I’m not an EE. I apologize if I gave that impression. I just have an obsession with understanding anything I use on a regular basis, whether computers, smartphones, electricity, vehicles… Anything that does stuff, and I use it, I want to know how it does the thing that it does.

I’m weird like that.

I learned a lot from “Electrician U” on YouTube, along with a few others. Maybe worth a look. The scientific/physics side of things was more from watching other YouTubers (as to why it behaves the way it does), along with a fundamental knowledge that I learned from doing amateur radio stuff. Working in IT and having to deal with the power requirements of systems and making sure that we won’t blow a breaker under load… That helped motivate me to learn.

It all came to a head when we were deploying a network and server for a business that was still in construction of the facility. The electrician was going to run a temp line for our stuff so we could set up and be ready for opening day, and he asked how many amps we needed… I did a bit of a deep dive to figure out an answer for him, and I’ve been learning more and more since then.

Oh this gets stranger.

It’s usually 120v, but I’m not going to split hairs over 10v.

So, 120v is not a voltage that is delivered from the grid… Technically speaking. Each home is given one circuit of 240v, which is usually part of one leg of a three phase, coming off of the Transformers… 120v is there because they center-tap the transformer. This halves the voltage by consequence. Inside the house the circuits are generally laid out to try to balance the load between each half of the 240v phase.

The idea is that two 120v loads, put in series, will total 240v. So power will ideally go from L1 to a 120v load, to “neutral”, then over to another 120v load, then finally back on L2.

More or Less.

120v is basically just half of what you should be loading the system with.

The center tap neutral from the transformer is to collect any load imbalance between L1 and L2 to allow for the two “sides” of the phase to be out of balance and still work.

The US “plug” ( aka receptacle ) is a NEMA 5-15R, or NEMA 5-20R (for 20A); these are designed for 120v operation using the half phase described above. Of course, you can mis-wire it and make all kinds of dangerous abominations if you so choose. There is, however, a less known NEMA 6-15R and NEMA 6-20R that is basically the same, but for 240v operation, replacing the neutral wire with L2 instead (and 15/20A respectively).

So it is entirely possible to have 240v outlets in a North American home, while still being compliant with code.

It’s actually really fascinating information when your dig into it.

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.

We wanted to do it this year on our anniversary, which was about a month ago now, but there was too much going on financially that even throwing a modest party with the budget constraints was going to create problems. We both had job disruptions in the last months of 2024, and things have just been a bit to hard financially to really bother.

We’re starting to save for next year already. Planning shall begin soon.

My partner and I are similar to you. We couldn’t care less. I proposed to her, she said yes, we’re happy with the way things are, nothing needed to change.

However. Legally speaking, when you get married, you are considered as a single legal entity in many things including court/law enforcement/taxes.

A person cannot be compelled to bear witness to their partners actions in court, in the USA, that’s the fifth amendment, in Canada, it’s section 11© of the charter of rights and freedoms. The basic concept being that you have the right to remain silent (and not incriminate yourself).

While I don’t plan on doing any crime or anything… That’s a nice perk.

Also, she hates doing her taxes, so when we’re married, I can do taxes for both of us.

There’s very few perks here and bluntly, it’s not worth the cost…

We’re going to elope and just throw a “reception” (party) afterwards.

Oh, I agree. I’m right there with you.

I was specifically addressing butthurt white males.

I, personally, couldn’t give a shit what race/gender anyone is, they’re a living human deserving of respect, the kind that isn’t demonstrated by the asshole in the subject comic.

The only reason I’m calling out white males, specifically those that feel butthurt by the comic and have no sense of humor, is because the previous poster specifically cited that group. I’m a member of the white/male group, so I wanted to speak bluntly “man to man” style to any future visitors. Oh my, there are so many issues with referring to it that way; I’m just going to leave it and hope it comes across correctly.

In any case, anyone, regardless of their race, or gender or anything else you can classify people using, has different behaviors or thinks differently (better or worse) about others based on gender/race/whatever, then they’re an asshole.

I will judge others based on the content of their character. That doesn’t make me better than anyone else, I’m only stating my intent. If the content of your character is trash, then I will judge you for the trash you are. If you’re trying to do right, despite falling/failing sometimes, then thats worthy of more consideration than the trash humans mentioned earlier.

