Linkblogging for 30/09/08
Debi Linton has an excellent ‘beginners guide to Barbara Gordon’.
Beer made from bacteria from insects trapped in amber millions of years ago – I love science.
More serious science here – the annotation of human proteins has been completed. This is a far bigger thing than the human genome project.
A complaint about bloatware in free software. I have to agree with this – a lot of free programs written in very high-level languages like Python are absolute memory hogs. On my last laptop, if I tried to run a web browser, comic reader, bittorrent client and MP3 player at the same time my system would practically grind to a halt (and this was using IceWM, a lightweight window manager). It’s a truism that programmer time is more expensive than machine cycles, but one advantage people always give for GNU/Linux is that it runs well on older hardware, and that’s rapidly changing.
J.H. WIlliams is posting a page a day of his Jonah Hex issue. Williams is by far the best artist working in comics today, and every page of his rewards study.
Dougas Rushkoff talks about the fundamental problems with our monetary system. I don’t know enough about economics to know if I agree with his analysis, but it smells right.
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One of the things I like about the KDE project is that they’re making some efforts to keep system requirements down – part of the quality assurance for the project involves running applications remotely over high-latency connections to check that the user interface isn’t too “busy”, and it’s claimed that the new KDE 4 series has the same minimum specs as KDE 3.
As for one of the comments in the article – yes, I would expect OpenOffice.org to run nicely on an EeePC, and it’s a testament to the bad decisions made during the OOo 2 development phase (turning it into a Java/C++ hybrid to satisfy Sun) that it doesn’t.
That comment seemed absurd to me, too – *yes* I would expect the standard Office suite to run on *every single piece of hardware you throw it at*. Personally I very rarely touch that monstrosity – I use AbiWord and Gnumeric (although the current Debian unstable package of AbiWord, which I have on my machine, is broken so I use OOo right now…)
Well, I might not expect OOo to run on, say, a FreeRunner smartphone without some tweaking… but an EeePC 700 series is basically a low-end desktop sort of specification, which I’d expect to run OOo if it were in a desktop case rather than a UMPC form-factor.