Some IT guy, IDK.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I disagree.

    1. You already have a government space agency. Maybe give them more funding so they don’t have to rely on space-x to get their stuff into orbit?

    2. There’s a national telecom network already in place. It at least has the potential to be faster and more reliable, if it isn’t already… At least compared to low earth orbit satellite coverage.

    There’s no good reason to continue providing Elon or his companies with any government handouts. Pull that funding and give it to… I dunno, students who have more debt than homeowners with a mortgage… NASA… Literally anything that helps people?


  • Days in lieu, from working OT on salary… IMO, is required.

    I don’t work for free; if you’re paying me to be present for specific hours, regardless if it’s salary or not, then I expect to work during those hours and not any other time.

    If, as a salary employee, I’m paid for results and as long as I meet my deadlines (and deadlines are reasonable) I can work whenever, then yeah, I’ll probably put in unpaid OT sometimes. I’ll tell you something though… With my level of experience, it would be unusual for anything to take so long that it requires that I work more than what is typical.









  • Let’s stop mincing words here.

    You want me because I have a particular set of skills that you think will be helpful to you in your pursuit of profit.

    I want your job because I can leverage the skills I have for money and benefits that will provide food, and shelter.

    Your main concerns are profits.

    My main concerns are survival.

    Employment is where these things meet in the middle. Let’s not pretend that we’re here because we’re friends. We are not family. Fuck you, pay me.





  • For those curious, if you can get a European Windows product key, you can install the “N” version of Windows. Be warned, it only works with certain product keys

    The standard Windows installer should give the option of “Windows 10” or “Windows 10 N” (or similar). The N version is basically bloatware free out of the box…

    The regular version has a bunch of promos pre-installed, like candy crush, and other things that most people couldn’t give a shit about…

    Recently I’ve been playing a “fun” game with my work laptop where I’ll remove copilot, and a few days later it will appear again. Weeee. In that case, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a policy in place to enable copilot on my works systems… I’m sure someone who works here, probably higher up the food chain than me, wants it enabled, and the ham fisted policy maker can’t create a policy just for those who want it, so everyone gets it because the bosses son Shane decided that he wants to see how much of his work can get done by AI so he can do even less while on the clock.






  • I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

    They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

    When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

    I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

    As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

    Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

    Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.


  • I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

    I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

    At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

    The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

    You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

    They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

    This is not a good look at all.

    I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

    I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

    The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.