... except that Plex is also specifically terrible for some kinds of music. Even when I tell it to use my tags over those from online sources, Plex doesn't make use of the Composer, Soloist, Ensemble or Conductor tags at all. With Amazon, Google or Apple, at least I know that whatever garbage metadata it has is consistent with titles in their storefront, but with Plex, maybe their scraper did the right thing (i.e. use my tags, which are correct) and maybe it didn't and I can't even tell.
It transcodes well for non-LAN playback, too. I tested it against a 32-thread Xeon and that one machine was able to hold up against a 11 (literally as many devices as I could easily borrow) 1.5Mbit streams on phones and mobile devices over LTE connections.
And the consistent interface across (most) platforms is a nice plus as well.
I generally like Kodi better for media presentation, but telling my brother in Prague to VPN in to my LAN so he can connect to my file server for his video needs is a complete non-starter.
Plex doesn't handle classical music properly. It doesn't even come close. Of course, nothing else does either, but holy fuck how hard is it to give us the option to key off the Composer, Soloist, Ensemble and/or Conductor tags instead of useless album and track titles?
17 years ago, I had a one year contract with unlimited overtime, all meals and accommodations provided. They wanted me on site all the time. I worked 18 hours a day with no time off for that whole time... and immediately had a breakdown as soon as that contract ended and I got out of the weird routine of it. I needed months to get back to anything like sanity.
The next job I got, and the job I still have, is a four day work week, 50% telecommuting gig. I have responsibilities and I'm on call 24x7 but as long as I keep everything working, I have a pretty sweet work/life balance. I can't bring myself to give that up.
I've been on both extremes and I consider myself extremely fortunate to be where I am right now.
I agree. Pirates have the superior product. I can choose my interface and delivery method. Ads generally aren't present and I don't have to worry about the content license expiring or becoming region locked or somesuch. I can automate delivery of content. I don't have to be concerned with Netflix bogging down in its prime time because my copy is local. I know not everyone has dozens of terabytes of storage sitting around, but it's still the best choice IMO.
I have not given even one single fuck about any feature added to Plex in the last five years. I want it to handle music metadata properly for non-pop music. That's it. It's not hard. Let me choose to use the Composer, ensemble and soloist tags so I can sort my music properly. They're already on my files. Plex just doesn't do anything with them.
The Thinkpad 25 (25th Anniversary) uses the old style keyboard. I'm tempted to get one but some of its other specs are a bit anemic, particularly the battery.
I will agree that Apple input devices, particularly on notebooks, are deeply shitty. Not enough key travel, comically overlarge trackpads and now no function keys. Any one of those things is a deal breaker in my opinion.
I just made that call myself and went with the V20. I don't like the larger screen but the V20 is definitely supported by LineageOS. The G-series is less friendly for boot loader unlocks and the like for some reason.
I don't disagree, but at the same time the pirated files probably aren't full bit rate 4k HDR originals, which is something I don't mind for a series like Sense8 or Luke Cage. A 1080p/6 channel copy of House of Cards is easy to come by on a torrent site but I *do* pay for Netflix (and I have since 1998) and I *do* have an AV setup that supports the whole 8 speaker/60fps 4k/HDR, and since I'm in the rarefied group that can, I'd prefer to.
The Shield's Plex Server chokes on transcoding two 1080p streams for non-local clients. I've tested 10x3Mbps streams against the Xeon E5 rig I normally use for Plex and it's held up. I don't think a workload of 3 streams is too much to ask and I'm not going to re-encode all my videos to inferior formats just to keep my media server from using cycles that it should have available.
Also, supporting 4K is not the same thing as having the authorization to deliver it. Shit tons of PCs have a fully 4k-compliant delivery chain but unless you're running Edge on Windows 10, Netflix is only going to be 720p no matter what you do. Likewise, some Android client devices have special authorization to deliver 4k while others don't.
IMO, the Shield TV is a decent product that's priced a bit too high. You can stream some games to it and it can kinda-sorta act as a Plex Server with limited transcoding support, but even as someone who has a 4k HDR TV, I recognize that the use case for those things above and beyond the feature set of a FireTV or Roku box are pretty limited.
