You know this reminds me of a bad taste that Google Sales team left when I asked for some of my billing that I was unaware of running after following a quickstart guide.

AWS refunded me in the first reply on the same day!

GCP sales rep just copy pasted a link to a self support survey that essentially told me, after a series of YES or NO questions that they can't refund me.

So why not just tell your customers like it is? Google Cloud is super strict when it comes to billing. I have called my bank to do a chargeback and put a hold on all future billing with GCP.

I'm now back to AWS and still on a Free Tier. Apparently the $300 Trial with Google Cloud did not include some critical products, AWS Free tier makes it super clear and even still I sometimes leave something running on and discover it in my invoice....

I've yet to receive a reply from Google and its been a week now.

I do appreciate other products such as Firebase but honestly for infrastructure and for future integration with enterprise customers I feel AWS is more appropriate and mature.

The thing that worries me most about Google Cloud and these billing stories is that I’m assuming if you chargeback or block them at your bank then they’ll ban all Google accounts of yours - and they’re obviously going to be able to make the link between an account made just for Google Cloud and my real account.

They WILL absolutely block and suspend all accounts indefinitely. They have terminated accounts for credit card failing transactions.

I really wanted to try out their new autoML but I was paranoid of entering my credit card and getting banned from Google

oh man....so ALL of my gmail gets banned?

this is FUCKED. its aking to holding my youtube and google play accounts hostage.

For any Google service with billing, always set up an entirely new account, in incognito mode, without using the same recovery phone number or email address.

That way Google won't ban your main account for non-payment.

It's the only way, especially considering Google cloud has no functionality to cap spending.

They will link the accounts by IP (and other fingerprinting), and you will get banned.

My experience shows they do not.

For a ban, they need something concrete like using the same browser cookies, recovery email address or phone number.

IP isn't enough alone - you could be on shared WiFi.

Also, after account creation, you can log in from the same place without risk, or even use multi-login to log into both accounts at the same time.

I’m so tired of this widespread tracking. You can’t even buy a burner phone anymore because there exists multiple fingerprinting methods.

Phone and desktop OSs should grow a pair and create a virtualization protocol to randomize tracking info to keep PII anonymous.

I moved off of gmail after reading stories of people getting locked out of their google accounts and how difficult it made things due to email basically being an internet passport, so I sympathise with your fear here.

With that said, If I delivered you services and then you credit card chargebacked me, I'd cut all relations with you as well.

Are you seriously complaining about having to pay for using their resources? I understand that you're surprised some things aren't covered in the free trial or free credit or whatever, but getting $300 free already sounded a little too good to be true (I heard about it from a friend and was dubious; at least in Europe, consumers are told not to enter deals that are too good to be true), you could at least have checked what you're actually getting.

I think it's weird to say you get credit in dollars and then not be able to spend it on everything. That's not how money works. But that's the way hosting providers work and afaik it's quite well known. Especially with a large sum of "free money", even if it's not well known, it was on you to check any small print.

> Are you seriously complaining about having to pay for using their resources?

I didn't read it that way. I thought they were complaining about poor customer service that made it difficult to understand the bill or respond to it appropriately.

Google is well known for not caring about small shops, only if you are a multi million dollar customer with dedicated account manager you can expect reasonable support. That's been the case forever with them.

Does Amazon treat smaller customers any better? I am genuinely asking, as I have no clue.

Absolutely. I've seen them wipe a number of bills away for companies that have screwed up something. They definitely take a longer view on customer happiness than GCP. Azure also tends to be pretty good in this regard.

Depends.

AWS is mostly easy going.

Only some people at the partner programm can vary.

I had a guy who wanted to help me out even tho I was just a one person shop. After he left I got a woman who threw me out of the program faster than I could look.

Yes. 100%. We don’t pay AWS much but their help is top notch. We accidentally bought physical instances instead of reserved instances. AWS resolved the issue and credited us. I’ll prob never touch GCE. Google just isn’t a good company at any level.

I'm scared to put anything serious on GCE. One super bill from a DDoS, one tiny billing dispute, something else tiny and unpredictable, etc. Suddenly my entire 10+ years of gmail is gone. Or Google cancels my friend or SO's gmail for whatever Orwellian reason, suddenly my production app is inaccessible or is deleted.

There's too much liability. And no support.

Definitely. A previous small company I worked in had some S3 Snafu and AWS Support was super helpful.

I've got a personal account with an approximately $1/mo bill (just a couple things in S3) and a work account with ~$1500/mo AWS bill (not a large shop by any means) and I've always felt very positive about my interactions with AWS support

Yes

Their ecommerce and AWS both have fantastic help and followups (and also aggressive marketing).

If you buy their support (which isn't that expensive). Holy fuck it's good. You literally have an infrastructure support engineer on the phone for hours with you. They will literally show you how to spend less money for your hosting while using more AWS services.

>I asked for some of my billing that I was unaware of running

>I have called my bank to do a chargeback

You're issuing a chargeback because you made a mistake and spent someone else's resources? And you're admitting to this on HN? I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds like fraud and / or theft to me.

It’s not, read the terms of your credit card. It’s basically “I didn’t intend to buy this. I tried in good faith to contact the merchant for return and support. I was ignored. I’m contacting you.”

