Depends on the job. I typically give candidates a problem a few days before to see how they work without much pressure, but part of my job is to go into the field to conduct integration testing. I will often need to find, analyse and fix a problem under a ticking clock while customers and partners look over my shoulder. If you can't code in an interview you probably can't handle that part of the job.

As an aside I once had a candidate offer to show me some code he had written previously and proceeded to bring up the code he had written while working for several previous employers. Not exactly the way to give me confidence that our code would remain in the company.

Which computer is fast enough? What do you want it to do?

We aren't all developing desktop widgets and web apps. Some of us are producing washing machines, anti-lock braking systems or medical implants. We have microcontrollers with a few kb of memory and we really, really care what the hardware is doing.

The point is that we need different tools for different jobs. Personally I think that learning with these languages gives you a better understanding of what is going on. Teaching them in schools certainly saves us from teaching new hires from scratch and hoping that they can get they get their heads around the concepts.

I've got an HTC Hero which is connected through Optus. The phone wasn't available in Australia when I bought it so I imported it. I think it was originally intended for Malaysia. It doesn't have Android Market installed on it and as far as I can tell, Google won't provide access to it.

Optus is may be trying to direct app sales to their own marketplace by not selling phones with Android Marketplace installed but the real problem seems to lie with Google for coming up with the "Google Experience" concept and HTC for trying to get exclusive deals with telcos (and offering phones without Android market as part of those deals.)

If Google wasn't trying to restrict access to the Market this wouldn't be an issue. Optus could block traffic or do whatever they want but if Google wasn't blocking access to the Market I could access it over wi-fi and Optus wouldn't know the difference.