Yes, do it. This is Slashdot, so I can meaningfully recommend what I did: buy a used Android phone like a Pixel 6a or something like that if you don't have one lying around. Then, load it up with iodeOS...there's an app stack that'll replace almost everything you requested.

CoMaps and Sygic GPS both provide these, the latter being $18/year and working completely offline.

Spotify still works; I also use either AntennaPod for podcasts or PowerAmp ($7 once) to play the music I loaded onto it.

...yeah, disconnecting the car makes this one impossible, no getting around it.

OwnTracks, possibly combined with Reitti on the server side if you're feeling a bit extra.

well, Sygic and Comaps both show distance to destination, and the last five cars I've owned have showed me miles-to-empty on the ICE side; I'd imagine the EV side will do the same, and from there it's just a subtraction problem. Sygic does have an EV mode; I don't know how that behaves, but it probably narrows the gap a bit.

Agreed...and that's why the systems are desirable to buyers...but since it's clear that these systems can and will be actively used to make money for the OEM, there's a trade to be made. The aforementioned setup isn't a drop-in replacement, but it checks off many of the things on your list.

That said my car has never shown ads, fuck BMW and I highly recommend no one ever buy their cars.

Yet. BMW has been the most aggressive at post-purchase monetization, but the others will follow.

Well, the thing is that having a frictionless ordering process that allows more sales-per-hour is good if the goal is to sell coffee, but the point of a Starbucks, originally, was to be a 'third place' that wasn't the home or the office, so paying $4 for a cup of coffee or $8 for a thousand-calorie caffeinated milkshake was entirely justifiable when the value proposition was "paying for a place to sit down with a cup of coffee for an hour". Shifting to a coffee pickup location means that the value proposition shifts, and paying half as much for a cup of coffee twice the size at 7-Eleven while I'm getting gas tends to win out on both cost and convenience - dissuading customers from sitting down and hanging out gives fewer reasons for people to *go to Starbucks*.

Likely, but for different reasons. I left T-Mobile about two years ago, after being a customer for over 20 years. They weren't less expensive than Verizon or AT&T anymore, and they pissed me off for other reasons...but having a retail channel means being able to make a few dollars off accessories with new phone sales, it means having a first-point-of-contact with a rep who, at least *used to* help address customer issues from tech support to billing discrepancies, and so forth. I could understand perhaps reducing the number of stores, but if they're going to give the same service level as an MVNO (buy a phone on Amazon, everything is an online transaction), they're going to have to compete on price way better than they currently are.

It's possible that T-Mobile is looking to be a more muted player in the field and quietly make more money by just being the network of the MVNO's, but I don't think they'll be able to compete with Verizon and their retail presence without having a retail presence, any more than they'll be able to compete with the MVNO's on price.

This. This right here is the answer.

Google search originally was creepy-accurate because it was built on the work that was done elsewhere. While other search engines looked at frequency of search terms and other easy-to-game metrics, Google did it based on links, meaning more linked-to pages got preferred rankings. That worked for a very long time, until that too got automated and SEO slop took over search indices. Google itself began to have more and more ads creep into search results, and reward clearly-seo-slop over the sort of sites people actually wanted to find. Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites...then there were the cookie banners, then there were the modal overlays...and if you had a labor-of-love website that legitimately had useful, human-created or curated content that was useful and functional...you were buried on page six of the search results because you were competing against the SEO slop and backlink farms.

and then ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity came around and were able to sift through all the crap to give everyone the paragraph they were actually looking for in the first place.

You dug your own grave, Axios...when your website takes a minute to load its moving video ads, people tolerate it in the absence of an alternative. Gemini is terrible for 101 other reasons...but if it puts the slop sites out of business, I'll accept the tradeoff.

So...Microsoft certainly didn't get the massive market share AOL had in the 90's, and they weren't too successful at getting the "walled garden" they were probably hoping for around that time...but they did just fine. Azure isn't *quite* AWS, but they're doing better than Google in IaaS revenue, and they spent most of the 00's and 2010's running the business world with desktop Windows and Windows Server - alongside Linux and not at super massive scale, granted, but they did just fine.

Where I think Apple's opportunity comes in is to replay the iPod playbook. There were a bunch of MP3 players before the iPod, and most of them had trouble once Napster fell. Apple ran the 2000's on the iPod not just because of the hardware, but because of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, making it possible to use both existing MP3 libraries and to create new ones, easily, legally, and virus-free.