I really wish this were modded up. I've been active in various parts of literary SF fandom for a some time and while I can't say I have had any direct interaction with him, I've heard more Jerry Pournelle horror stories than any two other writers, even when one of them is Harlan Ellison.
Migrating to Palemoon takes about 90 seconds. There's a tool to copy over your profile and you'll probably wind up switching over to Adblock Latitude. Sometimes you'll have to hunt up an old version of an Addon but it's really not a big deal.
I might be mistaken since I don't frequently use any WebKit browsers, but last time I checked, NoScript for Chromedidn't have the full set of capabilities found in the Mozilla-based version. uMatrix may be similar and is often described as being just as capable but I've likewise not had the patience to deal with its idiosyncrasies compared to the NoScript I've been using for years.
With regard specifically to "downloading" addons, I've tried quite a few and I've found I can do the most work with the least effort with DownThemAll. There's a very good reason it's a popular tool.
I'm a Palemoon guy already. I can't bring myself to move everything I do over to Google, but moreover, Non-WebKit browsers work much better for my browsing habits (even, ew, Edge) in my experience. To the extent that the choice exists to not use Chrome or something Chrome-like, I'm going to do that.
On the other hand, if you're on desktop Windows, which is probably pretty common even among Slashdot users, Palemoon is probably the best of the available Mozilla forks for all of the reasons the grandparent post said. I use wget more often than I load a desktop browser on my Linux systems and I bet I'm not alone in that, either. It's not that it doesn't matter, but given the size of the team working on Palemoon, I think they're justified in concentrating on the most common desktop platforms.
The correct answer for me has been Palemoon, which continues to do all the stuff I like about Firefox, with a UI I like and all the add-ons I need. I realize that it's a lost cause in the long term since it doesn't have the developer resources to get a highly tuned JavaScript interpreter or whatever weirdo DRM video formats we might have on the horizon, but for now I think it's the best of my available options.
Opera lost me for being the browser that decided it didn't need to use all the same keyboard shortcuts as any Mosaic-derived (Netscape, Spyglass, IE..) software and for being the only browser for a long, long time that thought it did something worthy of making it non-free commercial software. In my experience, Opera-Classic was also by far the crashiest browser I used over its life. It had fantastic crash recovery, but holy god did it need it.
Opera was also very late in getting addons and customization. It's nice that it kinda-sorta had some power user features, but nothing it ever did was as compelling the Mozilla feature set at any point in its history, up to and including today.
One of the deeply disappointing things about Ryzen is that you're limited to a single NVMe slot and only 24 total lanes of PCIe. For as much as Intel Enthusiast chipsets might suck or that Server-grade hardware costs, my main Intel desktop DOES have three M.2 slots that can all have NVMe SSDs connected, Missing that option is a big strike against the AMD hardware right now, even if the CPUs are actually pretty respectable.
Someone has already mentioned the tragedy of this ruining it for other people and in a way I agree, but since he did it using the remainder of the unlimited storage period, I'm not going to feel bad about it either. This dude is a fucking hero even just for making the world's most obvious joke about Amazon's Cloud storage into a reality.
But it's a damned shame that the unlimited storage plans are going away because I really did have about 6TB of actual personal data (mostly photos, which are still unlimited for Prime subscribers anyway) on my account and the amazing thing about Amazon as opposed to every other big cloud service is that they never, ever seemed to run out of upstream bandwidth. I took a 4TB drive to my server colo and sent data to Cloud Drive. Amazon took it at the physical speed of the hard disk. Compared to Google or Carbonite or Backblaze, where data transfer throttles seem to be the name of the game, the idea that Amazon will take THAT MUCH data in so short a period of time is more impressive to me than just having the disk space to store it.
Like the mobile keyboard that didn't display lowercase letters and instead used a color shift to indicate letter case for some reason, up until iOS 9 or something?
Or a mobile OS that won't natively play a FLAC file and doesn't natively support general purpose file browsing until, hm, whenever the next version gets released?
Yeah. Those guys sure do have a handle on getting stuff right.
The normal actions are dropping DNS entries and/or eliminating direct links from search results. Neither of those things is any more than a speed bump for someone who wants to use the site or its services.
It's fairly trivial to export your messages. You can copy them someplace local via any IMAP client. Contacts from Yahoo aren't bad either, since it'll make a.CSV for you. Putting the messages back on another service isn't horrible once you have those things under your own control.
