Yes. I was just talking to my prof./boss today who worked at Stanford, PARC and later Interval about moving some things to Dropbox, arguing that it's a better l

Yes. I was just talking to my prof./boss today who worked at Stanford, PARC and later Interval about moving some things to Dropbox, arguing that it's a better long-term solution since it's just <i>the file-system</i> and the system doesn't rely on any specific representation (such as a database) or syncing mechanism (can be swapped for rsync, git, AeroFS, etc.). Hearing this, he launched into a rant about distributed file-systems (like AFS) and how hierarchical file-systems are themselves a specific and ultimately transient technology. Working with him and another fellow who was hacking UNIX in the early 80's, you get a sense of a sort of terminal frustration from having witnessed the golden years of research in computers first-hand and the subsequent failure of most of those ideas to manifest. Today's computing is built mostly on tools that were originally cheap hacks intended to be replaced. If you have not watched the videos above, for the sake of our future, please do.