This is a followup to my recent column about Steve Wozniak’s warning on the perils of cloud computing, especially cloud storage. It might surprise many users to know there are firms that sell cloud storage and do not back it up. They rely on the disk RAID and some redundancy in the cloud to “protect” your data. If something happens to their data center, they could probably not recover your data.
Remember MailandNews.com? They did not have a viable business model. They also didn’t back up their servers. One day they had a big crash and relied on the RAID array to recover the data. It took two weeks and still not all of the data was recovered.
RAID is not a data backup technology.
What […]
Some readers may recall one of my predictions for 2012 was 
I had a surreal experience yesterday driving here in Sonoma County. My Bluetooth speakerphone rang and it was YouTube calling. How many people get calls from YouTube? The message was simple: I’d written a column 
I was supposed to be on CNN last night to comment on the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement trial that just started in San Jose, but then Mitt Romney insulted the Palestinians and I was bumped. The way these things work is CNN calls the day before so I have time to think up something pithy to say. The question now is what to do with all that pith? So I’m dumping it on you. Consider this the long distance view of this legal battle in the context of what it really is — brands at war.
Update at 7:00PM Saturday – It’s the speed of the PC. A dual-core 2-GHz iMac is jerky while a 2-GHz four-core I7 Mac Mini runs fine. A 2.4-GHz AMD four-core PC running Windows 7 Professional runs fine, too. But I can’t watch the Olympics on a 2 GHz iMac, a 2 GHz Mac Mini, or my mid-2010 MacBook Pro (also 2-GHz). All three computers have two cores and are at their max RAM. Yes, I can slow down the connection, but anything above 360p clearly has problems (240p is best) and this on a 25 mbps Internet connection. Understand that in each case I’m starting with the resolution setting on “auto,” so […]
Depending on who you are talking to there were several very different reasons why the Internet was created, whether it was military command and control (Curtis LeMay told me that), to create a new communication and commerce infrastructure (Al Gore), or simply to advance the science of digital communications (lots of people). But Bob Taylor says the Internet was created to save money. And since Bob Taylor was, more than anyone, the guy who caused the Internet to be created, well I’ll believe him.
E-mail readers of this column don’t have an easy way to leave comments so of course they send them straight to me, which is easily done simply by hitting reply. Other bloggers are smarter than I am and don’t use their actual e-mail address for the feed. The trend this morning among my e-mailers is to see the hiring of Marissa Mayer at Yahoo as some kind of trick by Google. Ms. Mayer is Google to the core, readers say, and she’s going to Yahoo simply as a commando to pick and choose future Google acquisitions.
If Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, The West Wing) was writing the story of Yahoo and he got to Marissa Mayer’s surprise entrance yesterday as Yahoo’s latest CEO, here’s how he would probably play it: the brilliant, tough, beautiful, charismatic engineer defies her Google glass ceiling and, through sheer vision and clever example, saves the pioneering Internet company. That’s how Sorkin would play it because he likes an underdog, loves smart, well-spoken people, and revels in beautiful if slightly flawed characters and happy endings. But in this case Aaron Sorkin would be playing it wrong.
Then you can stream it 
