My biggest issue, that no-one so far has mentioned? Press start, type in Putty. Hit enter or click on the search tile. Putty starts.
Connect to my machine, no problems.
Want to open another connection? Repeat the process. Nope, the start menu wont open two copies of putty, it simply takes you to the running copy. The fix is to change registry keys... WTF? why isnt there a real option to definite this behaviour?

I only noticed it recently, because the update to 8.1 killed my Classic Start menu install, and I thought I try the Windows Start menu.

Yes - its been exploited to. I admin a site - and we were hit quite hard by this. Im amazed that its taken this long for the exploit to be acknowledged.

Unfortunately Not quite true. We've fought the MS bandwagon for many years - standardized on Thunderbird and Open Office - however calendars with Lightning and Caldav have just never worked reliable. It appears to work - however it does not scale to reasonable workloads. It does not take too many calendars with a few entries to start causing pauses and issues in thunderbird.
Further to this, the simple features are just missing. Setting calendar permissions? Ligntning doesnt support it - even though caldav does. Finding available calendars on the server - not supported - even though its supported by almost all Android phones via caldav. Also there are serious issues with invites, issues with resources - no good meeting scheduler. Furthermore - tasks are missing some quite simple features - so much so, that most of my staff found them unusable, and either use another tasking program, or use appointments as tasks instead.

We tried very very very hard to like Thunderbird with Ligntning. Thunderbird and a good IMAP server is excellent (we like cyrus - with multiple servers around the globe) - however the calendars jsut arent up to it.
Office 365 - well, the mail is no where as good as what we had, however, calendaring and tasks work (90% of the time in typical MS fashion.)

Its an even bigger issue here known as 457 visas. Even the government knows they are being widely abused however the opposition likes the status quo. Supposedly its only for job types that people are in short supply how ever almost every job you can think of is on the 457 pre approved list.

Well, since the Adelaide Grand Prix hasnt been around for over 10 years, you'll love to hear about the Clipsal 500 - one of the largest touring car races by patronage in the world.

Some of these new metro apps are pretty cool. However, on my 27 inch monitor, the full screen really annoys me. What I wish, is that I could size them, and put them where I want! You could put them in a box, I could drag them around the screen. I dont know, you could call them 'windows' or something.

For my use case, windows 8 is a complete waste of time. The metro interface just gets in the way. In standard form the new start screen is slower and takes more time to use.
2 Common use cases for me:
Windows: Aim to the Start Button Click, slight move to programs, click on program.
Windows 8: Move down to the left corner wait for the start to appear and click. Now move the mouse to the app I want which could be the whole way across my 27 inch screen, and click on program. Or worst case, move to the far right of the screen to scroll the screen across, and then move up to the program to click on it. On my monitor, that can be alot of mouse movement just to run one program.

Windows: Hit start, type calc. Hit enter. Very quick. (unless something cpu heavy is running - may take a while to appear)
Windows 8: Hits start, type calc. hit enter. This is noticeably slower. The search list takes much more time to populate.

Windows 8 without a start screen replacement for me is terrible. Windows 8 with a start screen replacement offers nothing more than windows 7. It feels a little snappier but that's it. Running windows 8 for while now, and I just don't use metro mode at all. As I opened with, If I could window some of the apps, Id possibly use them, but without that, there's no point.

We use the Cisco Ironport - and have done since before Cisco bought them. Quite good devices - but as posted by someone above - 90% of the work is done by reputation filtering and protocol correctness filtering - which can be done using the normal black holes with relatively no cost. If the spam makes it through both of these, then its probably got a 5% chance of making it through the content filtering. I probably get a couple of false negatives a day - and 0 false positives in the last 3 years..

Second level support here. It means the Radiation Beam has been erroneously set to full power.

(Unfortunately if you think this is a joke, google the Therac 25 accident. This should be compulsory study for all programmers and software engineers.)

That is what happens in Australia - with our ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Four TV channels, numerous radio stations, very good and relatively unbiased news service - no ads. All for approximate 7cents a day per tax payer. (Used to be 12 cents per day - and they proudly proclaimed this - but then their funding was somewhat cut.)

Cheapest (full service - Qantas) flight from Adelaide to Melbourne 700kms (Australia): $140 (Meal + Newspaper + 1 free alcoholic drink + minimum 1000 FF points compared to BA's measly 125.)
Cheapest flight from Adelaide to Melbourne: $48.

US has it bad, very bad. Australians don't realise how bad flying is until we leave Australia.

Note that the two relevant entries that you mention are both spawned from the same product and code base. Originally, MS SQL Server was Sybase SQL server.

Lightning is full of bugs. Its been getting better over the years - but its so far behind Outlook and Exchange. Its a pity, because a little work with this, and it could be a very good Outlook/Exchange replacement. Cyrus-IMap is a better mail server than Exchange in every way, and the remnants of Netscape Calendar (now with Oracle) is a better calendar server in every way - its just the clients suck.

These are some wishes from semi-enterprise...
Mail:
1. No auto-configuration. Why should users have to configure mail servers - configure it through DNS srv records. (Dont get me started on the current mail configuration - theres plenty of rants here already.) If the srv records are there, it knows all of the account details, just provide a username and password and thunderbird is configured.
2. The text editor is only a minor improvement from the original netscape (and in some ways that was better.) Have a look at MCE editor for ideas on providing a better editor (and its already in javascript for easy porting)
3. Plugin deployment is difficult.

Calendar:
1. No auto-configuration. Using Caldav means adding a horrible url for each calendar you want.
2. No way of administering these calendars. - Delete, rename etc. I can add new ones, by crafting a new url.... https://caldav.example.com:8080/caldav.php/username/NewCalendar
3. No adding of modifying permissions on calendars.
4. No listing available calendars from the server. I should simply be able to list my own calendars that are on the server - and list ones available from other users, and resources.
5. Invites are still spotty.
6. Theres very little insight to when it goes wrong. no meaningful error messages - stuff just doesnt work.

Sogo is addressing some of these things, however, this should all be included functionality - core to lightning.

It really highlights some of the issues - calendars are hard, and because its a plugin - its in javascript - and thats damn hard too.
But its annoying, because its so close to being a great enterprise product.

No, CDMA was shutdown. It has been replaced by the NextG network - with is simply a GSM/HSPA network operating at 850MHz in the country and also on 2100MHz in the cities. With this it combines the best of range and capacity with the dual frequencies. It really highlights the engineering excellence of the best of Telstra - its easily the best network in Australia, and the others are struggling to keep up. Its a pity that nothing else of Telstra shows similar quality.
It may not quite have the range of the old CDMA network, however its close, and it delivers excellence bandwidth to the areas it does cover. They have also rolled out 4G services through the CBD's and this will get a practical 30Mbs of downloads.

The alternatives? Vodafone/3g is massively over subscribed, however on their way through $1BillionAUD to attempt to fix it. Optus is in a similar position, having caught everyone who fled from Vodafone.

Solaris will join a domain - and allow decent user mapping. Samba's user mapping honestly just sucks - even when it is joined to a domain. There are options - but they are all 'patented' and expensive. (See Centrify or similar) (How do you patent user/userid mapping?)