I think that playbook can work here as well. I've got two computers with GPUs, one an RTX3060 and one an AMD 9060XT. Not flagships by any means, but enough to run local models well-enough. My Macbook issued to me by work has an M5 CPU, and it generates tokens within 20% as quickly as those cards, on battery. If Apple can conjure up some sort of AI App Store that serves up AI models and purpose-built apps for them, that run on Apple hardware with no subscription tied to them, and make the process smooth, seamless, and generally-useful, Apple can probably stand on OpenAI's shoulders and make a local AI laptop that's worth owning...and if they can do that, they can profit at the endpoint level without having to invest billions at the datacenter level like OpenAI and Anthropic are doing.

The Vision Pro, I think, would work well if they sold it as a business tool - diagram overlays, status windows, that sort of thing...but fashion accessories that obscure the face are VERY difficult to make work; people wear contact lenses because they prefer those to face-obscuring glasses that correct their vision. As a video game console or a work utility that's put on for a function and then turned off, there's a niche, but it's not going to be the sort of thing people just walk around wearing.

So, in MY perfect world, we'd be going back to cartridges, where the 'cartridge' is basically a 256GB NVMe drive, so the game cartridge could theoretically be patched on-media, load times would be far lower, and there wouldn't be nearly as much dependency on massive storage on the console itself.

The reason why it will never happen this way, is because NVMe drives, even at Sony-levels of purchase, would be a significant portion of the game itself. If Sony got 256GB drives at $30 a pop wholesale (about half of what a quick look showed a drive for at retail), and they simply forwarded the cost onto the consumer, ignoring markup *and* all the retooling required to write games to NVMe media at scale, pretty much every game would be $100 or more, just because of the media...and if Sony can get away with selling games for $100 a pop, then you KNOW that Microsoft is going to trip over themselves to do the same.

Perhaps GameStop could find a new role, in that they could sell blank Sony-blessed cartridges, and then sell a case with a license key, that allows Gamestop to write the game, at its current patch level (it'd take 5-10 minutes to write in-store), to the blank cartridge, maybe include a box with a manual and some cover art if they're feeling fancy, and the cost of the media is externalized onto the customer without the game itself costing more...but it'd have to be a system like that for such media to work.

The reason why optical media is still the one everyone points to is that it's the compromise that works - users have immutable copies of the game, and the discs cost about a dime each - a trivial amount for Sony to absorb. Even if we bring it up to $5 for the case, the amortized cost of the duplication equipment, and the transportation fee...it's still cheaper than Sony will ever get flash media on a per-unit basis.

Ultimately, the reason people want discs is not because people LIKE optical media specifically, but because a whole lot of us have had download-only or stream-only media become unusable due to some licensing drama that our subscription fees were supposed to pay for. Optical media is the compromise, not the technologically elegant solution.

I'll be the first to register www.IManAmRegalAGermanAmI.www.
Followed by www.OozyRatInASanitaryZoo.www.

*engineers complete training of AI*
Management: "You've been promoted to customer!"
AI: *follows training, flags QA issues, slows production to ensure resolution*
Management: "The QA flags are slowing production too much!"
AI: "You're right! We need to increase production!"
Customers: "...this product failed miserably!" *files lawsuit*
Management: "The AI didn't do a good enough job flagging QA problems! Bring the engineers back to get it back to the point of avoiding the lawsuits!"
*engineers complete training of AI*

1. You sure these are the same people? There are LOTS of people in the world, some people complain about spyware AND either don't carry a phone, or carry a dumbphone or run Graphene or something similar.

2. Online shopping and credit card usage can be limited; one can buy their laundry detergent on Amazon with an Amex and still pay for their kink toys in person with cash. One need not opt out of the surveillance tradeoff EVERYWHERE to still desire a means of making private purchases in certain cases.

3. Most of the surveillance done in a car is done after the car has been paid for by the user. Money has changed hands, but the OEM still seems entitled to sell data the driver generates. The selling of the data does not benefit the owner of the vehicle at all, only the person gathering and selling it. This is different than a payment processor or online merchant that provides a service that has some benefit to the user - access to goods not easily available through traditional retail or where retail purchase would involve prohibitive distance or transport requirements being some examples. In the case of credit card companies, yes, they most definitely make money off purchase data...but they also use it to combat fraud and mitigate liability, which cash simply doesn't make possible. And, in the case of smartphones, even stock ones, data harvesting is more selective, and the phone can be left home, while the car cannot. Yes, data is still harvested and used in ways that don't benefit the customer, granted...but it *does* provide a counterbalance that a remotely usable vehicle kill switch does not.

