Hammer Storage's 2TB Network Drives Are Big Like a Large Object

This Hammer (don't...) Storage myshare NAS seems to be one of the few home and small business units to offer up to 2TB of storage. The unit itself takes 2 hard disks to form anywhere between 320GB and 2TB of storage, with an extra USB expansion port in the back for printers or even more space. Best of all, the NAS has Gigabit Ethernet and RAID 0/1 support, so the performance will be (theoretically) pretty solid.

The 1TB version is on sale now for $499, and the 2TB will be shipping in August. We're always looking for more storage for all the crap we amass from being on the Internet 18 hours a day (we went on a Batman comic downloading spree last week). – Jason Chen

Product Page [Hammer via Electronista]

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Touchscreen Smart Mirror: Widgets in the Mirror

A team of students at the University of Waterloo, lead by William Lam (no relation to our Brian Lam), have designed a touchscreen Smart Mirror. Widgets can be placed on the mirror and it can also play music, video and more. Check out the video above and see for yourself. –Travis Hudson

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Installable Grid of Thumbnails - created by FlickrCash

<br /><!------- BEGIN FLICKRCASH INSTALLED SLIDESHOW CODE -------> <br /><script src="http://flickrcash.com/api/flickrcash.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <br /><script type="text/javascript"> <br /> FlickrCash.lightbox({ <br /> key: 'rnx2nu1v', <br /> thumbs_wide: 10, <br /> thumbs_high: 3, <br /> thumb_edge_in_pixels: 50,<br /> show_drop_shadow: true,<br /> auto_rotate: true,<br /> auto_rotate_seconds: 3<br /> }); <br /></script> <br /><!-------- END FLICKRCASH INSTALLED SLIDESHOW CODE --------><br />

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Multi Touch User Interface

Jeff Han demonstrates—for the first time publicly—his intuitive, "interface-free," touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated ... all » intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure. Han is a research scientist for NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 09:32) closeup of usage of multi touch interface

longer presentation at TED Conference

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Human Computing - by Prof. Luis von Ahn

ABSTRACT Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it.

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