Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Gizmodo has a new review of the Western Digital Sharespace 4TB personal NAS product that just came out, and it’s absolutely glowing:

Western Digital’s ShareSpace Storage is a steely, cubular vault of NAS with fast Gigabit ethernet that brings enterprise-level centralized storage down to the small business and deathcore nerd space.

For $999 you get 4TB of storage (2.66TB actually free w/ RAID5), sluggish transfer speeds (10.5MB/s writing and 12MB/s pulling data), three USB ports, and Gigabit ethernet. You could get a faster Drobo for $100 more. And, in my tests, the better looking Drobo gets 16MB/s, and is also hot-swappable. You can buy the enclosure and put in 1.5TB drives to get a 6TB rig if you are so inclined, something that’s less possible with the prepackaged WD NAS solution.

I’ve had bad experience with Western Digital internal/external hard drives; they just die on me (and all the friends I know) a lot. But, I don’t own a WD NAS, so if you have one, let me know your thoughts!

I am extremely impressed with Obama ‘08: The Official iPhone Application. It’s slick, down-to-earth, full-featured, breathtakingly gorgeous, fast, and functional. Its blue theme coherently extends the Obama ‘08 campaign branding to mobile devices. Check out these screens:

It’s interesting that the Obama campaign application shows your friends (classified by zip code) as a checklist to call off and recruit. Will it work to get more people out on voting day? Who can say. It’s certainly aggressive, and the only big turn-off of the application. In a way, it reminds me of the moronic Facebook applications “Vampires and Werewolves” or “Pirates vs Ninjas” which both try to coerce you into harassing your friends.

The local news is what I’m looking for, Obama news and updates for the US and NYC.

The issues pages are also nice; it would be better, perhaps if they included a summary of other candidates views, with rebuttals from the Obama camp, but you can’t wish for everything to be perfectly balanced–this is politics.

Gizmodo rants, “This is something like what politicking at the grassroots level will look like by the next election—local and immediate, but definitely national in scope. It makes you feel like a part of the campaign.” For me, this might be the first opportunity to follow Obama’s announcements without being harassed by email or sms-spammed.

Go download it now in the iTunes store, it’s free!