I did not dig up the changelog of the make homepage but the linked post is fairly old (2010) and the make manual gets updated somewhat frequently[1].
Why this was posted and upvoted tho I don't quite understand. It's not some kind of arcane concept barely anybody knew/knows about. The accepted answer doesn't seem to be better than the part in the current manual about it either.
[1]:
> This is Edition 0.72, last updated 9 October 2013, of The GNU Make Manual, for GNU make version 4.0.
Aren't games on Steam pretty much "rent-only"?
Considering your don't own them in a sense that you are not able to use them without your Steam account.
With Steam at least you only pay once (and FYI some Steam games don't have any DRM but they are a minority). I'd have to dig but the impression that is in my memory is that you would get a game for a time period for a price and then pay again if you wanted to play again. I could be remembering completely wrong here though, I just don't recall the idea of "pay once, play until we go out of business".
Steam is a pay-once indefinite rental, the same as any other software that is sold with fine print that disclaims first-sale rights with the excuse that it's only a license, not a sale. This is very different from a fixed-term renewable rental.
I can't really comment on other countries, but at least in Germany you have a (pretty) difficult time trying to fire somebody for 'under-performing' as long as the person doesn't mess up unrelated things (like repeated misbehavior, e.g. feigning illness, theft, sexual harassment, ..) or your company isn't doing all that well from an economic point of view.
You can register for the Preview for Developers program [1] and get timely OS updates regardless of the carrier.
With the 8x the lack of updates is an HTC issue tho as far as I know. They look to roll out 8.1 on some of the 8Xs in October [2].
[1]: http://www.wpcentral.com/preview-for-developers
[2]: https://twitter.com/htc/status/509409362100879361