It's not missing. In fact, the up arrow in the Windows 8 Explorer has been there for several months now.

Looks like they've gone back to 1986 and Windows 2.0 style 2D.

It looks hideous to me, I much prefer the gloss and depth of Aero Glass.

Back in the early 90s there was a little program you could get called All3D. This used a DLL called ctl3d.dll to make all the 2D elements of regular Windows 3.1 (such as checkboxes and radio buttons) become 3D, as was eventually the case with regular Windows 95. I daresay some enterprising person will come up with a similar thing for Windows 8.

How amusing - our dear little con-dem Government reckons Britian will have the best superfast broadband by 2015, do they? Well, they might like to "encourage" BT to pull its finger out and upgrade all the exchanges to ADSL2 for a start. There are thousands of small exchanges stuck about 5 years in the past and no plans whatsoever to upgrade them.

Meanwhile all the effort seems to be going to towns and cities, the places that already have the choice of cable or ADSL2 or fibre to the cabinet. They really ought to splunk that cash on bringing everyone up to speed instead, but no, as it's all about money it's far more efficient for them just to push ahead where there's already fast broadband.

I think there's more chance of the Sun suddenly exploding than there is of the UK having the best superfast broadband by 2015.

NVidia have pulled a past one here, which doesn't seem to have been widely picked up yet.
The codename for the 680 is GK104. The 460 and 560 cards were based on the cut-down GF104 and GF114 GPUs respectively and were midrange parts. The 480 and 580 high-end parts were based on the full GF100 and GF110 GPUs respectively and had a 384-bit memory bus (rather than the 256-bit bus used on the GF1x4 parts).

In other words - the 680 is really what would otherwise have been called the 660, it's just that nVidia's worked out they can make some extra cash by marketing it as a high-end part. Don't be at all surprised when in a few months time a 685 or 690 appears, based on the "full" GK100 (with a 384-bit memory bus and a fair bit of extra oomph....

most motherboards are still coming with floppy controllers on them for some reason,

If only... None of the HP machines we've bought at work in the past couple of years have had them and we buy both the slimline desktop variety and mini-tower PCs. The few Dells I've seen likewise don't have any floppy ports on the motherboard.

As for build-your-own PCs, or ones from companies that assemble generic parts into PCs, very few come with floppy ports on the motherboard. Indeed, the only non-industrial Intel motherboards I know of that have a floppy port are the ASRock Extreme boards - and that's powered by a SuperIO chip on the motherboard, as chipset support for floppies was dropped by Intel years ago.

Note: the reason I mention all this is because I'm looking at getting a Z77 motherboard in the next few months with a floppy connector, so that I can hook up a 5.25" floppy drive I've acquired (purely for the heck of it, before anyone asks - I've a big box of old disks from the early 90s that I wouldn't mind rummaging through, the PC I used for those having been chucked out years back). ASRock are pretty much the only option nowadays and I have no doubts that when Haswell comes out next year the old 37-pin floppy connector will be well and truly extinct.

An original PC and indeed the XT that followed it would boot into cassette BASIC if it couldn't boot from a given disk. That cassette BASIC was even less useful on the XT, given that only the original PC had a cassette port around the back...

You can still get motherboards, even brand-new Z77 chipset ones, with floppy connectors (ASRock make them). Plug a 5.25" disk drive into that, boot off a 160K floppy with PC DOS 1.00 on it and bam, it'll boot into 1981-era DOS just fine.

My comment referred to the use of PCs for gaming - which is largely what the MPC standards were about and also what the Experience Index is for (after all, you don't need a 7.9 rating to use Word or knock up some PHP code....)

I don't own a PS3 and nor do I want one - the PC on which I'm writing this is my games machine.

As a PC gamer, anything that brings more people to the platform and which drags graphics up from DX9 gets my vote. (Skyrim, for example, looks nice. But think how much nicer it'd be with a DX11 engine with tesselation, as seen in that Heaven benchmark... mmm!)

Yes, it's just a PC-in-a-box. However, this is something a bit more interesting in that at long last it'd set a more modern minimum spec for games. For too long PC games have been crippled graphically, as no games maker wants to lose out on the Windows XP-with-DX9 graphics crowd. If enough of these boxes are shifted it would work to further PC games in terms of graphics, as developers could assume a certain minimum level - and I'd wager it wouldn't be crusty old DX9-level graphics.

As a bonus, everyone who has a decent gaming PC already would stand to benefit from a larger pool of developers and games.

Things like this have been tried before, however. Remember MPC and MPC2? They quickly fizzled out, as did use of the Experience Index that's present in consumer versions of Windows from Vista onwards.

The main fly in the ointment is likely to be cost, however. i7s are around £230 alone in the UK and a decent midrange graphics card (like the GTX560) is another £120. A PS3 is cheaper than an i7 CPU, around £190.

I rebooted 3 hours ago and I've got 9 tabs open in Firefox - Slashdot, some weather charts, a Livejournal page, a WoWWiki page, two BBC news items and a couple of xkcd pages. I don't have any addons other than Downloadhelper and Flashblock.
The commit size of firefox.exe is 1,334,304 KB - over one and a quarter gigabytes for 9 pages! (The private working set is around 30 MB lower, FWIW).
Although I've got the RAM, 1.3GB for a web brower is just plain silly.

I've got a 1 GB Seagate EIDE drive from 1997 in a PC running my weather station. I've got another 1 GB EIDE drive from 1996 in use as a swapfile drive in a P3-450 that I keep around for playing old DOS games.

I've also got a 1992 486 PS/2 with a 230MB hard drive, but that doesn't get much use - once a year just to see if it still works!

The best upgrade for me was the £70 I spent on a Voodoo Graphics card in 1998. I took my P100 with me to Uni and it was okay at playing Quake and Quake II - software mode, 320x240.
After inserting the Voodoo card I was astonished: GLQuake ran at 30fps at 640x480 and Quake II had coloured lighting and also ran at 30fps at 640x480 - a massive step up from 320x240 at 15fps! That day in 1998 was the day that 320x240 VGA mode-X died for me. Ever since then it seemed low-rez and clunky, whereas before then it was the norm (software mode 640x480 games on a P100 generally weren't much fun).

Yea it crashed when you looked at it.

Only if you used dodgy drivers. I only had a couple of crashes over a period of almost 3 years using it.