Actually, it has 256 megs of RAM and 768 megs of swap on an internal flash device.

I have done this and it is a nightmare. The software that supports the CrystalHD card is buggy as hell, the XBMC support for it is still not great, and the performance is still spotty (running the latest XBMC SVN builds and the latest CrystalHD code from svn). I can't get it to stream The Dark Knight without dropping frames, pausing/resuming causes all sorts of problems, and exiting out of a movie crashes XBMC half the time for me.

ION hardware is absolutely the way to go, no question about it.

"casual" is no fad. It's older than hardcore gaming. The first games were all casual games. PacMan is a casual game, as is Pong.

That's my point. You can't mix to entirely different things and expect to get something that appeals to people who like both. More likely, you're going to get something that appeals to an even smaller niche market.

That's like bridging the gap between coffee and coke. It's like bridging the gap between whiskey and wine. You are only going to create some crap that no one likes.

What needs to die is this attitude that what we need to do is make games that appeal to everyone, so that every person in the population buys it. That's stupid. It's chasing an impossible dream. You are far better off just making a good game that a certain set of people like. You can't appeal to everyone, so pick a genre, "casual", "hardcore" or whatever, and make something good in that genre. You aren't going to make a game that appeals to both grandma and Twitchy McFragerton, so stop trying. You're just going to end up with some crap that both grandma and Twitchy agree is worthless.

Maybe while they're at it, they can add in actually-useful error messages. See http://blog.llvm.org/2010/04/amazing-feats-of-clang-error-recovery.html for some examples. It's shocking how user-hostile GCC is in comparison.

You jumped right on the LLVM part, but apparently don't know what clang is. You should read about clang. http://clang.llvm.org/

No frakkin' way that would happen!

I was using scp mostly. Even ten years ago, I think I only ever used floppies for the stupid firmware update boot thing.

Yeah...when I cleaned out my attic five years ago, I tossed a bunch of never used 3.5 floppies.

The engine doesn't fall off of a plane of Boeing's colo burns down.

When I was 20, I would program 8-10 hours a day, then go home and code for 4-6 hours into the night.

Now I get distracted before an hour's coding is up. That's why I moved into management.

Personally, I use lastpass to do most of my logging in so I rarely type passwords. I have a screensaver set so that I never leave my machine unlocked. I use a Das Keyboard, which makes shoulder surfing difficult as does the fact that my password is well ingrained in finger memory, which means I can type it extremely quickly. And yes, I am very cognizant of who is around me when typing passwords...

Expiring a password in 30 days does fuck all for over the shoulder attacks because anyone who wants to do that is going to compromise your machine at the first opportunity. It's like assuming that sending people a new credit card every 30 days will somehow prevent identity theft.