FireOS does not include access to the Play Store, but adding it is really just a matter of installing three APKs and signing in to your Google account if you feel like you really need it. The Amazon App store does have some pretty big holes in it; Firefox isn't available in it, for example. Amazon devices have nice, bright screens and good battery life in their favor. They also have a fairly straightforward launcher. I'd also put forth that Amazon FreeTime is a pretty good sandbox kid mode, but Amazon did finally make it available outside its own devices as of a few weeks ago. No, these things aren't $400 super-premium tablets. But for the money, it's hard to complain about what Amazon is selling. These guys are worlds nicer than $50 No-name Chinese knock off devices.
Down side is that they're hard to root. The default launcher doesn't support widgets (not that I miss them) and has a somewhat limited subset of configurable options compared to Android + the Play Framework. But I've bought these for my nieces and since they do Youtube and Minecraft for cheap, all is well.
A few off the top of my head: laptop touchpads lacking full functionality, keyboards with Fn key functions not working, poor power management support. Some laptops still ship with WLAN hardware that doesn't work out of the box.
None of this stuff represents a complete dealbreaker, but it's a combination of factors that wears down the likelihood that I could adopt Linux on a personal PC. As a VM? Something I remotely manage? No problem. But when power management is so bad I only get half the battery life I get on Windows AND the screen brightness keys don't work AND I have to go make my own gesture to get the touchpad to middle click or something, it's pretty hard to say it's worth it.
I repurposed six 6C/12T LGA1366 Xeon workstations into mid-range gaming rigs last year. I paired them with GTX1060s and 240GB SSDs. For 1080p gaming, there's really no subjective difference between those machines and a latter-day Kaby Lake i5 PC with the same GPU, at least among the games I tried on them. Even lacking amenities like USB 3 and updated PCI-e slots, those ~6 year old machines could keep up just fine with Mechwarrior Online and X-Com 2. The contemporary i5 is assuredly faster, but I got those complete Xeon systems for about what I paid for the i5 CPU, so I'm not going to complain.
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... except that Plex is also specifically terrible for some kinds of music. Even when I tell it to use my tags over those from online sources, Plex doesn't make use of the Composer, Soloist, Ensemble or Conductor tags at all. With Amazon, Google or Apple, at least I know that whatever garbage metadata it has is consistent with titles in their storefront, but with Plex, maybe their scraper did the right thing (i.e. use my tags, which are correct) and maybe it didn't and I can't even tell.
It transcodes well for non-LAN playback, too. I tested it against a 32-thread Xeon and that one machine was able to hold up against a 11 (literally as many devices as I could easily borrow) 1.5Mbit streams on phones and mobile devices over LTE connections.
And the consistent interface across (most) platforms is a nice plus as well.
I generally like Kodi better for media presentation, but telling my brother in Prague to VPN in to my LAN so he can connect to my file server for his video needs is a complete non-starter.
Plex doesn't handle classical music properly. It doesn't even come close. Of course, nothing else does either, but holy fuck how hard is it to give us the option to key off the Composer, Soloist, Ensemble and/or Conductor tags instead of useless album and track titles?
Do something useful and fix THAT.
17 years ago, I had a one year contract with unlimited overtime, all meals and accommodations provided. They wanted me on site all the time. I worked 18 hours a day with no time off for that whole time... and immediately had a breakdown as soon as that contract ended and I got out of the weird routine of it. I needed months to get back to anything like sanity.
The next job I got, and the job I still have, is a four day work week, 50% telecommuting gig. I have responsibilities and I'm on call 24x7 but as long as I keep everything working, I have a pretty sweet work/life balance. I can't bring myself to give that up.
I've been on both extremes and I consider myself extremely fortunate to be where I am right now.
I agree. Pirates have the superior product. I can choose my interface and delivery method. Ads generally aren't present and I don't have to worry about the content license expiring or becoming region locked or somesuch. I can automate delivery of content. I don't have to be concerned with Netflix bogging down in its prime time because my copy is local. I know not everyone has dozens of terabytes of storage sitting around, but it's still the best choice IMO.