It’s pretty convenient for companies like Comcast and Google that have poor customer service.

Imagine leaving a 1000 watt space heater on by accident in a spare room for a month, then trying to get a "refund" from the power company because you "didn't intend" to purchase all that power you used. That's effectively what this is - signing a service agreement and forgetting to turn off a service you don't need, causing an irreversible loss of resources. You're not entitled to a refund for a service you agreed to pay for and actually used, just because you forgot about it.

My power company will literally give you a refund for this if you call them. I don’t think I’m entitled to a refund, but good customer service gives me one.

Of course, I get one free pass at that and if I did it over and over, I’m hosed. The difference is that my utility is regulated and has a phone number and a human whose job it is to talk to all customers.

GCE charged me for "Chinese egress" but doesn't provide me a way to block China via firewall or other methods. They have the ability to check and bill me for it but if I want to use the same logic for a firewall rule I'm on my own. That sounds like theft and or fraud to me.

OP sounds like they're just defending their selves from ambiguous draconian billing robots.

You may not like it, but that doesn't remotely resemble theft or fraud in any way.

What was the quickstart guide?

Isn't it also that promotions at Google are based on creating new products/projects rather than maintaining existing ones? So engineers have a negative incentive to maintain things since it costs them promotions.

That explains the proliferation of chat services and why they all get actively worse over time until they're replaced

From what I’ve been told, the issue is that the people with political capital (managers, PMs, etc) are quick to move after successful launches and milestones. No matter how many competent engineers hang around, the product/team becomes resource and attention starved.

this is awesome. I ended up paying like $99 USD just to have a custom domain pointed to it.

When I asked if I could switch the domain they said "that will be another $99 USD please"

...I don't even know why I am writing on medium

oh man I remember the hype around this game in magazines back then! It's AI would "adapt" to your inputs and that was a 'wow' in my mind back then.

all in all Dreamcast, imho, was the perfect console. You could emulate PSX games at higher, smoother res and sharper textures, there are emulators for various games now.

I wonder how much it costs to pick one up now...

The Dreamcast had an incredible array of quality software, and ran at a beautiful full 640x480 while other consoles were for the most part stuck at 320.

Yeah but SEGA had already lost way too much money by then to be able to recover its hardware branch. The Saturn utter failure hit them very very hard.

Yeah I've always thought it was sad. I love SEGA games, they have that signature, clean, fast, simple feel across their characters to game design.

Sega SATURN was a major flop, even though it is an interesting system none the less. See shenmue running on Saturn vs Dreamcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-YxOpZ7mDo

So the SATURN was more than capable of outputting even PSP level graphics for the mid 90s!, but seemed to have poor developer experience overall.

Similarly, they went all in on Dreamcast and the console was perfect and overshadowed by PS2 and entrance of XBOX. Sony had a near monopoly hold on gaming console market with the success of their PSX variants but failed to keep Microsoft out while successfully doing it to other Japanese console manufacturers, testament to the sign of a truly, cutthroat environment, for example Nintendo's "backstabbing" that made Sony lose face and release PlayStation as revenge.

XBOX roughly has 1/4 of the US console market, that's either something that should've gone to Sony had they've been able to keep their market leader position, something that traditionally has been a Japanese dominant one.

Now Google is entering the game industry with a Stream game approach but its already questionable, because I've used it before on PS Now and the experience has been terrible, it would intermittently degrade in visual and audio quality, and with a poor quality Canadian ISP with a capped upload speed, the reaction times were absolutely horrid.

I'd imagine in 20 years when Canadian ISP gets cheaper and faster with 5G (after the world has been running on 6G), this might make sense.

Perhaps its a totally different experience if you live in a country with cheap and super fast internet like South Korea

My humble opinion is that Dreamcast failed because Electron Arts did not support the platform. As to exactly how Sony got EA to wait for the PS2, especially given how easy it was to develop for the Dreamcast, I would be curious to know.

The official history says EA and Sega were negotiating over EA getting sole publishing for sports game. Eventually, EA didn't get sole publishing and opted not to do any publishing. The 2k sports games were pretty decent, but EA ended up negotiating exclusive rights for both teams and players; and the market wasn't there for made up teams with made up players.

Bought one for $40 around 2011. I used either Amazon or eBay, and I remember it being a standard price—ie, I didn't do much shopping around beforehand.

No idea if they're more or less expensive now.

is that USD? seems to be around that range still for a high quality one.

yeah I might pick one up....I always wanted a Dreamcast.....and I still do I realized!

Give me Shenmue 1&2, Phantasy Star Online, Omikron + Bleemcast + Gran Turismo 2 Simulation Disc and I'll play the shit out of it.

Yep, USD!

I'll note I believe I ended up spending significantly more on a VGA adapter because I got frustrated with how blurry the default output looked on an LCD screen.

I wonder whether the AI was as good as it looked in his video.

is there any security concerns with the pi itself? say your computer is infected with a really bad malware. it takes over your host, ignores your right to block out noise, and then the idea that pi-hole will be able to as a last resort block it out?

Some devices use hard coded DNS (looking at you G). You can force devices to use the pi-hole via masqurading. In you example, you'd be able to see the malware requests show up in the pi-hole interface.