As much as I'm sure you're right, I think this is a great way to perform advertising. No flash animations, no autoplay video or sound clips, no clickbait... Just pure data-driven performance benchmarking. It's like they're saying "Let's attract tech-savvy customers by publishing something that will actually be informative and/or interesting to them, and then maybe some of them will be interested in what we sell" I can totally get behind this form of marketing!

For non-savvy users: I recommend Tresorit. I really like the interface, and they seem to have security as one of their primary focuses. Everything you store on Tresorit is encrypted before it leaves your computer / device.

For more savvy users: SpiderOak. Its interface is ... more than a little bit convoluted. But it's got all the same security and encryption that I like about Tresorit, plus file versioning and a web interface.

I actually think I would enjoy something like this, as I'm really enjoying using Kindle on Android lately. But not to the tune of $10 / month. The thing is for the $15 / mo you pay for Netflix, you could buy one movie. You watch one movie during that month that you otherwise would have bought, and you break even. It takes you one evening, and you still have 29 more days in the month to get more than your money's worth out of it. For the $10 they want per month for this service, you can buy one paperback book. But I know very few people who read more than one book per month right now. Maybe that's just because me and a lot of the people I know are all obsessed with the huge fantasty epics for now... (*cough*BrandonSanderson*cough) But personally, I really don't think I'd sign up for more than $2 or $3 per month. Good luck to them though.

Lua has some notable differences from more prominent languages like Java, but as a World of Warcraft addon developer, I find it a surprisingly robust and fun language to program in. I look forward to this change to Wikipedia and hope it works well for all of their contributors.

I disagree with your black-and-white view of microtransactions, and cite my experience in League of Legends as an example. The game is free to play. There are no ads on their website, annoying or otherwise, or in the game. About the smallest useful "microtransaction" would be around $2, which you could use to unlock a very cheap champion or skin for a champion. Other skins cost what would be close to $10. However, the skins have no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever, and nothing that does impact gameplay cannot be purchased with the currency you earn for playing and (at a faster rate) winning games.

I think $10 is a little much for a single champion skin, but that's me. I did buy one skin so far for ~$5. So far, I've probably enjoyed 200-300 hours worth of gameplay. That's a WAAAAY better ratio of dollars spent to hours of fun than almost any other game I've ever played. If they were to stop their system of microtransactions tomorrow, then ... Riot Games would cease earning any money at all, development would cease, servers would go down, and the game would be dead. In the interest of keeping them alive and well, I feel no compunction whatsoever about choosing to support Riot by buying the various boosts and vanity items they offer that appeal to me. It's an absolutely *fantastic* implementation of microtransactions.

So yes, I believe there is a "non-evil" way to do microtransactions, and I'm grateful that at least one company has found it.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to try it out, you can sign up for your own free account and help me out in the process by going to http://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4ceace9718e1b841855707

I should also note that I keep Firefox open, about 18 hours per day, every day, and I hibernate my computer at night with FF still open. So it doesn't get rebooted very often, it hardly ever crashes, and it's still only consuming 475 MB. I don't know why so many other people are seeing 450 MB for one or two tabs. Maybe it's my computer?

Win 7 Pro on a Phenom II X4 940 3.0 GHz with 8 GB of RAM.

Although I agree that browsers in general are "consuming more and more memory", I'm seeing a slightly different story than you are. I abuse Firefox 4's new tab grouping functionality horribly, and keep tons of tabs open regularly. I use to have to pare them down just so I had room to read the titles on my tab bar, but now I can have upwards of 50 tabs open at a time.

Right now, I've only got 15, including my 5 pinned "App Tabs" (Four Google apps + FB). My Firefox is consuming 475 MB.

I was curious, and decided to see how much RAM Internet Explorer 9 would take with the exact same 15 tabs open. It appears to have spawned four child processes totalling approximately 1,283 MB.

My data: http://i51.tinypic.com/fualq0.jpg (Sorry, no pic of the tabs I've got going, you'll just have to believe that I really did open all the same tabs)

And yes, I should include data for Opera and Chrome, but I didn't have those installed, and want to get this posted in time for a chance at being modded up. ^_^

Personally, for how extensible, and how many great features Firefox brings to my online life, I've never considered its memory consumption unreasonable. And it certainly appears to be doing better than the competition.

From the perspective of liking my software free and open-source, I was actually a little excited about this announcement when I first heard it. And then I started thinking about all the implications.

I've been a fan of QuestHelper for quite awhile now, and I never saw a donation "reminder". And I didn't get it through WoWMatrix either, I downloaded it straight off WoWInterface manually, every time it was updated. I think it's a shame that Zorba is being forced to mothball that project due to this. The inability to even have the chance to pay my favorite mod authors to keep addons I like functioning is a mistake, IMO.

Another good addon that they've killed with this announcement is nUI. This is the Mazzle of 3.0, but instead of a collection of addons automatically configured, Scott has written an entire UI to replace the default. If I weren't so addicted to many of my addons that don't mesh with his, I'd use his in a heartbeat, it's very very nice. But he's been out of work for awhile as I understand it, and now that he can't have a seperate free and premium version, he's said it may not be worth his time anymore to continue development on. This one, I beleive, is truly tragic.

Last of all, I just noticed Mundocani taking down his postings of GroupCalendar and Outfitter from all the hosting websites. He doesn't even ask for donations as far as I can recall, but he's done that in protest. I don't disagree with him either, but I do regret the loss of such talent from the UI Dev pool.

Blizzard is not making any of their fans love them for this, and I sincerely hope they reverse this policy.

http://www.gotapi.com/ It's got all the good reference sites in one. You click the reference site, it adds a tab to the gotAPI webpage. It has a really good search box. No signup required. Best all-in-one reference ever.