In .NET, you exactly have the same thing: ObsoleteAttribute. It's not often used, but it does exist.

No. Windows handles DST rules in the registry, so it's perfectly capable of date-dependent DST rule handling. The article discusses those recommendations as a way to avoid problems caused by issues with Outlook and Exchange 2003, both of which have their own unique ways of handling TZ changes (basically, they fail to store TZ information with dates, so TZ changes screw up the display of appointments). The problems were largely addressed in Outlook and Exchange 2007 and completely fixed in the 2010 versions, which keep the appointments in GMT-plus-offset format.

There's legitimate complaints you can have with the way Windows handles TZ changes -- personally, I'm not a fan of having to install TZ patches from Windows Update and I really dislike how Windows keeps the RTC in local time instead of GMT -- but don't blame it for the failings of antiquated and soon unsupported Office programs.

Honestly, I've not found that to be the case. In most cases, you can disable the integration drivers in the guest, then move the VM to the new virtualization platform and start it back up. You may need to do a startup repair or in-place upgrade on an older version of Windows; Windows 7 (2008 R2) and 8 (2012), however, are fairly resilient.

The smoothest way to do it, though, if you've got the time, is to use the new platform's P2V tool to create a new virtualized VM based on the old one. This is how I've moved guests from Virtual Iron and Oracle VM to Hyper-V. In general, I'd say this is probably the smoothest way to move a VM running any OS to any other hypervisor, as it gives you a backup copy on the old hypervisor if needed and ensures that any special drivers are injected for the first startup.

There's lot Microsoft could do to make solid progress, starting, naturally, with getting rid of Steve Ballmer.

* Subordinate the desktop to the Modern interface. Give each program that isn't written for Modern its own virtual desktop and make them act like Modern apps in the charm bar, SideView, and the like. This whole "desktop is desktop, Modern is Modern" nonsense has got to go.
* Make a Modern version of Office.
* Remove the "Windows Store apps only" restriction on ARM so it can benefit from backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility is the major selling point of Windows (enterprise management is the other).
* Start selling Windows to ARM device manufacturers in much the same way DOS was sold to the various 8 and 16 bit computer manufacturers. Go one step further and let people buy copies of Windows for ARM at a reasonable price to put on their own devices.
* Consider selling Windows as a subscription product, similar to Office Home Premium.
* Stop changing the API to chase your competitors. WinRT is a pain for everyone on the client side and doesn't really help drive devs to the platform. Instead, seeing JavaScript (of all things!) as one of the "key" platforms for Modern on MSDN drives away other developers. Likewise, telling WPF, WinForms, and Silverlight developers that much of what they know is useless (because WinRT is /just different enough/ to be incompatible with all of these) isn't the best way to make friends with developers.
* Correct your internal struggles by not having groups fighting with each other. If this means divesting business units or firing managers, so be it.
* Stop hiring H1B consultants and engaging in weird hiring practices, like "Interview 2.0" questions and direct out of college hires. Find the best developers for your own organization and hold on to them, rather than grinding down fresh graduates. Your developer tools group seems to understand this.

It can with a simple rule: a law is, prima facie, a violation of the separation of church and state when the only articulable purpose of the law is religious in nature. For a law to not run afoul of this, it has to have some purpose to society that isn't derived from religious principles. That doesn't mean that it can't have a purpose derived from such principles, only that that can't be the only purpose. For instance, most religions prohibit the killing of other people, but preventing murder has non-religious purpose as well. An example of a law that would run afoul of the rule would be a dictate that attempts to convert people from one religion to another is punishable by death. It has no articulable secular purpose, and therefore wouldn't be permitted. (A more recent and U.S.-specific example of a law with no articulable secular purpose is the banning of civil unions with the same rights and benefits as marriages.)

The reason why this rule works in the U.S., at any rate, is because a law that only has a religious purpose is either an establishment of religion (by granting extra rights to a religious group) or an impediment to its free exercise (by removing rights from those who follow a different religion or none at all, which is in itself a religion in this view).

Actually, Microsoft has a wide variety of SLAs with financial penalties covering the Azure cloud. I expect customers will be able to claim at least a 10% service credit on this, as it's definitely an issue within Microsoft's control and definitely would cause a miss of the monthly availability number.

Review http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/ if you're interested in the Azure SLAs. Interestingly, Amazon has a much less tough SLA, as it's calculated on a yearly basis and doesn't have as brutal penalties (Amazon at most credits 10%; Microsoft credits up to 25%).

Actually, Windows Phone 8 uses MTP for transfers to and from the computer. That's actually a source of much unhappiness among WP owners, though, since they now have to transfer everything out of Zune (which no longer works) to a different media management system -- and the Windows Phone desktop software for 8 is of questionable quality. However, that does mean that it should be much more usable on other OSes now.

They don't have to be. One approach is to create high churn through abusive behavior and unreasonable KPIs; this works if you don't really care that much about error rates and don't need your personnel to be able to do more complicated tasks besides "pick, pack, ship." On the other hand, at my company (we do aviation fulfillment), our warehouse personnel are paid well, given reasonable KPIs, and treated well, and so our churn is extremely low. I believe this year our warehouse churn has been 0%, and it's historically around 1% or so. The advantage of this approach is that you have better quality control and personnel who can competently handle things like dangerous goods. Perhaps most importantly to us is that you don't have to have the obsessive security most fulfillment warehouses have, which ultimately saves money. Funny enough, when you treat your personnel well, you don't have to worry about them stealing from you.

You do know that non-admin users have to provide an admin login to elevate using UAC, right? And that proper Windows practice since Windows 2000 has been to run users as non-admins?

Actually, you can just start typing on the start screen to find, well, anything; it defaults to apps, but the search hits all search providers. The WinKey+F shortcut isn't needed.

There's lots of ways to skin that cat, but I'd start with:

* Installing software: Use the invoke-expression and invoke-command cmdlets to run msiexec, after using new-pssession to connect to the machine
* Modify the registry: Powershell has a provider that treats the Registry as a drive. Use get-itemproperty and set-itemproperty to edit values. Or, follow the above process and use regedit /s to import a .reg file.
* Format a disk: Invoke-command + diskpart.
* Manage services: Invoke-command + sc or the *-service cmdlets (get-service, stop-service, suspend-service, etc.)

I'm no PS expert, but I was able to find this all in a few minutes of searching.

Insert disc, click Next a few times? Windows 7 and 8 are trivial to get going from zero, especially since they come with at least basic drivers for most things and can get the rest from Windows Update automatically once they have a network connection.

While the Linux installers have come a long way since the olden days, they're still a fair amount more complex than the modern Windows or OS X installers.

Nope.

Basically, when you complete a kit plane, you get it certified by the FAA as an experimental aircraft. Those can be flown anywhere that's permitted by their equipment and your licensing; for instance, the plane has to have its minimum equipment list to fly at all and navigational aids to fly in IFC. The major restriction on an experimental aircraft special airworthiness certificate is that it can't be used for commercial cargo or passenger operations.

To close a Metro app, grab the top of the screen and drag it to the bottom, either by swiping or dragging with the mouse.

I agree it's not intuitive, though. I found out about it via web search, and if you have to search just to perform basic functions in your OS, something's wrong -- either the OS needs to come with a tutorial, or the UI affordances need to be more obvious.

While DirectSound and DirectInput are now deprecated, you now have XAudio2 (or Core Audio, depending on your needs) and XInput. XInput isn't an exact replacement, however, since it only supports XBox360 controllers and those that can emulate one with their drivers.