I have not given even one single fuck about any feature added to Plex in the last five years. I want it to handle music metadata properly for non-pop music. That's it. It's not hard. Let me choose to use the Composer, ensemble and soloist tags so I can sort my music properly. They're already on my files. Plex just doesn't do anything with them.
The Thinkpad 25 (25th Anniversary) uses the old style keyboard. I'm tempted to get one but some of its other specs are a bit anemic, particularly the battery.
I will agree that Apple input devices, particularly on notebooks, are deeply shitty. Not enough key travel, comically overlarge trackpads and now no function keys. Any one of those things is a deal breaker in my opinion.
I just made that call myself and went with the V20. I don't like the larger screen but the V20 is definitely supported by LineageOS. The G-series is less friendly for boot loader unlocks and the like for some reason.
I don't disagree, but at the same time the pirated files probably aren't full bit rate 4k HDR originals, which is something I don't mind for a series like Sense8 or Luke Cage.
A 1080p/6 channel copy of House of Cards is easy to come by on a torrent site but I *do* pay for Netflix (and I have since 1998) and I *do* have an AV setup that supports the whole 8 speaker/60fps 4k/HDR, and since I'm in the rarefied group that can, I'd prefer to.
The Shield's Plex Server chokes on transcoding two 1080p streams for non-local clients. I've tested 10x3Mbps streams against the Xeon E5 rig I normally use for Plex and it's held up. I don't think a workload of 3 streams is too much to ask and I'm not going to re-encode all my videos to inferior formats just to keep my media server from using cycles that it should have available.
Also, supporting 4K is not the same thing as having the authorization to deliver it. Shit tons of PCs have a fully 4k-compliant delivery chain but unless you're running Edge on Windows 10, Netflix is only going to be 720p no matter what you do. Likewise, some Android client devices have special authorization to deliver 4k while others don't.
IMO, the Shield TV is a decent product that's priced a bit too high. You can stream some games to it and it can kinda-sorta act as a Plex Server with limited transcoding support, but even as someone who has a 4k HDR TV, I recognize that the use case for those things above and beyond the feature set of a FireTV or Roku box are pretty limited.
I really wish this were modded up. I've been active in various parts of literary SF fandom for a some time and while I can't say I have had any direct interaction with him, I've heard more Jerry Pournelle horror stories than any two other writers, even when one of them is Harlan Ellison.
Migrating to Palemoon takes about 90 seconds. There's a tool to copy over your profile and you'll probably wind up switching over to Adblock Latitude. Sometimes you'll have to hunt up an old version of an Addon but it's really not a big deal.
I might be mistaken since I don't frequently use any WebKit browsers, but last time I checked, NoScript for Chromedidn't have the full set of capabilities found in the Mozilla-based version. uMatrix may be similar and is often described as being just as capable but I've likewise not had the patience to deal with its idiosyncrasies compared to the NoScript I've been using for years.
With regard specifically to "downloading" addons, I've tried quite a few and I've found I can do the most work with the least effort with DownThemAll. There's a very good reason it's a popular tool.
I'm a Palemoon guy already. I can't bring myself to move everything I do over to Google, but moreover, Non-WebKit browsers work much better for my browsing habits (even, ew, Edge) in my experience. To the extent that the choice exists to not use Chrome or something Chrome-like, I'm going to do that.
On the other hand, if you're on desktop Windows, which is probably pretty common even among Slashdot users, Palemoon is probably the best of the available Mozilla forks for all of the reasons the grandparent post said. I use wget more often than I load a desktop browser on my Linux systems and I bet I'm not alone in that, either. It's not that it doesn't matter, but given the size of the team working on Palemoon, I think they're justified in concentrating on the most common desktop platforms.
The correct answer for me has been Palemoon, which continues to do all the stuff I like about Firefox, with a UI I like and all the add-ons I need. I realize that it's a lost cause in the long term since it doesn't have the developer resources to get a highly tuned JavaScript interpreter or whatever weirdo DRM video formats we might have on the horizon, but for now I think it's the best of my available options.
Opera lost me for being the browser that decided it didn't need to use all the same keyboard shortcuts as any Mosaic-derived (Netscape, Spyglass, IE..) software and for being the only browser for a long, long time that thought it did something worthy of making it non-free commercial software. In my experience, Opera-Classic was also by far the crashiest browser I used over its life. It had fantastic crash recovery, but holy god did it need it.
