Quote Originally Posted by m^2 View Post
Any example? Because I use a lot of it and don't see any difference.
I had a portable copy of Photoshop CS2 on my harddrive which I couldn't update. A lot of portable software also uses hacked executables and dll's which cannot be patched.
Depends on the license. It's sometimes, though rarely illegal to make and use, especially with big companies like MS or Apple.
Most licenses I've seen have been limited to a single computer, so you can't just take your copy of Office 2007 and install it on your laptop, your desktop, your neighbors computer...

Last year I used a service that very well could be described as an online application, called zamzar, which performs conversions between multiple file formats. No registration is required, and all the heavy number crunching involved is handled by a server. In this case there is extremely little requirements on the local computers processing power. It really only need to be able to render the GUI and send/receive the data. Of course if you wish to use this to convert movies, you will need a fast connection.