the Portland attempt at city-wide wifi, MetroFi, shut down a year or so after launching. The company could never turn a profit off of the ad-supported free service. I think WiFi is just defunct for this use, the infrastructure costs too much for it to work out. in Portland we have Clear and Comcast High Speed 2go, both of which are based on 4G WiMax technology. They offer better performance at a much lower infrastructure cost than WiFi.

I used to work at the Democratic Party of Oregon. we just named each machine after a county in Oregon. When we ran out of counties we started using towns. The names were easy to remember (Malheur, Douglas, Wallowa, etc. as opposed to random numbers), so when we asked someone which machine they were having a problem with they usually remembered the name. We then just had an excel spreadsheet with name, make/model, location, specs, serial, software installed, license keys, etc. I hate numeric names because they're just hard to remember and awkward to work with. Pronounceable names, preferably ones that people have heard before, work great. Geographic names, names of famous people, names out of fiction (I'm typing this comment on Voyager), etc. all work great.

Remember the Myst series, and the spin-off Uru series? The franchise is almost surely dead at this point, and in the time leading up to it's death Cyan Worlds was working against a tight budget of time and money. This resulted in some official works violating canon and general confusion and drop in quality. Nonetheless, I think the world and concepts they developed still have enormous potential. It would be nice to see another game from them that better explains the world (which would make it more approachable by new players), perhaps starting at the discovery of the cleft by the DRF and going through the restoration (the DRF/DRC and the Restoration were covered in the spinoff Uru series), with integrated history lessons going over the fall of D'ni and the events that followed that (which was the focus of the Myst series).

I find that on my widescreen monitor this works fantasticall well, particularly since I rarely maximize Firefox. I'd really like to see this implemented as a core feature, since theme support for vertical tabs is so iffy right now.

Screenshot

I find the occasion to have many tabs open quite often.I find that in environments like forums it's more efficient to open all the unread threads in tabs, rather than viewing each one and hitting Back. it allows all of them to load at the same time, so it actually is faster.

there are plenty of installers and updaters out there that obscure what they're doing. Must I came back to Foxit Reader? when you install that, you have to go to the Advanced installer to see anything about the browser plugin. The fact that it can't be removed the normal way is very likely unintentional, as MS seems more blundering than malicious.

I find it interesting that people here are so outraged at MS installing an extension for third party software, particularly a web browser. Think about how many completely non-Mozilla related products install a Firefox extension - PDF readers, media players, etc. I'll take as an example Adobe Reader, which installs a plugin for in-browser viewing when you install the desktop app (I hate Adobe Reader too, but it's a high-profile example). Firefox is not an Adobe product at all! yet we aren't yelling at that. Additionally, MS already has components installed in FF. Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation are both MS products that are commonly installed in Firefox as plugins, to enable apps that take advantage of Silverlight and .NET browser features to operate in Firefox and friends as well as Internet Explorer. This plugin seems to serve a similar purpose of allowing .NET-powered web apps (which MS wants to be common in the future) to operate in Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. It seems like we should appreciate this move towards interoperability on MS's part - the alternative is only supporting Internet Explorer for web apps.

So it's really nothing abnormal to install an extension in a third party browser. This leaves us with only one issue, the fact that it was distributed via updates to other applications. I refute this as being a major issue for the exact same reason - quite a few programs update/install Firefox extensions as part of their normal update procedure - I raise Foxit Reader as an example, which as of v3.0 automatically installs a Firefox plugin. No one's yelling about that.

A significant question here: If it wasn't Microsoft, would anyone be nearly as angry?

When I worked at a small nonprofit, mail was handled via unix mboxes. For reasons unknown, the system completely ground to a halt every time an mbox got bigger than about 100MB. To avoid this, emails older than 2 months were automatically archived. Well, one day the executive director managed to get 100MB of email in two months... It took us a few hours to track down the problem. The solution? set the archive script to 1 month and run it on his mailbox. Problem solved!

Although the password is still there, many OpenID providers are moving towards advanced multi-factor authentication. For example, when I (or anyone else) attempt to log in to my OpenID account, the account provider calls my cellular phone. I must answer the call and confirm (by pressing the # key) in order to log in. This means that in order for an intruder to gain access to my account, they must have my password and my mobile phone, and if anyone else tries to log in to my account the unexpected call will alert me to this fact. I also know that other OpenID providers support the hardware key popularized by PayPal that generates a one-time password for each login. Other OpenID providers (including mine) support authentication via SSL certificates. There's a whole range of alternative and multi-factor authentication schemes offered by today's OpenID providers, and over time more and more methods are being introduced. OpenID allows users to choose an authorization service based on the security that they offer rather than based on what website they want to log in to.