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Rather than "Starter Edition," here's some suggestions, if anyone from Redmond just happens to read this. (I know they won't do it - it's more a mental exercise while I eat)

1. Go download this, and make it natively multi-user if it isn't already. Give it a strong native security model, too...you can get some ideas here, and the best part is, they won't mind you doing that if you don't try and patent said ideas. Also, modularise your GUI, and don't prevent users from accessing the CLI when they want to.

2. Have the CLI composed of this and this for us CLI types.

3. Make the Add/Remove Programs panel essentially a net-aware frontend for either this or this.

4. Use this for hardware detection. Also re drivers, get rid of the suicidal policy of seeing third-party hardware vendors as the enemy, and actually support them...via tools, docs, etc. These people are your friends...they'll help you stay relevant.

5. Download this and use it as your default FS, and then get this and this, (although you already seem to know about this last one) and incorporate both of those into your stock UI. You've essentially got WinFS right there, without all the added complexity you'd no doubt throw into it if you tried to code it from scratch.

6. For the Agent angle, incorporate the last point, as well as putting help/docs in a non-binary format, making them searchable with this, converting said search results for use with this, and then use the AIML output as input for something like this. Also, instead of making the agent a tightly anthropomorphic personality, make it more generic, and more as though it's simply "the operating system" communicating with a user, rather than that dog or Clippit instead.

7. Give Outlook a major overhaul. This and this are examples of directions it IMHO should go in.

Just some random ideas, anywayz. Dreaming's fun. ;) I'll probably get modded Offtopic, but it was worth it.

It appears, with a name like Carly, you gotta be first sexy no matter what stupid shit you pull.

However, increasingly, the absence of a bandwidth limit is becoming an important marketing tool on the competitive Canadian DSL market (even though Bell runs everything from behind the scenes).

In Toronto

Sympatico

Golden

and

Echo Online

all currently advertise no bandwidth limits on residential DSL.

Another car that did not make it on the list is Fiat 126p. It was made in Poland, based on an Italian design. The car was very noisy. However it was so small that people used joke that the engine noise is not an issue since when one sits in the car your knees block your ears and thus you can't hear it.

can you set it up so that a middle click brings up a menu of your favorite commands?

Yes, you can

Can you make it so that they virtual size of your desktop is many times larger then the actual size?

Matrox cards used to come with software that let you do this. Don't know if they still do.

Can you eliminate the taskbar and use a Mac-style drop-down window list?

You can have a window list. You can probably also have it be drop-down, but I'm not going to spend much time looking for it.

Can you set up your browser to call up some of your favorite programs?

Doesn't your copy if IE obey file type prefs? Mine does.

Can you eliminate all that stuff altether and give each and every window it's entire window space in full size mode and switch between them with a alt-p or a alt-n?

Don't know about alt-p or alt-n, but it's a trivial matter for apps to run fullscreen in windows.

Can you eliminate the gui altogether and use a emac or a screen-style program and never use a mouse?

Just run a full screen command prompt window, and then run emacs in it through cygwin. Works fine.

The thing is, it's easier to do these things with linux, but for a lot of them you have to still install separate software. There are desktop replacements out there that replace the entire explorer shell for windows, so you can make it look and feel like literally anything. Software is just software. It provides access to the underlying hardware. There's nothing linux does that windows inherently can't, and the same is true the other way around.

Having said that, I'm mostly a linux user, because as you said, linux is easier to tweak to be the way you want it.

GoScreen is the answer to Windows. I didn't like MS' virtual desktop manager and others out there. This one I love because it is so small. It's not free though, but it is worth paying. Ir works from Windows 95 to the newest OS.

Bell Cancelled my service early, pulled the card from the local office (only to put it back 3 days later), cut my phone service for a day and a half, and further messed up the line for 5 days until Echo complained directly to Bell.

Switching DSL service providers should be as simple as changing your authentication (username + password). Well Bell doesn't like making things easy.

I switched to Echo online's DSL service because on the 26th of June Bell Sympatico started blocking all inbound port 25 connections.

I was wondering if anyone else has similar problems, is anyone annoyed enough to start a class action? (I have no interest in investing the time, but if you want to rant try class.action at marks.______.net)

FWIW: I thought it was funny to mention Echo Online does not have OS myopia, they ackowledge, Linux, *BSD and even Sega Dreamcast as possible client OSs.