Can't agree with you enough! I thought they would have learned their lesson with the Fire phone. As a owner of a company that makes games for tablets, the performance on the new line of devices was noticeably worse than the previous generation.
Your comment said "is not usually a large bottleneck (but it is measurable)" which implies that there is a performance impact. If they are trying to eek out as much performance as they can from an already terribly slow device then it stands that it could be for performance reasons.
Amazon's most recent line of Kindle Fire tablets are horribly slow products. They sacrificed their hardware in order to make a super cheap tablet (which in my opinion is a mistake because it leads to poor user experience). I'm sure this is an attempt to get a little extra performance from these products.
Right now I use 3 Softlayer virtual servers to serve up 15TB of static files a month. It costs me a whopping $168 a month. The same 15TB on AWS would cost $1325 a month. I consider saving $1157 'significant'.
Softlayer no longer includes 5TB on every virtual server and their bandwidth is equally outrageous so I'm still evaluating a plan for new servers.
What do you consider significant? If you are doing over 10TB then you'll be paying lower and even lower the higher you go. This doesn't help the smaller players doing under 10TB. Do you know of people under 10TB that have negotiated better rates?
Ideally, none of your servers on EC2 should be 'permanent' :) Although having EBS available makes it easier to start relying on them as if they are permanent.
This is one of the first scripts that I made myself after migrating to ec2. I initially programmed it in ruby, but just recently re-wrote it in Go. I don't cache the hosts and it usually takes around 0.5 - 0.7 seconds. My ruby implementation was much slower due to the libraries I was using needing to be loaded in each time it ran as opposed to the Go compiling ahead of time.
While it has declined, it is still almost a billion dollar industry on its own just on Facebook. You asked for "examples of games making heaps of money" and I included links to a bunch of them.
Edit: Also, I believe Kongregate has a whole ton of games with In-App Purchases. I don't have any experience publishing on there but I do have experience on Facebook.
Flash games are easily a multi-Billion dollar a year industry. You mention games shifting towards Steam. I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of games on Steam that are still created in Flash. Flash (through Air sdk) provides an amazing way to target web and all major mobile platforms with the same code base.
Also, I wouldn't judge popularity by money made through ads. The industry has long since shifted to in app purchases.
There is a still huge industry of web games (99% of them in Flash) because that is still the best technology to write cross-platform games in the browser. Kongregate, Armor Games, millions of people playing games on Facebook.
The lack of double-dash in the stdlib really annoys me. Almost all command line tools use a single dash for single letter arguments (-h) and double-dash for anything longer (--help).
I was able to use 'dnu build', but that looks like it builds a dll and places it in a folder. I was curious if it's possible to build a single executable (similar to go) that can be run. Also, 'dnx run' is slightly slow so I wanted to see if the performance hit was less after building an exe.
Flawed was probably the wrong word to use, maybe unrealistic view would have been more appropriate. As a developer in the Flash gaming community, one of my pet peeves is the loud outcry from the tech community to kill Flash. Flash is still the best way to ship cross-platform games that can be played from any browser, and there is a huge community of interest in that.
There are millions of people a day that play Flash games across many websites. Many of the members on HN have a flawed view that just because they don't use flash then no one else does.
One cool use that we are using Lambda for is to destroy EBS snapshots past a certain date. We tag snapshots with a 'retention_days' tag and then a Lambda process kicks off daily and deletes the old snapshots. The great thing about this is we can lock down the DeleteSnapshot api call so that none of our instances have access to that call anymore.
Doesn't an iOS app have to declare that it is going to do background audio? If so, what was their original legitimate use case for having background audio?
Edit: Here's a link to the apple docs that show apps have to declare what tasks they will perform in the background.
We have a business with 100mbit for $57.99, but last time I got a quote for higher speeds it was around $99.99 for 175 mbit and $153.99 for 270 mbit. They also charge us 14.99 for a static IP address.
I'm curious. Does anyone know if Apples statement actually means you must fully support IPv6 or if you just can't submit an app with hardcoded IPv4 addresses?
I just tested one of our apps that uses IPv4 only domain names and it passed according to the setup here "Test for IPv6 DNS64/NAT64 Compatibility Regularly":
This is a main reason that I have avoided Android so far. The iOS permissions model is a far better model. At least with the next release of Android (Marshmallow) they are fixing some of this and hopefully you will be able to use apps without giving them access to so much info.