If /. was put in charge or anybody who thinks the way an average /. user does, then all sorts of things will qualify as trolling. All of a sudden difference of opinion qualifies as 'trolling' on a government level and is punishable by jail time. Vast majority may find it wonderful, that opinions of a minority are qualified that way, however everybody is in minority opinion on some things.

Here is my take on it, I have a number of people from well known schools, same number of people from schools that nobody heard from and in some cases people from unknown schools who dropped out and started working for me when I offered them a job. I have a number of people that had no formal higher education at all and a couple of guys that didn't know much about computers before they started here.

AFAIC I care about the attitude, I care that the person can work within a team, that I can work with the person, whether they are eager to learn. This is a starting job for all of the people I hire, very few of them worked in the field before, I do not pay much but that is also part of the equation. The people that do not have student debts do not have the same problem as those with debt, they don't need to try and get a highly paid position right away and so they can afford to work with me, where they are gaining more than enough experience so that eventually they are propelled to better paying jobs.

I will say this: I have about equal number of good coders, whether they had any formal computer science training or not, but I go through many people to find good ones but it does not take much time at all to know who is who. Just in the last 2 months I interviewed about 15 people, 3 of them ended up with me, 2 are going to be excellent developers. Out of the 15, 4 decided it was too hard in the first 3 days. 2 decided that they made a mistake and shouldn't be in this field right during our meeting.

In the interview all I do is I show them what we do, how we work, ask them what they like to do and explain the structure here: you are studying here before I put you on an actual paying project. I teach you what you need to know and while I am teaching you, I am not paying you anything. Normally takes 2-3 weeks for a developer to go through training and start being productive. This is my way of doing stuff, I do not care where you studied, what you think you know, I only care to figure out if you are OK for the team and if you can learn and have the right attitude for this company.

They do do that already. Their prices are what they are and not 2 times what they are now for a reason as well. Of-course actually building Apple hardware products is a costly endeavour, nobody else can really afford to do what they do to achieve the save level of user friendliness and beauty. I don't buy Apple products (not because of price, I just do not like their software), but plenty of people do. Their products are priced to satisfy demand of a specific set of population, however if their revenues did not cover their costs and did not make them good profits, they would have lowered prices by lowering the cost of production and very likely by sacrificing build quality to gain market share, however their customers are used to certain degree of quality and shine, and so Apple spends more than anybody else delivering just that.

If Apple could actually cut their production costs in half, while delivering the same quality of product, their prices would go down to increase market share, but they are in business of providing top quality systems (even with some problems, like the new phones that probably bend much easier than some others).

If you in fact believe that you could provide similar quality of the product as Apple for half the price, you yourself could do what you are talking about, but apparently it is not as easy as you say, since other companies do not provide the same, shall we say 'shine' in their hardware so far, while being able to charge much less than Apple.

Did you choose the "sketchy" type in the pencil settings, by any chance? Try using the "plain" type instead :-)

Because of convenience. Updates and new features are added automatically, and the developers only have to deploy a single copy to know that everyone has the latest features and bugfixes, instead of having to rely on people updating their local copies. And as long as you have access to a computer with an Internet connection, you have access to the apps you're used to.

Of course there are downsides, but local software has downsides too. It all comes down to your user profile, and for most people, Google docs has all the features they need. For power users, you have locally-installed applications with larger feature sets and harder learning curves.

Right, it's definitely not a perfect solution. But then again, Chromebooks aren't really targeted at your type of use case. MS seems to want to resurrect the netbook, with a full Win8/10 installation to compete with Chromebooks. That's probably your best bet for cheap on-the-go development.

True, it's probably niche in the basic number of users. But the people who actually use extFS on their Chromebooks tend to be power users and developers, a lot of the time they are the very people who develop Chrome apps and extensions. That's a niche you do not want to neglect, and I think the Chrome developers realized that.

Well, there are a handful of sites like http://cpp.sh/ where you can test your code. I haven't used them myself, but I've had them recommended to me.

