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.