced due to these failures; but in fairness, what else can Corsair do?

Thank you, Corsair, for doing the right thing.

On a RAID 0 array built out of 4 Corsair Force F240 SSDs, we have had THREE failures so far – within a total time span of two months. This makes an average of one failure every two and a half weeks.

The first two failures happened after 5 days of building the array. After replacing the failed drive with a new one, the array failed again – promptly – within 5 more days.

The third time was somewhat the charm – the array lasted about six weeks. Then, it failed again.

There is a direct correlation between the amount of stress we put on the array and the failure rates we experienced. Testing the installation of InstallAware itself, for example, on 4 VMs simultaneously – that is almost 9GB of data being installed onto 4 VMs all at the same time – stresses the array. Watching the VMs just “fly through” the data was fun: a joy to watch indeed, all four main progress bars, jumping forward in unison, quickly and efficiently…letting our Q&A move on to the actual job of testing our main product after installation.

This joy would unfortunately disappear when, powering on this testbed the next day, one of the drives would have been found to have “bricked” itself during its powered off state. Yes, that is correct: the drive would brick itself somehow, magically almost, when it was powered off. As long as the system was running, there would be no indications of failure.

We decided to consciously reduce the amount of stress after receiving the THIRD replacement drive from Corsair. We still needed to do our job, of course – install InstallAware every now and then inside a particular VM configuration; to test the new features and bug fixes in that build.

And it seems the most these drives were able to last us was no more than six weeks!

Makes for a sad product indeed.

We have contacted Corsair for a full refund on the purchase of all four drives, as apparently replacing the spontaneously bricked items just buys us two and a half weeks on average. We don’t have time to keep rebuilding this array, re-imaging the machine, over and over again.

Lesson learned: Avoid the Corsair Force series like the plague!!!

Well guys, I have received yet another reply from Bing that they are not allowed to share with us information why was our site removed.

Our site is once again listed at the Bing directory. I really wonder how come we did not get any reason for why we were removed.

-Royi

Hi All,

So we’re on day 3 here over at the TechEd 2011 show in Atlanta. We’re having a great time. I want to thank everyone that came across out booth, grabbing our brochures, trial disc and wonderful silver pens :).

I hope you liked our booth and us here. Daniel has been really glad helping you out here and demonstrating how InstallAware wins it all!

Don’t forget that our current promotion for TechEd week – 25% discount – is still ongoing and will be available until this coming Friday night. Just enter ‘TechEd11’ on checkout!

Thank you again.

Expect more photos and stories soon!

-Royi

Good Morning folks,

After waiting for it a few weeks… Setting up for 2 days… The big day has arrived!

TechEd 2011 is starting!This morning, at 10:30AM the hall is opening and InstallAware is making its first debut in public eyes!

We are all very excited here and are waiting for you at our booth #1841 to visit us, meet with us, talk with us and grab our nice kit ;-)!

Remember, that is booth #1841 :).

Some pictures from setting up –

-Royi

Last year, InstallAware’s paid search advertising on Bing was suspended, because, “your website does not have clear uninstall instructions for the software downloads it offers.” This generic excuse was ridiculous to be sure – InstallAware is not an end-user utility, it is a developer tool. On top, it is a developer tool that is used in building setups – the uninstallers that “Bing” could not find on our site are often powered by InstallAware.

We let the issue slide last year, given that the search engine market is still dominated by Google. It was a suspicious case to be sure, but not one of critical importance.

Recently reviewing an SEO report, I saw that InstallAware has absolutely ZERO pages indexed on Bing. Now this raised some additional suspicion: I also checked whether any other properties owned by InstallAware are indexed on Bing. None of them are. I also Bing’ed my own name. Whereas previously a lot of content about me, personally, used to show up – now it was all filtered away.

Wow, really guys?

Is Microsoft at the mercy of some low-lives who feel threatened about InstallAware, a product that Microsoft isn’t even in direct competition with?

Are these low-lives really the stuff that Microsoft is made of right now? Do these people really have so much pull there nowadays?

Just to be 100% sure, we’re going to re-submit InstallAware to the Bing indexer, and see what happens.

This blog post serves as our timestamp for when the submit happened. We’ll keep you posted.

~Sinan