"But muh smartfownnn" is such a lazy and overly reductive argument against a very complex situation that has plenty of room for nuance and specifics.

Is it, though? Serious question, I looked into this some time ago...and they make NO claims of this. They claim they don't have an infotainment system, fine...but that doesn't mean it lacks a GPS tracker, a "tattletale" connection that sends CANBUS/ODBII data back to a mothership somewhere, and/or a remotely accessible kill switch.

If you've got documentation that says that the Slate lacks these things SPECIFICALLY, I'd love to read about it...but when I looked, they made no claims of this and made no spectacle of it in their privacy policy...so 100% sincerely, if you've got a citation for this, I'd LOVE to read it.

...been moving everyone I can off Acrobat Pro; PowerPDF is $180 once, and it's way better for 98% of users.
https://www.tungstenautomation...

If they're not dependent on Send & Track (or they can't move to Docusign), it fits most office environments I've used it in.

its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with Veeam

So, being as Veeam supports Hyper-V, Proxmox, Nutanix, Red Hat, and XCP-NG is supposedly coming within the next month or two...what could they have POSSIBLY moved to, and why the hell did they walk past all of those other products to do it?!

Most people don't need free speech because they have nothing to say.
Most people don't need guns because they have nothing to shoot.
Most people don't need to worry about housing soldiers because military personnel have taxpayer funded housing.
Most people don't need to worry about their stuff being unlawfully searched because they have nothing to hide.
Most people don't need to worry about incriminating themselves because they don't commit crimes.
Most people don't need their trials to be public because they don't get put on trial.
Most people don't need the guaranteed ability to sue someone because most people don't file lawsuits.
Most people don't need to worry about excessive bail being imposed because most people don't get arrested.
Most people don't need to worry about any of those rights being used against other rights.
Most people don't care whether a right is granted by the state or federal government.

Fortunately for those who DO find themselves in a place where the government would cause issues in these matters, a bunch of old guys a few hundred years ago had the presence of mind to realize that the point of rights isn't because "most people" need to exercise them regularly, it's to create limits so that "most people" *don't" need to exercise them regularly.

For all the positive, pro-consumer elements of Steam, unless Steam builds some sort of generic network abstraction layer into the Steam client, I don't think that swapping out "a dependence on Gamespy" for "a dependence on Steam" is really the answer here...

Back in 2004, *everyone* had to port forward in order to host a game server. That's the alternative to "let EA host it until they don't feel like it anymore". The point is to give the control back to gamers, but responsibility comes with that - specifically, "how to do a port forward". More to your point, it probably would have been smart to see if you and the friend capable of hosting the game could get a session going with just the two of you, then invite everyone else once you had the procedures in place. Again, the logistics aren't Epic's problem.

There will always be a group who favors simplicity over capability, but it's not like, in the case of UT2004, Epic added some sort of technological barriers to actively prevent you from playing the game, because it DOES still work perfectly once the port forward is in place. Similarly, the expectation isn't that a game is going to still have millions of players after it's EOL, it's to ensure that the few-thousand who *do* still want to play it aren't limited explicitly by the absence of server-side code. "My friends and I can't port forward" isn't that limitation - "the server-side code was never publicly released and the enthusiasts who attempted to reverse engineer it got DMCA slapped" *is*,

Also, there are still some public UT2004 servers you could mostly-one-click (copy/pasting an IP address would be close-enough to what you're describing, I'd hope):
https://pwc-gaming.com/game-se...

And, if you were a bit more interested, a cheap VPS can run LinuxGSM, a Linux build explicitly designed to be a game server for dozens of games like UT2004 that have the capability of connecting to custom dedicated servers:
https://docs.linuxgsm.com/game... ...the thing is, UT2004 is kinda the textbook example of what these games *should* look like - entirely playable in single-player mode *today*, and shipping with both map creation software and dedicated server software, including a Linux build...and it was so well built, that one need not even emulate Windows XP to do it; the game runs just fine on Windows 11 and on GPUs that didn't exist at the time. The Crew was a powder keg precisely because it was the opposite of UT2004 - dependent on central servers for no technical reason.

[citation needed]

Fast, effective, included the nView Desktop Manager to include transparency and window-shade mode to any window, and it was under 100MB installed.

Why nvidia drivers are now larger than Windows XP itself is a mystery to me, and they've always been a concession that has gotten bigger, slower, and more confusing than what they replaced.