As the other AC said, social media integration has been pulled and a lot of the best functions are gone. I understand that it was difficult to achieve, but the way they've pulled it, has really undermined their initial intention. There's a few other things which they've modified in an annoying way. Separate volume profiles was needed, but it's really annoying to put the phone on silent now. With that said, some really important features were added; file manager and ability to download files was a critical feature as the phone was incredibly limiting before.

The 830 rumours seem to make out that it may be the 'good enough phone' but will have the 20MP camera. I care little for 1080p displays, so don't really want something that drains more battery than it has to.

I doubt they will go back in. Nokia stuffed up massively, they got bought out, that's it. It's a real pity, because the lumia hardware has been nothing short of spectacular, unfortunately WP is a bit wanting, and MS were onto a good thing, but fiddled with it a bit too much in the latest 8.1 update and pulled quite a few good features they didn't want to keep working on.

I'm speaking in a more broader sense. But to answer your query, Microsoft have definitely built themselves a reputation in the 90's to spend money to kill competition. They're not the first, and definitely not the last. I've already written what I think is fair competition in other posts here, can follow it up if you're really that interested. I'm not explicitly saying that it's the competitors of dropbox doing it, but the point to be taken is that they were offered to be bought out, and they declined. The writing was on the wall, so to speak.

You clearly didn't read my second paragraph.

No, operating something at a loss so that it kills the competition is anti-competitive. If a company finds a different way to make money from it, that's one thing, but subsidising losses through other completely separate profitable parts of a business is purely there to destroy competition through attrition rather than actually having a better product able to sustain itself on its own merits.

Mind you, I have taken the comments from Dropbox person at face value. I do agree that others are doing a better job, but my main point, as others have stated, it was so obvious that blind Freddy could see it, and the money was on the table; they made their bed, they now have to sleep in it.

A while ago some big company offered to buy out dropbox and they declined. Surely it was a sign of the times that the big guns were going to enter the market, and when they get in, they don't muck around. Fair competition isn't something the big companies enjoy doing, as their whole business model tends to revolve around destroying competition then bleeding the market for what it's worth.

I used dropbox for cloud storage, I liked it for collaborative work. Would be a shame to see it get destroyed through aggressive anti-competitive practices.

I agree with the top-down perspective, it's especially noticeable that a lot of people try to find only evidence that proves their preconceived opinion, rather than finding evidence to develop an opinion.

Your history needs a lot of refinement. Soviet Russia didn't become technologically powerful until WW2, after the USA gifted them entire factories to make stuff as part of the war effort. Then the soviets infiltrated many companies and government research missions with their spies sending back heaps of information, and took in heaps of german scientists after WW2 (so did USA). If anyones technological prowess depends on some richer or advanced countries benevolence, then I don't think you can really claim that the glorious revolution was all that much a success.

Nope, it's only from a few years ago where they relaxed the requirement. Certainly when I made a steam account, if you didn't move into offline mode while you were online, it wouldn't let you. So if you lost your internet connection, then tough. Steam in the very early days was an abortion comparable to simcity and AC2, actually probably worse all due to DRM requirements. None of this changed until the last 2-4 years where things were starting to get improved. But like you have shown, it still requires you to be online periodically. Compare this with GoG; no DRM, download the game and you can install wherever, whenever you want without having to run a third party client to oversee your game running. It's like as if I'm gaming in the 90's and early 00's again.

How is a tablet OS not sideloading relevant to steam? It isn't, because your whole issue, while not factually wrong, is a storm in a teacup and offtopic. I explained why, but you snipped that part of the paragraph and probably didn't read it. To further explain my point about it being ARM, is that it was never going to have any effect to steam or desktop computing. No one seems to be criticising apple that iOS doesn't allow sideloading, so why is MS being singled out here? There's also no back catalogue of software for winRT, and definitely no hardware to run graphically intensive games.

I think the whole issue is simply that valve was worried about MS having an app store integrated with windows. That was the underlying point of contention with windows 8 (aside from the dud UI, but everyone knows that). We all know MS' past history, they tend to be anti-competitive, but these days, who isn't? Valve is just releasing steamOS in an attempt to keep steam closed and making money and largely free from competitors, i.e. the status quo. It's no different to why google released android completely free, because they needed something to protect their premier product, google search, from remaining only in a desktop browser, in a fast moving landscape. Valve is doing the same thing by trying to make inroads into the console market with their steam box coupled with steamOS. They want to keep steam relevant by finding its way into the living room.

Steamworks games have DRM which is probably worse than consoles. You generally must be online, and you must have steam running to play the games. Consoles, generally still don't do this. Valve have improved their offline mode, but for a long time no internet meant no play. From what I can see, it's still a paint in the arse, and doesn't allow you to completely run games if your internet drops out all of a sudden. I've had a lot of experience in dealing with steams heavy handed approach to staying online.

Sideloading is a non-issue since WinRT was always intended for ARM processors. I can't see any valid criticism as games wouldn't work even if sideloading was permitted unless the code was ported and optimised for the different hardware. What my criticism is that many stores are forced to sell games with steamworks ultimately leading their customers to a competing store. I see it as very similar to when MS was forcing OEMs to pay for licenses for computers that didn't ship with any MS products.

The issue is valve is protecting their walled garden in steam, steamOS is only a few additional fences around their heavily walled garden. They were really concerned about the integrated store in windows as that was something which had the power to directly compete with steam. It's why valve refuse to make a modern ui app available through the windows app store, as the last thing they want is people to realise they can get games elsewhere. One can hardly criticism MS for making a walled garden, and champion valve when valve's own enormous moneymaker is a walled garden itself.

I care little for half life (iunno, I just can't see what others do, not particularly impressed by anything in any of the games).

I don't like steam and valve for different reasons though, steam because it is DRM and valve because despite their (well gaben's) public stance on win8 was valid criticism, at the time, it was, however, hypocritical for them to say it considering what they're attempting to do with steam and more broadly their steamOS.

I remember watching a documentary that covered that. Revisionism is probably a bit strong, but it certainly doesn't fit in with the narrative that certain people want for the USA's industrial proficiency. There are shonks everywhere.

But there is a strong misconception that android is still FOSS. The phrase that comes to mind is the rug has been pulled from under them. I was surprised to learn to what lengths google has gone to lock down android. It was certainly a huge reason as to why a lot of the tech sector was pushing android in the early days (nothing gets the tech sector weaker in the knees than FOSS). While you are right, that users don't care, google has performed a massive bait and switch.

I certainly think so. It's a real pity that mozilla is just becoming a dud social justice warrior organisation now. I guess the people who work for them all aspire to work for google, which is probably why their trying to do an orange version of google chrome...

Since the UI changes, and getting rather annoyed with FF29 (or was it 30) which would constantly block stuff or ask for permission (like vista) to enable things, I just moved to opera. Not sure if it's good on the security and privacy side, but at least the UI, for the most part is lightweight. Needs a few improvements. I'd stick with FF28, but not very keen on running unpatched versions, and it was having many issues anyway with stability, so I guess it's better to just move along.