So the first question, why is this a news story now when it occurred in 2017?

My best guess is that with the second season of Jury Duty being about a corporate retreat, the WSJ (who wrote the first article on this) contacted Moniker as they organize such retreats (and have organized them for Plex for many years). I expect they ask about bad experiences and this trip immediately came to mind.

Did this all happen?
Yes Also, I was talking with Sean (Hoff) just over a year ago and he told me other things that happened that I likely shouldn't repeat. This trip was extremely stressful for him which likely ranks it very high for worst trips for him.
The shower porcupine mostly became a topic of laughter as it started contained and remained so.

120 employees?
Uh, I think that's a confusion with Plex's current employee count and not what it was in 2017. This was before the AVOD side of the business and everyone worked on Personal Media so the company was much smaller then. I think it was ~70 or so then. Now the Personal Media side of the business is significantly smaller than what it was back then.

How was it overall?
Mostly it was a fun trip. There were several things we did have to concern ourselves with which did detract from the trip. Yes the water broke all the time but also we didn't want to drink it anyway (I never did; didn't even brush my teeth with the water from the tap). There was also a concern about mosquitos especially since Zika was spreading there. We couldn't really go into the ocean because there were jellyfish all over the place. On the planes to Utila (the island in the article), looking out the window I could see nothing but water and jellyfish.

How was it for me?
Mostly it was fine. I did prepare by getting up to date on all my vaccinations beforehand, getting malaria medication, mosquito repellent, etc. I did make the mistake of eating the salad on my last day so I got sick when I got home. Fortunately I had gone to a doctor who specialized in travel beforehand so I had medication on hand already. Never had it as bad as Keith.
Honestly, the most dangerous I felt on the trip was the bus from the airport to the resort.

TT-RSS is my reader of choice and has been since Google Reader shutdown. These days I use the docker container on one of my servers.

There has been a site here and there that I had to remove due to their rss feed no longer updating over the years but the vast majority have maintained their feed. Sometimes I have to hunt for the feed or even look at the source of a website to find the URL but nearly all sites in my interests have feeds.

I used Delicious Library since ~2008. I would use it to catalog which movies, books, and CDs I had for both my own accounting and if I ever needed it for insurance purposes. The barcode scanning with a camera and later the iOS app made it quite easy even if the UI of the shelves wasn't the best.

I discovered the lack of metadata loading in very early November and digging around other reports strongly indicated that it wasn't coming back. I since switched to libib. The UI isn't as pretty, it's a cloud service, some items can't be found, but the basic functionality is there and the barcode scanner is much less picky. It also meets the hard requirement of being able to export to CSV so I can go somewhere else if needed.

This is entirely opt-in and you have to make a change for it to be anything different. If you never set these settings, nothing is shared.

Moreover, for any content watched on Plex Media Servers to be included, that requires a separate opt-in to enable sync of watch state.

This test question isn't that difficult. The quoted text points out that the question is 5 pages long but that is just clarifying exactly how the functions should behave with text and pictures describing it.

This question is the last on the exam. So I have to ask, of the 34% who missed it, how many attempted and failed to provide a workable solution and how many simply didn't answer because they ran out of time answering the previous questions?

The problem isn't the quantity of titles, it's the lack of quality. I've done this hunt before with friends and it was nothing more than a repetition of "is this worth watching? No, move to the next." If we had found a title worth watching, the hunt would be over and we would have watched it but most times it was nothing but failure until we gave up. That's why I eventually cancelled my Netflix account. I re-up it once a year or so for a bit just to watch the new seasons to the few series we care about but the hunt through the sea of muck isn't worth it anymore.

I grew up in Los Alamos and I worked there during my high school years through some of graduate school. The article completely failed to mention one of the main culprits for a lot of these problems: The Department of Energy. While I do not have knowledge beyond what is in the press for most of the incidents mentioned, the ones where I do mostly include a major role in the problem played by DOE ranging from their screwed up policies to direct involvement. Given this, a new contractor can only do so much.

The Roku rates pretty low in terms of scriptability/hackabilty IMHO. Yes, it has an API, but through numerous poor choices on Roku's part, this is not as useful as other platforms. Their Brightscript is not well designed, and the VM is buggy. I can cause the device to hard reset with one line of code (an accidental discovery trying to make the thing work). The library availability for the language is poor. Heaven help you if you want to do something that's provided in libraries on the net in nearly every language but not available on Brightscript. If you want to do something very very simple, you can pull it off, but more complicated programs are an exercise in frustration. Additionally, their provided displays are missing key functionality. For example, the Grid Display cannot be stacked without crashing the device, you cannot set the selection on it before it is displayed, and there is no callback for the display of the grid so you can set the selection then. Also, use the debugger too much, and you'll lock up the device, requiring pulling the power to correct it. Lastly, you cannot have more than one development app on the device at a time.

I went to a GoogleTV, and it's hackability is vastly superior to the Roku. It uses a language which has a large library availability (java) and the programming environment is inside an IDE (Eclipse). The remote debugger is more useful, synchronizing the execution with the location in the code and displaying local variables, in stark contrast to using telnet on a port to step through which is essentially a stripped down command line gdb (which is missing many of the more useful commands, such as breakpoints).

I cannot speak for the other devices, but if they were to provide any API for third party development, I would be surprised if they were not superior to the Roku. It has a development environment you would expect from the previous decade, not this one.

> later when they upgraded the OS (without breaking any compatibility)
This caused me to laugh. I have a Roku 2 and experienced a regression on http live streaming resulting in audio dropouts, video freezing, and even the device rebooting. My dad has a Roku 1, and experienced regressions on two separate "updates." This is not isolated; just see the forums and the number of requests to revert the firmware and Roku's refusal to allow it.