Yes, they sell decently, but do no represent any profit for Google (which gives the OS for free).
It's around 5-6 million units sold anually, but, as Google themselves said, Google don't make any money of off them.
Samsung, Acer, etc, who produce the units do, but again, in total it represents a tiny slither of laptop profits due to the small margins. Most Chromebooks (70%) go to the education market as cheapo laptops.
I would imagine that Google indirectly profits by having more users using Google as their default search engine and by encouraging the world to rely more on the web.
Edit: Also, in the past Google would pay Firefox to have its users use Google as the default search engine and Google gets the equivalent of this for free with each Chromebook sold.
They suffer from the gulf state problem where they make so much money from one thing that nothing else will ever be important enough to really be successful.
I suppose it could help somewhat (at least the client wouldn't have to keep that huge world in memory), but now you have to deal with sending input to a remote server over an unreliable connection, and also being able to steadily render and compress about 180mb of data per second on the server side, and get it back to the client within a second to achieve 30fps @ 1928x1080. I think this will definitely be noticeable (I remember experiencing a noticeable delay with OnLive even though the connection was pretty good).
The real solution would probably be finding an effective way of dealing with memory on the client side. I don't know what the state of the art in javascript land is but big environments like this are better streamed from disk into memory portion by portion rather than putting it there all at once (i'm pretty sure there is no standard api that lets you do something like this).
There's a few optimizations techniques that you can apply, like sorting.
You keep track of all the points the player is currently looking at, and sort them. Then when the world state is updated, the server check all clients whether to send the new update or not.
Running smooth on a first gen mac book pro retina here in Chrome. This machine is several years old. Are you sure there isn't something else using a lot of CPU in your system?
I wonder how much time and money they would save if they had just bitten the bullet and rewritten the entire thing in PHP in the first place instead of doing what they did.
The big advantage of the ASP/VBScript version is that there were almost no dependencies and it would install on the most basic IIS setup. Many companies already had IIS installed and configured but not doing anything.
Getting companies to install PHP on Windows (a dicey position those days) was a non-starter.
I'm curious what kinds of additional features you'd be interested in here. In these comments so far I've heard code review, access control and online IDE. Would any of those be useful? What else would be useful?
GitHub has at least some good ideas in this area. Code review and issue tracking are nice, but everyone seems to want something different from those systems so I'm not sure how to do that in a reasonable way. Access control would be nice for deploys I guess?
I hope that someone really does make an online IDE that means I don't have to use a local IDE anymore, but I'm not certain how feasible that is. Atom seems like a giant step in the right direction.
Kids know the life style of how they are brought up and taught. At least until they reach an age where other influences seem more appealing...I wish I had a more unique upbringing than my normal, vanilla, typical upbringing.