I couldn’t possibly give any fewer fucks what color your skin is, or what you have in your pants. Be whatever you want to be, just don’t be an asshole.

As a white male, I’m not going to disagree with you on any of this.

Related to the content: personally I like opinionated, loud mouthed women. I don’t classify myself as a “high value” male or anything. I mean, who the fuck is that arrogant? I’m not poor, but I’m certainly not rich. I’m much closer to being poor than I am to being rich… But that doesn’t say much.

In any case, the content is funny. It’s an exaggeration of the kind of reaction that people tend to have to dickwads sharing their unsolicited opinions with strangers who don’t care what you think.

I love that it is shining a big fat spotlight on the shitty behaviors that self proclaimed “high value men” think is ok. It’s not ok. Stop it. Get some help.

It’s shameful to share a gender with these degenerates. I am ashamed of my gender because people like the one depicted in the comic, exist. And they’re not a trivial amount either. There’s a good number of them, and it’s fucking embarrassing.

To anyone butthurt about the contents of the comic: first, relax, it’s a joke. Second, how about you treat everyone like they’re a fucking human being? Instead of putting people into little boxes like “high value” or “male” or “female” or whatever, how about you throw all that bullshit out and just see humans. Regardless of race, gender, preferences, religion, anatomical features, disabilities… They’re all human beings deserving of some measure of respect. And don’t give me any shit about “respect is earned”… Fuck you. You need to have a basic level of respect before you can prove yourself as someone deserving of respect; otherwise any action you take will be seen as the feeble flailings of someone nobody cares about to earn some kind of clout.

Everyone should be given a base level of respect until they prove that the respect granted to them for being a human in our society, isn’t deserved.

For everyone else who may still be reading and didn’t get butthurt by a comic: stay frosty.

A person who hasn’t debugged any code thinks programmers are done for because of “AI”.

Oh no. Anyways.

Dunno why it’s even rated M. Seems high for what it is

… But why?

I would pivot to W10 LTSC to avoid Windows 11… So why would I move to the LTSC version of the OS I’m trying to avoid?

Makes zero sense.

While I get why they want to do all online accounts, no. Just no.

Ironically, for business users, online accounts are basically the way the industry is moving. Some integration with Azure active directory (now known as “Entra ID” - a useless rebranding of the exact same product), you can connect systems using someone’s email, and it can tightly integrate with your work email account on Microsoft 365, and everything just kind of fits together.

This prevents admins from having to go and do prep/setup on each system and/or maintain a library of system images with all the standard settings for the organization, since connecting with AAD/Entra can also enroll the device into Intune and those policies are just as powerful, if not more powerful than what you can do with images and prep; just now is entirely automatic.

For home users, it’s less about the convenience of system management and more data harvesting of their clients. The irony is that a lot of the business versions still have an option to bypass the online account (usually by selecting an option that you will be joining a classic domain).

So business has the option and largely, business is moving away from it, and home users don’t, but that’s something that a large number of home users want.

The only thought I have on it is that: bitlocker is enabled by default on many newer versions of Windows, by signing in with your M$ account to the PC, those bitlocker keys are backed up. If you don’t use an online account, it’s up to you to back then up, and users either don’t do that, or do it in such a way that it’s ineffective, like saving the recovery key to the very drive that needs that key to unlock it in the event of a problem.

I’ve seen more than one person fall victim to their own lack of knowledge and understanding when bitlocker is enabled, and Windows update screws their boot sequence to the point where they need to do a recovery, which requires the recovery key, which they do not have. It basically makes all of their data inaccessible, and gigabytes of data, just from the people I’ve known affected by this, has already been lost as a result.

I hear what you’re saying, but, there have been some pretty significant improvements to Windows, generation after generation.

Windows 10 finally seemed like they were on the right (and hopefully final) track with the direction of the operating system. Probably the last big improvement was to bring basically everyone to 64 bit.

XP moved us from the 9x kernel to the NT kernel that’s used in Windows today. Vista introduced security features and driver updates that help to keep systems free from many common root kits. 7 brought in a very standard UI, that would be the basis for things going forward, 8/8.1 existed… Then 10 basically uplifted everyone to 64 bit as a default.

Of course this is far from a complete list.

What did W11 add that we didn’t have before? A TPM requirement? Ads? AI slop/shovelware/spyware?

