> So it only took about a year of screaming from the users
> and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and
> brought back the MENU instead of that god damned
> useless start screen.

No, what it took was a new CEO. Don't flatter yourself. What you have observed is merely the surface of a significant shift that is happening. The fact that these effects are already visible in the first 6 months is pretty telling.

If Microsoft can have those people wait for Windows 9 and Windows 9 is an improvement of any sort, they stand a better chance of keeping the customers.

Really? MS didn't change much in Win8.1, and they are making Win7 really hard to buy. It implies they really believe Win8 isn't a disaster.

The head of the Windows division got fired shortly after Win8 shipped, and the whole company seems to be treading water while the board hunts for a new CEO.

It's unrealistic to expect any changes to the Windows 8 vision until that shakes out. But when it does, you can bet the Surface/metro thing will get ripped apart, and Julie Larson-Green will be replaced by someone who isn't just keeping a seat warm. Whether that's for better or worse really depends on who the CEO is.

.NET also has a managed C++ model, which as allows C++ objects to be tightly bound to C# including garbage collection in an extremely natural way, while still having inline assembly language and all the performance of C++. And for managed languages (C#, VB, PowerShell, Python, etc) you get very deep integration that is probably the best that could be hoped fo. The F# mutability example is unreasonable, given the radical difference between these languages. And for all of this integration you get to use a single IDE with a visual debugger that shows you a single callstack with thr different languages mixed together.

Microsoft solved this problem so thoroughly, you couldn't ask for much else, except that none of it works on any OS other than Windows.

and, in the case of zombies, a canter or even a slow trot will easily get you past any somewhat mobile rotting corpses.

...until you encounter your first ZOMBIE HORSE!
Nay, naaay!

You refer to the audience as "senior management," but then you have framed this entire discussion around you -- the enlightened one -- trying to "teach" the bumbling, ignorant executives while tiptoeing around their childlike attention spans. A quick look at your pay grade should reveal the exact opposite. You each have a specialty, but /yours/ is the narrower mindset with the smaller impact on the organization. And they may be bored by technical details, but when it comes to the operational and strategic details that drive the day-to-day success or failure of your company, /your/ attention span is the childlike one. Want to see a bunch of snoozing engineers? Put them in a training session about how to extract more money from customers. :-)

In order to be truly successful with your goal here, you need to step out of your world of IT and let your audience teach you something. What were they doing before they came to the class? What are the problems facing the company right now? Why are they requesting the training? If there is an optimal outcome -- publicly congratulating you and asking to do a follow-up training -- what would that look like? (In other words, what was a similar past event that everyone remembers as being a great success?) Sometimes these questions have hidden answers, like people not wanting to be made to feel stupid, or wanting to learn a few simple tricks that will impress others, or merely needing to fulfill a mandate from higher up with the least effort heheh. To be really successful, you need to give them exactly what they want, not what you think they need.

You can ask these questions directly at the start of your session, but a better approach is to talk informally with some key people beforehand. Show them the material you plan to present, and ask for suggestions and feedback. Make them feel like you will implement their advice, so they have a personal interest in the outcome of your event. Technology is absolutely not the point of IT, don't let the conversation dwell on that. Instead, ask about the bigger picture, and try to understand the human perspective and reward mechanisms.

Above all, recognize that you have a blind spot that is twice as large as any executive's blind spot for technology. Accept it, develop some techniques to help yourself work around it, and you will find yourself light years ahead of your IT peers.

I use five different operating systems. (Osx , ios, linux, windows, android ) name one keychain program that can be used across them all and keep that program easily sync'd?

http://lastpass.com/

Here is the original self-promoting story from Food Safety News:
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/08/honey-laundering

However, from searching Google News (e.g. "china counterfeit honey"), the results are merely people's blogs that link to the same Food Safety News article. I'm sure FSN is providing a helpful service of raising awareness, but they are not an impartial group who we can expect to conduct a reliable investigation. Where are the confirming sources?

Their article references the FDA, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Agriculture -- but I can't find anything on those sites to support the article's opening claim that "A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China."

Can anybody provide a citation?