Well, would you look at that…

All we can do is guide them. Personally, I guide them to treasure I cannot have, since I’m damn near obligated to run and deeply understand Microsoft Windows because I work for IT support.

All of my work tools are Windows centric.

The thing that confuses me is that Microsoft is no stranger to Linux. They use it in their data centers. It’s plainly obvious if you know what other offerings are doing.

Their entire front end stack for azure virtual machines is OpenStack. Some years back they integrated with OpenStack to allow it to manage hyper-v, but OpenStack can also natively manage KVM hypervisors, as it was originally designed to do, and also VMware.

Hell, I’d be surprised if there isn’t a Microsoft distro of Linux floating around (not available to the public… Not yet at least).

The people who seem to be pushing Microsoft, more than anyone, are game studios. Their garbage Anti cheat rootkits work best on Windows. So use Windows so they can low jack your PC.

I was gifted a 2080Ti about a year or so ago and I have no intention on upgrading anytime soon. The former owner of my card is a friend who had it in their primary gaming rig, back when SLI wasn’t dead, he had two.

So when he built a new main rig with a single 4090 a few years back he gifted me one and the other one he left in his old system and started using that as a spare/guest computer for having impromptu LANs. It’s still a decent system, so I don’t blame him.

In any case, that upgraded my primary computer from a 1060 3G… So it was a welcome change to have sufficient video memory again.

The cards keep getting more and more power hungry and I don’t see any benefit in upgrading… Not that I can afford it… I haven’t been in school for a long time, and lately, I barely have time to enjoy YouTube videos, nevermind a full assed game. I literally have to walk away from a game for so long between sessions that I forget the controls. So either I can beat the game in one sitting, or the controls are similar enough to the defaults I’m used to (left click to fire, right click to ADS, WASD for movement, ctrl or C for crouch, space to jump, E to interact, F for flashlight, etc etc…); that way I don’t really need to relearn anything.

This is a big reason why I haven’t finished some titles that I really wanted to, like TLoU, or Doom Eternal… Too many buttons to remember. It’s especially bad with doom, since if you don’t remember how, and when to use your specials, you’ll run out of life, armor, ammo, etc pretty fast. Remembering which special gives what and how to trigger it… Uhhh … Is it this button? Gets slaughtered by an imp … Okay, not that button. Reload let’s try this… Killed by the same imp not that either… Hmmm. Goes and looks at the key mapping ohhhhhh. Okay. Reload I got it this time… Dies anyways due to other reasons

Whelp. Quit maybe later.

It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

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.