That's true, but the list of offline-capable Chrome apps is quite long: https://chrome.google.com/webs...

Strictly speaking, you could develop anything in a basic text editor, but I assume you actually want a semi-decent IDE? I don't know of any that aren't javascript-focused on ChromeOS, no.

Sorry, I'm in Denmark, and I know mobile subscriptions vary wildly on either side of the Atlantic. The price you quote is pretty bad, and I assume it limits tethering as well?

I own an iPad, although not by choice. I've had no issues using Google Drive for all my personal stuff, but it's true that device backups etc. are locked to iCloud.

I don't know about ChromeOS, as I don't have a Chromebook yet. I assume the Google apps use Google Drive, and MS apps use OneDrive, but I don't know about other third-party apps.

Basically all of Western Europe. For instance, here in Denmark my plan is 3GB/month for ~$17, which also includes 5 hours talk time and unlimited SMS and MMS (and we don't pay to receive calls or messages). And there are no limits on tethering. For reference, I work at an ISP/Telco and my subscription is from our basic self-service brand. We've just measured the average data rate of our 4G network to be over 50Mbit/s basically everywhere there's coverage, and peaking at over 100Mbit/s in some areas.

I may be spoiled rotten by our infrastructure, but we actually have APs on the busses and trains, free of charge.

As for the store-provided hotspots blocking access, that's easily circumvented by spoofing your MAC. Not that I would ever engage in such shenanigans ;-)

There are a handful of Chromebook-targeted Win8.1 laptops out there, and more cheaper versions are on the way: http://www.theverge.com/2014/8...

Personally, I think maybe people are going to be slightly disappointed at their performance, but for $200, you can't really complain, right? A lean Linux distro should perk up the performance nicely.

It's the default action for the backspace key for basically every browser ever on Windows, as well as in Explorer windows. I used it that way for a long time, but since switching to Linux where using backspace to go back in history isn't the default, I was annoyed for a little while and then just stopped using it. I have no idea why it's the default on Windows, though.

I did lose a lot of forums posts back in the Windows days due to backspacing while not having the text box focused.

That's a good example, and that's exactly how Chrome does it. Firefox requires you to manually reload the tabs first.

Mobile data plans are cheap as chips in most first-world countries, plus odds are you'll have wifi access available in a lot more places than you'd think.

But really, your use case falls outside of what a Chromebook is meant for. It's meant for browsing, email, videos, chatting and that sort of thing. You can develop software on in, but it's not ideal, as it was meant for other purposes.

If course, you're not paying to use your own computer, you're paying for Internet access while you're on the go. You can use a Chromebook while offline now, you know.

I may be a bit privileged in this area, as we have free wifi on the busses and trains around here. And my mobile subscription is $17/month, which includes 3GB data. That's actually quite a lot of data, even with heavy use of my phone for tethering and watching Youtube etc., the highest I've ever used in a month is 1.5GB.

No, it's actually pretty easy to choose where to centralize computing power. Just off the top of my head, you can choose between Google (ChromeOS, Google Drive, Google Docs etc.), Microsoft (Skydrive, Office365, Outlook.com etc.) and Apple (iCloud, iTunes etc.).

Can you install an alternative browser on ChromeOS? No, because the browser is actually the shell. But you can easily use competing web-based services, no problem. So it's pretty much the same situation as with iOS, where you can only install different UIs for the default Safari browser, but nothing's stopping you from installing Google Drive or Dropbox etc. and using them instead of iCloud storage.

They already offer access to alternative data vendors, nothing's preventing you from using Outlook.com instead of Gmail and Skydrive instead of Google Drive.

As long as Apple aren't forced to open up the iPhone/iPad platforms, I don't think Google will be forced to open up the ChromeOS platform.

And there's nothing preventing you from doing that on a Chromebook. After all, there's a basic text editor ;-)

But just off the top of my head, there's also Spark, Text, Tailor, ShiftEdit and Caret, all of which have syntax highlighting etc., and work offline.