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.

Except it doesn't offer the international data and texting, something I use.

Ten million nag screens. An app doesn't care if you close a popup over and over.

Exactly. If the alternatives weren't worse in terms of costs and features I used, I'd have dumped them years ago. I had been on an ultra cheap grandfathered plan so no other carrier comes close, even with their price increase.

Reminds of the Dilbert cartoon where the PHB announces they will reward staff for each bug they find and Wally announces "I'm off to write a mini-van..."

Good points. The challenge is, given Linux' fragmented nature, presenting

Companies selling boxes don't want to have to mess with OS UI design, they want one that user' can use out of the box and runs the programs their customers want on their boxen. Linux' strength is a san open source software people are free to adapt it to their needs, but that is also a weakness when it comes to marketing because it fragments the market and their isn't a consistent desktop GUI or interface standards. A lot of the stuff just isn't polished, even though it works fine, which is a challenge when it comes to mass marketting. People want shiney.

Ecxept lawyers have been pretty good at ensuring only lawyers can practice law and give legal advice; and while they will no doubt adopt AI to automate tasks low level staff do now, I doubt AI will be a big threat to them like it will for other occupations; rather it will be a tool to be more efficient whithout billing less.

Most human call centers I have had to contact aren't much better, just some person making a tiny wage reading from a script. Not there fault, it's just companies want the lowest price so that's what they get.

Yea, or maybe some sort of induction motor to create a counter rotation?

An axially mounted camera would not ned to spin. Not invisible, but a much smaller thing to spot.

If it can be made large enough to carry explosive charges it would be useful on the battlefield. You might hear it but have a hard time spottig it until it goes boom.

I understand your sentiment, but that'd a lot like claiming UNIX has X percent because the Mac is a certified UNIX system. ChromeOS is pretty far from Linux in terms of how it is presented to the user and most of the users have no idea it's Linux:Inside. They're not primed to keep using ChromeOS or graduate to Linux, they are likely looking for Windows or a MAC as their first real computer.

However, they are very cryptic with brevity seemingly valued over understandability. Once you learn them they are useful but most users don't want to use and memorize a command line, that is to much like the boomers' C:\> prompt.

I agree. They are really designed for a very specific use case and not really a mainstream computing product.

While it may be the year Linux grows more than before, I think it still faces several challenges:

• Just because an LLM can suggest a solution doesn't mean a non-technical user can implement it, or that the LLM doesn't break something in the process.
• Until a non-neckbeard/ultranerd can walk into a store and buy a Linux machine they are never likely to even know it exists
• Being better in the eyes of techies doesn't trump 'it's what everyone uses" for the average user
• Usable enough translate to it's frustrating and doesn't have the software I want to use for an average user