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- ZDNet Author Biography
Robin Harris has been messing with computers for over 30 years and selling and marketing data storage for over 20 in companies large and small. He introduced a couple of multi-billion dollar storage products (DLT, the first Fibre Channel array) to market, as well as a many smaller ones. Earlier...- more about Robin Harris »
ZDNet Resources
- Modern threats to American liberty
- Cash, currency and coins, is a store of value. In the US, "legal tender for all debts, public and private." Carry too much of it though and you are marked for suspicion (per the Wall Street Journal]: Steven Bierfeldt, treasurer for the Campaign for Liberty, a political...
- Tags: Withdrawal, Tender, Transportation Security Administration, ATM, Storage, Internet, Networking, Hardware, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-07-04
- Why Windows 7 should be free
- After the Vista fiasco, Microsoft owes its long-suffering customers more than a "screaming deal." They're owed an apology from Steve Ballmer - and a free copy of Vista SP3 Windows 7. The backstory Vista's market failure was not a surprise inside Microsoft. Senior development execs -...
- Tags: Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Microsoft Windows 7, Operating Systems, Microsoft Windows, Software, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-07-01
- Blu-ray's Blo-tards bite back
- Someone hired the PR/lobbying firm Corporate Advocates to bite back at Storage Bits. Their message: the Harris Poll on Blu-ray was wrong about the number of homes with Blu-ray players. A fact, it so happens, I never mentioned. But blow enough Blu-smoke and people will forget what...
- Tags: Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-06-26
- Blu-ray buzzkill: the death-spiral
- Will consumers upgrade to Blu-ray? The CEO & co-founder of fast growing Netflix believes mailed DVDs shall be replaced by web-sent movies. And a recent Harris [no relation, darn it] Poll finds that people today are less likely to buy a Blu-ray player than they were last year. ...
- Tags: Time Warner Inc., Blu-ray, Harris Poll Number, DVD, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-06-23
- Outrageously cool new hard drive
- DataSlide has come out of stealth mode with a very creative SSD replacement technology. They call it a Hard Rectangular Disk or HRD. Here's DataSlide's quick overview: DataSlide applies technology in new, patented ways to achieve unprecedented high performance 160,000 IOPS & 500MB/sec and...
- Tags: Hard Drive, DataSlide, Leadership, Management, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-06-15
- Apple's MacBook flop - fixed!
- 6 months ago I asked: Apple's new MacBooks: flop or fiasco? Apple answered "flop" by backpedalling on pricing, the unibody and FireWire - in record time! The big loser? Microsoft's successful ads focused on price. Maybe that's a card you don't want to play. ...
- Tags: Apple Macintosh, Apple MacBook, Apple Inc., Pricing Strategy, FW400, Notebooks, FireWire, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-06-10
- Cut. Scan. Read.
- Google books has nothing on me: for months now I've been cutting the pages out of old books, scanning them into PDFs, storing them on a hard drive and recycling the paper. OCR makes the text searchable and selectable. Most important: I'll never schlep them up...
- Tags: Adobe PDF, Minute, Scanners, Hardware, Peripherals, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-06-08
- The $17.5 million hard drive
- Some employers think they own you when all they're doing is renting your time. It cost 1 company $17.5 million to learn that stealing an employee's hard drive is really, really stupid. It's about time. Wha' happened? An RV sales manager was hired...
- Tags: Hard Drive, Sales Manager, Punitive Damage, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Notebooks, Sales, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-05-25
- RAIDfail: Don't use RAID 5 on small arrays
- Big storage companies stopped recommending RAID 5 a couple of years ago. But I still see small 4-drive arrays touting RAID 5 for home and small office use. Big mistake. You want to save money, but you also want to keep your data. RAID 5 isn't...
- Tags: Data, RAID 5, RAID, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-05-19
- The "erotic services" shell game: hypocrisy online
- It is memorialized as the world's oldest profession. The movie Pretty Woman glamorized it. Congressmen and Governors get in trouble over it. But what it isn't, is on craigslist anymore. A group of state attorneys general's have browbeat craigslist into closing the "erotic services" section. ...
