Oh, my favorite demo of the whole show was one I got on a bus ride! Steven Burns showed me the Longhorn Shell, which advances the "pipes and filters" pattern of UNIX by piping not text streams, but object streams! So, for instance, you can grab all the currently running process with a ps command (well, get/process is the "real" name, but alias get/process ps works), and then because what's being streamed are real objects and not just text streams, you can filter it with an arbitrary query against an object-specific property (ps | filter handlecount -gt 400) and then pump that into different formatters: ps | filter handlecount -gt 400 | tableformatter or ps | filter handlecount -gt 400 | xmlformatter or ps | filter handlecount -gt 400 | listformatter or ps | filter handlecount -gt 400 | FullGuiFormatter (I'm handwaving at what the real "full GUI formatter" command is, but I saw it work).

You know, rendering a GUI transition with AfterEffects is very nice and all, but sysadmin scripting: priceless.