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.

I actually wrote a fair amount of UI code interfacing with Microsoft Agent as part of a research project, AutoTutor. While the L&H TTS engines were indeed the default for Agent, that's just because they were the default ones installed on Windows (2000 and XP) at the time. Agent allows you to load the TTS engine of your choice, so long as it supports the Speech API. Because the Speech API includes callbacks for phonemes spoken, Agent can synchronize lip movements of the character to what's being spoken by the speech engine regardless of its creator.

Ultimately, the poor quality of the L&H voices led us to SpeechWorks and AT&T's NaturalVoice products. Sadly, both the TTS and voice recognition fields went through major consolidations in the early 2000s, and now SpeechWorks is dead (acquired by Nuance). NaturalVoice is still available, more or less, from Wizzard Software.

The SkyDrive and other Live APIs are indeed opened -- for Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and Windows.