Hacker News Reader

I do - they worked find for me. Did they give you a hard time? I ask because of the quote marks around portable.

Some better than others- I was able to grab a copy of portable office (Office 2007?) that ran fantastic on x86. I also went through the trouble of sandboxing every one I ran due to the unknown packing mechanics... Cool stuff none the less

Yup and they were fantastic! Mac OS X apps can work in much the same way. It's nice being able to download something and know it'll "just work".

Obviously it's terrible for getting security patches. Not entirely sure what to do about that. It would be nice to make package management more consistent across distros but I digress.

a.k.a. how Windows executables more or less used to work before the crawling horror that is the registry.

Special support for "portability" is an indicator of a design flaw in your OS.