I won’t be doing pretty much anything about it. I have 10 pro, I don’t really give a shit about what Microsoft thinks I should do. My computer is behind a firewall, and bluntly, it’ll be a while before the security issues become such a problem that I need to go and upgrade.

However. I already did the legwork. I went out and upgraded the hardware TPM 1.2 in my system to TPM 2.0, and I picked up some (relatively cheap) Windows 11 pro product keys. I can upgrade if I want.

I also have access to W10 LTSC, so I can always pivot to that if I need to.

I get the security and other concerns with Windows 10. I do, but the windows 11 changes, to me seem like they’re changes for the sake of things being changed. Windows 10’s user experience was already quite good, apart from the fact that every feature release seemed to have the settings moved to a different location (see above about making changes for the sake of making changes). IMO, as a professional sysadmin and IT support, the interface and UX changes have made Windows, as a product, worse; it is by far the worst part of the upgrade process and I don’t know why they thought any of it was a good idea. I also hate what M$ has done with printers, but I won’t get started on that right now.

For all the nitpicking I could do, Windows was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what it needed to be, between Windows 7 and 10. There hasn’t been any meaningful progress in the OS that’s mattered since x86-64 support was added. Windows 10 32 bit was extremely rare, I don’t think I ever saw it (where W7 was a mixed bag of 32/64 bit). Having almost everyone standardized on 64 bit, and Windows 10, gave a predictability that is needed in most businesses. The professional products should not follow the same trends as the home products. If they want to put AI shovelware and ads into the home products, fine. Revamp the vast majority of the control panel into the settings menu, sure. But leave the business products as-is. By far the most problems that people have with Windows 11 that I hear about, relate to how everything changes/looks different, and/or having problems navigating the “new look” or whatever the fuck.

Microsoft: you had a good thing with Windows 10, and you pissed it all away when you put out the crap that is Windows 11.

Stop moving shit around, making controls less useful, and stop making it look like the UX was designed by a 10 year old. Fuck off.

With the switch 2 coverage, this is something that bugs me quite a bit… Not the meme, Nintendo games, by comparison, are worth more than the slop that Ubisoft craps out. No matter how good a Ubisoft game could be, Nintendo has them beat in terms of quality.

Back to my point. The cost of games is insane. The price point for most video game systems is around $500 USD. Whether PS5, Xbox, switch, whatever, they’re all either at or near, $500.

You buy 6 games, and you’ve spent more in games than you did on your console. The fuck is this? We might as well go back to the days when you would buy a whole ass console that could only play a single (or small selection) of games like the Coleco Telstar.

I think they figured out that you make money from selling the add-ons, so they dipped the price of the console and jacked up the cost of all of the games so they could increase profits and shareholder value.

Oh wait.

More or Less. I would think of it more as a third person direct versus indirect. Third person direct being: referring to a specific set of people, eg, they’re in the room with you, where calling them females would be rude… Third person indirect, where you’re mentioning the concept of that group of people while not citing a specific or present subset of that group, would be rude.

You’ve made some good examples. Overall I think you understand the concept I was trying to get across.

Female is still an acceptable term in some context: eg, when referring to the social group on a societal level, female can be fine, also for identifying someone’s genetic/biological sex as “female” for medical/official contexts, that’s still okay in most cases.

Where it’s not okay is to use it on an individual level or to refer to a small group of ladies. The term is seem as cold, clinical, and in some cases, dehumanizing. It comes off as boiling down a person to their function in reproduction and nothing more. “You are the female and you carry children.” Kind of thing. Like women are some kind of bakery for your crotch goblins, and not people worthy of respect.

But something like “the female population of the country” is fairly okay, since you’re referring to the entirely of the people who identify as female, not an individual or small group of individuals.

At least, that’s my take. I’m just some guy. If any women want to correct me, I defer to your judgement and opinion, and happily retract any contradictory statements I may have made. I am always happy to be corrected.

IT guy checking in.

The only time I’ve even seen drive temp sensor alarms is on server raid arrays and other similar hard drives/SSDs… Never in my life have I seen one available on a consumer device, nor have I seen any alarm for and drive temp, go off. It just doesn’t happen.

IMO, this is one of those language barriers where people call their computer chassis (and everything in it) the “hard drive”.

Applying that assumption, their updated statement is: His computer over heated.

Idk what kind of shit system he’s running on that 60k rows would cause overheating, but ok.