- Tags: Service, Adult Service, Hair, Internet, Web 2.0, Games, Storage, Personal Technology, Hardware, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-05-14
- Cloud vs sand: Google vs Microsoft
- The numbers don't lie An independent study found on-site Microsoft apps - Office and Exchange - cost 20x in capital dollars and 5x-6x more than Google Apps on a 3 year Total Cost of Ownership TCO basis. How can Microsoft compete? The debate Cloud, as...
- Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Network, Data Loss, Downtime, Microsoft Corp., Business Problem, TwinStrata, SATA RAID 5, Capital Requirement, Update:Here, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-05-05
- Can 3D save Blu-ray?
- Blu-ray's problem is simple: Blu-ray's crisper picture isn't enough for recession-whacked consumers. Yet the demo I saw last week in Las Vegas was something else: beautifully detailed and very watchable high def 3D. That's a change you'd pay for. Panasonic is pushing hard. ...
- Tags: 3D, Blu-ray, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-04-27
- NAB '09: broadcast quality audio - on an iPhone!
- I'm at the National Association of Broadcaster's annual trade show in Las Vegas this week for 2 reasons Media companies are a driving force for new, lower-cost, storage architectures. I produce videos and love all the toys. Alas, most of the toys are...
- Tags: Apple iPhone, Audio, Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-04-21
- Better than RAID: the new DroboPro
- RAID is a bad idea for home users since its management complexity and failure modes create more problems than it solves. But protection from 1 - or better yet 2 - drive failures is a very GOOD idea. Data protection for the rest of us ...
- Tags: Drobo, RAID, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-04-09
- Apple's $500 or Microsoft's 81% tax?
- Which do you prefer? Even if it were true, Ballmer's "$500 Apple tax" comment is stupid: Microsoft's profits are way beyond Apple's. And, get this: that $500 - if it was real - is a great investment. Here's why. Margin, margin, who's got the margin? ...
- Tags: Antivirus, Steve Ballmer, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Taxes, Free Trade, Viruses And Worms, Personal Finance, Security, Financial Planning, Finance, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-03-31
- Inside a Microsoft data center
- It takes mucho computes and terabytes to create the 3D models used in Microsoft's Virtual Earth online mapping service. So how do they cram 5,000 cores and 10,000 terabytes - 10 petabytes - of storage into 3 40 ft. shipping containers? Containerized data centers Sun...
- Tags: Data Center, Verari Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp., Photograph, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-03-24
- Cisco's bong-sized "cloud"
- Peeling the onion on the Cisco Unified Computing System UCS reveals a very small onion. The platform they're promoting is tiny by cloud infrastructure standards. Perfect for a dorm room - but not anywhere near close to what an enterprise hoping for economies of scale or management would want. ...
- Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Blade, Cisco Systems Inc., IBM Corp., Storage, Servers, Hardware, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-03-19
- All flash drives not created equal
- Low-priced SATA flash drives are tempting. But beware: some of them test at an abysmal 2 random writes per second! The hype around flash SSDs attracted bottom-feeders to build junk drives with USB thumb drive controllers that were never intended for disk-level performance. Stuff them...
- Tags: Hard Drive, Performance, USB Flash Drive, Low-priced SATA Flash Drive, Calypso Systems, Flash Memory, Performance Management, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-03-16
- How Amazon builds the world's most scalable storage
- The cloud storage market is accelerating fast - despite naysayers and alarmists - and Amazon's S3 is leading the charge. Storing over 40 billion files for 400,000 customers Amazon is the one to beat. How do they it for pennies per GB a month? Read on. I...
- Tags: Data Center, Amazon.com Inc., Cloud Storage Market, Humans, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-03-09
- Start your company with a credit card and a cloud
- Despite the bad economy there's never been a better time to start a company. Why? Because you don't have to buy a single server or application. Whip out your credit card, load and go - on a cloud-powered data center. But this isn't just for startups: any...
- Tags: Software, Credit Card, App, Cloud Support Option, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Storage Management, Utility Computing, Tools & Techniques, Servers, Open Source, Hardware, Storage, Management, Robin Harris
- Blog posts 2009-03-03
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