Opera was also very late in getting addons and customization. It's nice that it kinda-sorta had some power user features, but nothing it ever did was as compelling the Mozilla feature set at any point in its history, up to and including today.
One of the deeply disappointing things about Ryzen is that you're limited to a single NVMe slot and only 24 total lanes of PCIe. For as much as Intel Enthusiast chipsets might suck or that Server-grade hardware costs, my main Intel desktop DOES have three M.2 slots that can all have NVMe SSDs connected, Missing that option is a big strike against the AMD hardware right now, even if the CPUs are actually pretty respectable.
Someone has already mentioned the tragedy of this ruining it for other people and in a way I agree, but since he did it using the remainder of the unlimited storage period, I'm not going to feel bad about it either. This dude is a fucking hero even just for making the world's most obvious joke about Amazon's Cloud storage into a reality.
But it's a damned shame that the unlimited storage plans are going away because I really did have about 6TB of actual personal data (mostly photos, which are still unlimited for Prime subscribers anyway) on my account and the amazing thing about Amazon as opposed to every other big cloud service is that they never, ever seemed to run out of upstream bandwidth. I took a 4TB drive to my server colo and sent data to Cloud Drive. Amazon took it at the physical speed of the hard disk. Compared to Google or Carbonite or Backblaze, where data transfer throttles seem to be the name of the game, the idea that Amazon will take THAT MUCH data in so short a period of time is more impressive to me than just having the disk space to store it.
Like the mobile keyboard that didn't display lowercase letters and instead used a color shift to indicate letter case for some reason, up until iOS 9 or something?
Or a mobile OS that won't natively play a FLAC file and doesn't natively support general purpose file browsing until, hm, whenever the next version gets released?
Yeah. Those guys sure do have a handle on getting stuff right.
The normal actions are dropping DNS entries and/or eliminating direct links from search results. Neither of those things is any more than a speed bump for someone who wants to use the site or its services.
It's fairly trivial to export your messages. You can copy them someplace local via any IMAP client. Contacts from Yahoo aren't bad either, since it'll make a .CSV for you. Putting the messages back on another service isn't horrible once you have those things under your own control.
FireOS does not include access to the Play Store, but adding it is really just a matter of installing three APKs and signing in to your Google account if you feel like you really need it. The Amazon App store does have some pretty big holes in it; Firefox isn't available in it, for example.
Amazon devices have nice, bright screens and good battery life in their favor. They also have a fairly straightforward launcher. I'd also put forth that Amazon FreeTime is a pretty good sandbox kid mode, but Amazon did finally make it available outside its own devices as of a few weeks ago. No, these things aren't $400 super-premium tablets. But for the money, it's hard to complain about what Amazon is selling. These guys are worlds nicer than $50 No-name Chinese knock off devices.
Down side is that they're hard to root. The default launcher doesn't support widgets (not that I miss them) and has a somewhat limited subset of configurable options compared to Android + the Play Framework. But I've bought these for my nieces and since they do Youtube and Minecraft for cheap, all is well.
A few off the top of my head: laptop touchpads lacking full functionality, keyboards with Fn key functions not working, poor power management support. Some laptops still ship with WLAN hardware that doesn't work out of the box.
None of this stuff represents a complete dealbreaker, but it's a combination of factors that wears down the likelihood that I could adopt Linux on a personal PC. As a VM? Something I remotely manage? No problem. But when power management is so bad I only get half the battery life I get on Windows AND the screen brightness keys don't work AND I have to go make my own gesture to get the touchpad to middle click or something, it's pretty hard to say it's worth it.
I repurposed six 6C/12T LGA1366 Xeon workstations into mid-range gaming rigs last year. I paired them with GTX1060s and 240GB SSDs. For 1080p gaming, there's really no subjective difference between those machines and a latter-day Kaby Lake i5 PC with the same GPU, at least among the games I tried on them. Even lacking amenities like USB 3 and updated PCI-e slots, those ~6 year old machines could keep up just fine with Mechwarrior Online and X-Com 2. The contemporary i5 is assuredly faster, but I got those complete Xeon systems for about what I paid for the i5 CPU, so I'm not going to complain.