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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Agile is not about being quick, it’s about delivering what the customer actually wants. When you do Waterfall you gather all the requirements, then you sit down and code the thing. Only to find out months or years later that you delivered crap as the customer didn’t even know themselves what they wanted.

    With agile you take it one step at a time. What is important now? Get the requirements for this feature, deliver it in the next two weeks (or at least a part of it). Then the customer, which can be an actual customer, or your internal Product Owner, or a Product Manager looks it over. If the whole thing is perfect? Nice, carry on to the next thing.

    Often you find out some detail was overlooked, or a new requirement came up, or the design didn’t fully work out. So pack it into the next sprint and do it better. You’d never get this feedback if you gather “all” requirements first and then just try to go from start to finish.

    Agile certainly has its upsides when done right, unfortunately there’s not a lot of companies who manage to do so (like most I’ve been part of). Despite being messy at times, it’s still better than Waterfall. There’s too many meetings either way.



  • There were 3 issues at once, so “trust & safety” is definitely part of it.

    1. Too much traffic use, this is purely a billing issue and CF probably wouldn’t even care (they haven’t for years) despite losing money
    2. Violating ToS with the domains, a minor infraction probably, but enough to cancel the contract
    3. This is the big one: CF uses one pool of IPs for all customers, the IP of a gambling site (like a casino) will get banned by ISPs of various countries (Gambling being illegal, strictly regulated and so on). This is the trust & safety issue, CF is actively hurting by keeping this customer. The enterprise plan they want to push them to has ByoIP (Bring your own IP), which would probably have been one condition of keeping them on. CF could have communicated better (if we got the full story here…), but for $250 a month they’d much rather kick the customer off their service

  • From the additional info I read, it sounds more like the traffic wasn’t the main issue.

    Gambling is forbidden in a lot of countries or heavily regulated. Cloudflare uses a common IP pool for all customers, so a casino customer would possibly get their IPs blacklisted (by various ISPs). The Enterprise tier of Cloudflare has “Bring your own IP (ByoIP)”, which they probably wanted to force onto this problematic customer to protect their business.

    So it’s actually a problem, not just them paying not enough (which is another reason to get rid of them as fast as possible).



  • As I said in another comment: The up-front payment is the only thing that makes sense for Cloudflare. You got a customer that’s costing you money each month. They broke ToS. You offer them a deal still to keep the services running. And their CEO/CFO tells you they are looking at other providers like Fastly.

    If Cloudflare gave them a monthly contract then the casino would simply pay for a month and switch over their services to a competitor in that time. So Cloudflare loses all the money from the past (where the casino used far too much traffic) and will barely recoup 10k (minus the running cost, so more likely 7k at the high end) for a single month. It’s just not worth it.

    So they offer: Stick with us for a full year at least or get fucked. Which is fair.


  • Is there? The casino is on a cheap $250 a month plan they don’t belong on and they broke ToS with the domains. While also costing Cloudflare money each month (as the casino admits themselves, their traffic alone is worth up to $2000 a month).

    It’s absolutely in the right of Cloudflare to drop a customer that’s bothersome. Casinos usually are (regulations, going around country restrictions), them costing them money on top is a massive issue.

    120k a year is a big slap of course, but it’s probably the amount Cloudflare would want to keep them on as a customer. If they leave, so be it.

    I’ve seen it several times before at companies I worked at. They cheaped out and went with a tiny service plan to coast by. Or even broke ToS because it would be cheaper. That usually got stopped by plans getting dropped (GitLab Bronze for example), cheap plans getting limited, or the sales team sending a ‘friendly’ message that we’re abusing their plan and how we’re going to fix it. If you don’t play along at that point you’re going to get the hammer dropped on you.

    It also wasn’t 24h as the title says, the first communication happened in April. At that point they should have started to scramble, either upgrading to a bigger tier immediately or switching providers. And it’s totally normal to go to the sales team when you break the ToS of your plan or you abuse a smaller plan. They’re going to discuss terms, it’s not a technical issue.

    Edit: And I should also say, the whole “paying for a whole year is extortion” is bullshit too. Their CFO or CEO told Cloudflare they are looking at switching providers (as they looked at Fastly). So of fucking course Cloudflare is going to demand a full year upfront. Otherwise the casino could pay for a single month and during that month they switch away to another provider. So Cloudflare would still be thousands in the red with that ex-customer after they used so much traffic the last few years.





  • I mean I didn’t check how long it actually takes, it’s not 500ms.

    It opens quick, but I can’t find the default value (you can change the behavior via registry), but it’s definitely less than half a second. Especially when you’re already hovering down there it appears near instant for me.

    And let’s be honest: The only reason why multiple icons worked back in the day was because the name of the open workbook was next to it. So you had “(Excel) My Workbook 123.xlsx” in your taskbar. Which ended up as a mess when you had several programs open. Now you have one Excel icon, you hover over it and you see all your open workbooks as a preview so you select the one you want. It’s definitely cleaner.



  • Of course, but it’s mostly for reading. The color will probably be used for notes and the occasional image, for which it’s easily good enough. When I read it’s usually a foot away, while I keep my monitor at 2 feet.

    Black and white content (text) has 300 dpi atleast, so for that it’s perfect.

    E-Ink is fantastic for lots of reading and battery life, for everything else an actual screen is leagues ahead. The response time is awful too.


  • Vlyn@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.mlKobo announces its first color e-readers
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    3 months ago

    Both use E Ink’s latest Kaleido color screen technology, which has subtle, pastel-like hues and drops from a 300ppi grayscale resolution to 150ppi when you view content in color.

    I had to check just how bad 150ppi would be when dropping down the resolution for color.

    A 24" Full HD monitor has a PPI of 92. So it’s actually okay.

    I’m still using my old Kobo Aura HD (now roughly 11 years old) and the battery still lasts over a month. The screen was already decent back then, but a bit sluggish. I just checked, the old one has 265 ppi. Maybe it’s not time for an upgrade yet :)




  • I was rather happy with Netflix for nearly a decade. The price was reasonable and family members could also watch. When I moved out I upgraded to the 4K package (split 3 ways between family members) and it was fine at first.

    But there were several caveats:

    • 4K only works on TVs, on my 1440p monitor I could only watch 1080p. Sucked, but it’s not too bad
    • Price kept going up, in the end it was 18€ a month. That’s okay split between 3 people, but otherwise far too much for what is offered
    • Series that I liked kept getting cancelled, while trash was getting renewed or they messed up the later seasons (Looking at you, The Witcher…)
    • They cracked down on password sharing, suddenly you need to be in the same WiFi to count as home or you need a travel code (limited to 2 a month and only for 2 weeks each), so if you regularly move between places it’s a no-go for a service you pay for

    I finally cancelled it, sick of their shit. Which also has the benefit of no longer having to take care of the account for the family. Unfortunately my dad accidentally took over the account (while trying to create a new one) and keeps paying the 4K price (I suggested at least going down to 1080p as the quality is shit either way). Simply idiotic :-/

    Personally I tried out Real Debrid and it has been pretty alright so far. The quality is better too, which is ridiculous.