I have to wonder if these are made from leftover panels from Samsung and LG. You know, something that is generally ok but some spec does not meet a well known brand's criteria. That said, pretty much any IPS panel will trounce a TN. I find it baffling that so many people will buy a several thousand dollar computer and then pair it with the cheapest monitor they can find.

All the nice improvements under the hood amount to nothing when the user interface is simply a mess. Take the Metro IE for example. It has absolutely no intuitive way to figure out how to use tabs, how to split the view to desktop and Metro (which for some reason can't even be resized to anything but useless 1/4 or 3/4 sizes) etc. You just have to stumble upon the features by accident and even after that they're not that great to use. Likewise the "Charms" bar has strange things like redundant features - running in a virtual machine, Brightness wasn't available. Brightness wouldn't be available on most desktops either I guess so why does the icon stay there? Likewise it often says you can't share things from the Desktop and even when sharing is possible, the options aren't exactly thrilling. Then there's still like 3 different control panels...Win8 is simply full of amateur hour UI design possibly by a committee. Basically there is nothing to make the desktop user want to upgrade and for the tablet user Android and iOS provide a better overall experience because they're designed for touch input from the ground up, not this hybrid. I'm willing to bet Win8 will be a huge flop. Hopefully they'll listen to their userbase after that because nobody asked for a tablet OS from MS. The Surface may end up being good hardware, but people will still prefer the software in iOS/Android because it's more user friendly. Depending on what it runs on, it might end up as a great "root it and cram in your favorite Android version" platform.

Not a fan of #5. It feels to me that you're simply trying to get the candidate to do free work for you. I'm also not a big fan of the "on the fly" testing. I can't remember how every damn function works off the top of my head and some of the problems outlined in this article are things I have never run into (most likely because I'm a web developer rather than a software programmer) so I wouldn't be able to answer them right away. I'd rather just give a few examples (code and all) of what I've done and then talk with the recruiters to see if I would be a good fit. That's how I landed my current job and it didn't waste days of my or the company's time jumping thru hoops with multiple rounds of interviews and crap.