I ran across a FUSE module (mhddfs) that seemed relevant when I wanted to combine several USB drives into a single file system. My main goal was to make each drive usable independently for file recovery if I had to move it to another system.

The module appears to be a fairly thin wrapper over an existing file system. It only appears to choose which of the sub-file systems to write new data to, automatically writing files to whichever drive has the most space. This provides nothing in the way of redundancy, however.

What is nice is that you can easily access the files on a drive without needing the other drives. May be helpful for someone.

http://romanrm.ru/en/mhddfs

I actually agree with the idea of an appliance-like approach for some things. I can wrap my mind around the connected and disconnected application scenarios based on HTML5 technologies. What I can't quite figure out is if this is a user's only computing device, how do you connect it to a home printer, scanner, etc. devices? I'll admit I have not read up on this particular device, but, in general, I am not certain how well such a scenario plays out.

Since Linux is running underneath, a certain level of device support would be available, but there is a large amount of user-space software that is usually needed to operate peripherals. Again, it could just be that this isn't part of this product's intended appeal. But I suppose I just can easily hear in the back of my mind of a family member buying one of these because of a low cost and then wondering why they can't connect their iPod, printer, or camera to it. I don't see how you can get away from the need of a "real" desktop system at some point. Perhaps we simply aren't "there" yet.

I have recently begun looking into developing for the iPhone and similar mobile devices, with a desire to be able to draw arbitrary diagrams/images/etc. I honestly did not notice how far the Javascript and HTML stuff had come along in the recent versions of browsers. With the addition of the canvas tag to most popular browsers, lots of useful applications are now feasible without heavily relying on the server-side for much.

While I wouldn't consider myself "old school", the bulk of my HTML coding skills were picked up by extensive use of the "view source" option of Netscape in the mid-90's. Javascript/Livescript were of limited use back then, by comparison. Newer web browsers combined with tools like JQuery and JQueryUI make doing all of the dynamic HTML stuff that was a nightmare only a few years ago, fairly tolerable for web applications.

In summary, unless it is just a horrible fit, I plan on targeting web applications when possible. I'd suggest you at least give it a look....you might be impressed with what is now available and possible.