I've recently become interested in this area myself, so I was surprised to see an article on fast booting. I was hoping the comments would by chance happen to answer some of the questions I have regarding the topic, but they have not, so my next best bet is to ask. I know plenty of you will say that fast booting is not important. I'll admit do care a little bit about boot times, but I'm mainly interested from an academic point of view and am using this to try to learn a little more about how Linux works.

I'd like to put together a very fast booting Linux system, composed of just the bare minimum needed to be able to run something like BusyBox. I've googled this topic and have found things like Linux From Scratch, but as far as I can tell these seem to have their own software on which you base whatever you're building. I was under the impression that all you need to boot is a file system, the Linux kernel, an initrd and then userland software for whatever you want to run. I've read that initrd isn't even needed if you compile SATA drivers into the kernel and maybe some other things. In fact I would say that another aim is to boot without using initrd at all, I only intend to use this on my computer for a bit of fun.

Are there any websites that contain a minimal list of things required to get Linux to boot? I could be horribly wrong on a lot of this, in which case I look forward to being corrected.

What I find to be "radical" is that you expect the average person cares enough about typing efficiency to go through the effort of learning a new keyboard layout.

I care, so I learnt Dvorak, but don't expect the rest of the world to care.

SSD may not be in high demand from the average consumer for desktops, but they are in demand for portable devices, and I can only see demand increasing. It is this demand that will encourage future development in SSD technology, the benefits of which will be available for desktop SSD.

To keep the game interesting, my friends and I impose our own restrictions on gameplay to make it tougher or to force us to play with unusual tactics. An example of this is all four survivors using pistol only for the entire campaign. Our current favourite is doing Left 4 Dead speed runs, we're working on passing all each of the four maps on expert in 20 minutes or less. With restrictions like that in place, it doesn't really matter if you know the maps or not (actually, knowing all the maps by heart is essential). Each game we play is pretty unique, some involving three people in spectator mode cheering on the lone survivor making a solo dash for the safe room. The game certainly isn't routine when played like this, because it requires you to be at the top of your game to get the best possible time, the same can't be said for sitting in a closet easily disposing of a few waves of horde and two tanks. To get longevity out of Left 4 Dead you have to play it competitively rather than merely fighting to survive like an intelligent person might suggest in a zombie apocalypse.

You mean n*(n+1)/2.

It is expensive right now, but it was well worth it the weekend it was half price. I wouldn't have bought it at the current price not really knowing what I was getting, but the amount of fun I've had playing it is easily worth the full price in my opinion.

But 2009 will be Year of the Linux Tasmanian Devil Desktop.

The best bit about being able to ssh into the computers at university is the ability to set up a reverse ssh tunnel (ssh -R). My university doesn't just hand out free internet access, so this is the easiest solution. It also works well to combine this with tinyproxy.

You should note that I suggested that USA should change to the metric system, not that they should just start using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. I also made a point about how I do not consider Celsius to be a real metric unit, nor do I consider the litre to be one.

The rest of the world uses the metric system, that by itself should be enough to encourage you to change. I believe that metric is used in most scientific situations in the USA (though poorly, with cubic centimetres and other things). Being able to 'eyeball' metric units is still useful in these situations, it gives you a means of verifying answers. USA should make the change so that its citizens can develop a metric intuition.

Being nerds, you shouldn't defend an inferior system just because you're used to it. If a single generation could just put up with the pain of switching to the metric system, then that generation and every generation after that would receive the benefits. It's definitely a lot easier that saving the planet for them.

I agree that we should be using Kelvin and I would also like to replace all uses of litre with cubic metres. On the same subject, please stop using square/cubic centimetres. I would rather always work with standard units than memorise that it manages to come out correct for certain formulae, then needing to convert it for use with others.

I find it particularly hard to get a campaign going with my friends. It takes ages to find a server and sometimes gives us servers where our ping is above 100ms. I think this is due to most of the local servers being set up for both versus and campaign, but they default to versus so the lobby doesn't find them.

I've now taken to finding the IP of the servers manually and saving them on my computer. Now when we want to play, I open console and 'connect ip:port', then call a vote to start a campaign to get it off versus.

Actually, it's quite likely they do. The beauty of software patents.

Steam seems to still use Internet Explorer for some things. I removed IE with nLite and can easily see where Steam tries to use it. TF2 also has major problems and it forces the game to minimise and presents a dialogue asking me if I want to download an html file, it then takes 20 seconds to get back into the game. I wish there was some way to stop TF2 from making any attempts to use a browser, but I haven't found one yet.