That has a few big catches, including maintaining an internet connection and being in the same broadcast domain. And looks like it doesn't have lan-only drives, I maintain a box serving up samba shares specifically because the work files in a specific project work files would blow my bandwidth cap for the month in 2 round trips.
> That has a few big catches, including maintaining an internet connection and being in the same broadcast domain.
Are those actual big catches? Those seem like pretty reasonable constraints. What machine do you have attached to your LAN that can't access the internet? And the network restriction is probably just fine for >99% of their customers.
I know its not going to impact the vast majority of their users, so they don't have to care. For my uses, they're all pretty big. That's why I'm so happy to see a new product that may fit into those situations better. Not every computer is on a SOHO network, or a network with many properties of the same.
The network I'm on most of the time is huge which means its heavily subnetted and no one user gets great throughput. My apartment has the aforementioned cap. My old man's place has no internet connection at all, just wifi for getting files to the media computer connected to the TV. By building a product that can serve these users, they'll have a product that can better serve users on ideal connections too!
I don't really see how this product makes any sense for the scenarios you're describing. This system still needs to be able to hit the Internet at reasonable speed, or else you get no offsite backup. It just becomes a network-attached hard drive, and if that's what you want, you can buy one at a better price with more storage (and it won't waste your bandwidth trying to be a "cloud" for your data or anyone else's data).
My original post was that this is a step in the right direction. From one thing I happened to mention, this thread took a tangent about dropbox's lan sync, but thats not specifically or only the area I care about. There is a place I'd like to see file storage tech to go, and we are inching towards it, but its not delivered with an off the shelf NAS box, dropbox or simple combination of the two.
I guess I'm not clear what your ideal product would be. All of the scenarios you describe have very constrained bandwidth, which means that sync outside the LAN will always be crappy. It sounds like you either need NAS or peer-to-peer sync (something like Mesh or AeroFS).
Short answer: I wear wrist braces to sleep (I just use some weight-lifting gloves with velcro wrist-straps).
Back story:
About a year or two back, I was working long hours and started to develop wrist pain. At the time, I 'asked' google the same question and came upon a recommendation (can't remember where to give credit) to wear wrist braces when sleeping.
I didn't really think about it again until a couple of weeks later when I woke up with my head resting on my hand and my wrist bent back underneath it. I started wearing braces to bed and the problem I'd been dealing with for a couple of months was pretty much gone in a week and a half.
A quick check of popular baby names in the US (here: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/) shows Michael and Daniel to still be quite popular. All four names mentioned appear several times in the top 15 baby names for years between 1979 and 2000 or so. Nicole averages around the 7th most popular name for the 80's.
