I see you're quite a good conversationalist; you must be quite a blast at parties. No, the claim that Javascript interpreter speed may have a role in browser performance is not easily testable because the author lumped different versions of the browsers together. It's possible that some obscure intermediary version of Firefox, for example, had an exceptionally poor performance, and that this skewed the data. I have in fact determined that Aurora 12.0a2 seems to have no performance difference between IE 8 on my laptop, but this does not necessarily mean, either, that IE 6 performance is entirely ignorable. Given the statistics for overall browser usage it would be exceptionally improbable that these have an overwhelming role in confounding results, but the landscape could still be measurably different as a result. Given that Javascript engine performance has increased dramatically as a priority for browser manufacturers in the past five years, this data incorporates information from a very broad set of configurations.
At any rate, I find it very disappointing that you chose to focus entirely on one statement about Javascript engines and not consider the rest of my post, or the larger significance of the point I was making. Instead you chose to attack (and violently, I might add) one relatively arbitrary theory when you could have contributed by gently stating any objections, before positing your own.
Here is an example of how to make a rebuttal correctly, for future reference: "over the span of a million data points from across the planet, it seems unlikely that network latency would have presented a bias towards one browser or another, particularly since the differences are on the order of magnitude of several dozen seconds, the application does not need to talk to the server for the player's experience to continue. To produce the kinds of bias observed given the nature of the application, Firefox users would have to be several times further from the Earth than the moon."
Perhaps the phenomenal absurdity of your suggestion explains why none of us are capable of thinking of it. Unless you meant to say network bandwidth, as in "IE users are all on dial-up, which is why they haven't spent the time to download a more secure browser, and it actually takes them 30 seconds to download the page," in which case I sincerely hope your entire post was made in jest, and that you have something better to do than make condescending remarks about intellect.
Of course, this doesn't disprove the leading theory, which is that the analysis is total garbage. The number of potential mitigating factors (e.g. "Hey look, solving a browser-based puzzle game reflects the speed of the browser's javascript interpreter!") and alternative hypotheses (such as "IE users haven't invested time in changing their browsers, therefore they aren't interested in investing time to do stuff with their computers in general...") are just too numerous. We can write this story off, entirely, as denigrating propaganda. But maybe that should be expected.
Then to avoid that contradiction, I propose a new hypothesis: IE users are the most likely to have something better to do than sit around all day solving puzzles. I think this really more suggests that Chrome users are the most bored.
Actually, the data were normalized against the Chrome speed for each category. That's not 100 seconds you're looking at, that's 100 percent of the Chrome rate. It's a weird way of displaying a graph, but if the author hadn't done it then the bars for the larger puzzle sizes would have (presumably) dwarfed the smaller ones, resulting in a loss of visible precision. I guess the more standard solution, using a logarithmic scale, either didn't occur to the author or was for some reason infeasible.
Oh boy, do I ever. The one really remarkable thing about humans is the tendency to in-fight; internal arms races much moreso than any external evolutionary pressure have made us what we are.
It didn't. There were at least two non-canonical TOS technical manuals, but Sternbach and Okuda were pretty pioneering as far as on-staff nerdistry is concerned.
Ew. No thanks. Humans are hereby "it" from now on. (After all, if you're too lazy to pick a gender or spell out the options, is this person you're talking about really a person?)
No, the female pronoun is frequently the default when the author is giving an example and is too lazy to say "he/she" or some permutation thereof. This replaces the former ubiquitous use of male pronouns amongst the sort of people who are committed to appearing as progressive as possible, and should be read as "trying too hard to impress feminists."
Personally, I'm waiting for the obligatory xkcd so I can really start grinding my teeth. It will presumably be posted in one of the side-conversations about Python, since there isn't really a strong one about Javascript.
Your signature is inspiring. Also, if you would like to relive your PDP-8 days, click here for a comprehensive re-enactment. (The part of Digital Equipment Corporation will be played by Larry Ellison for the duration of this production.)
Scratch not so darling. Maybe for the first couple of videos, but then what? Personally, I think the decision to go with JS was a good compromise. This should prove to be the exact opposite of going with Java, which actively drove students away by being too formal for a first date.
I believe you're missing the "evil supervillain holding the world for ransom by manipulating bugs" part. In 5,408 security breaches, surely someone found the password? And has a target in mind that they'd like to drop a space station on?
I think that part has to be done at the time when whatever in question is being manufactured—this isn't going to be like glue you can squirt on stuff. It'll be physically linked to the object instead. Otherwise you'd just be attaching a super-strong glue with a weaker one, which kinda defeats the point.:)
That's news to me. Although this says "it comes as no surprise that a leaked Stratfor client list included a large number of subscribers from the US foreign policy and military bureaucracies." (True, it's not a big contract.)
I didn't say that they were immune. I didn't even mention them. However, unlike over-bloated defence budgets (and let's be honest now, they're offence budgets), there is a small chance that some budget increases may have legitimate substance to them. As someone making a staunchly nihilist claim I realise you're probably opposed to dealing with the concept of any government other than pure anarchism or anarcho-capitalism, but please try to understand that grown-ups sometimes express cynicism too, and that when they do so it is not an invitation to leap into the middle of everything for a few yuk-yuks.
Agreed, Stratfor is hardly the biggest offence in terms of budget misappropriation, although the evidence is highly in favour of the 'no money should be spent on this at all' label, and suggests that the intelligence community is gathering huge amounts of unnecessary data because they have no idea what they need. (We have a similar problem in bioinformatics, but ours isn't caused by baseless paranoia.) Budget-wise, the really scary disasters are things like TRAILBLAZER (also mentioned in the article) which are heavily protected from scrutiny through their deep classification. You might further find the connected story of Thomas Drake interesting.
Apparently you didn't read the article, so you may want to reduce that last sentence to "terrible summary." TFA is about how some of the work Stratfor has done is total crap, and how the intelligence budget is nothing but cronyism hidden behind classification. Their surveillance on the Yes Men, for example, goes no further than publicly-available information provided by the Yes Men, and a substantial chunk of other work is just Google Translate output on news articles.
Reminder: any time you see a budget increase for defence purposes, there's some kind of pork or corruption behind it.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's your evidence; please jump off a cliff at the next opportunity. (FWIW, everything Apple was suing over in that suit, they stole from Xerox.)
I see you're quite a good conversationalist; you must be quite a blast at parties. No, the claim that Javascript interpreter speed may have a role in browser performance is not easily testable because the author lumped different versions of the browsers together. It's possible that some obscure intermediary version of Firefox, for example, had an exceptionally poor performance, and that this skewed the data. I have in fact determined that Aurora 12.0a2 seems to have no performance difference between IE 8 on my laptop, but this does not necessarily mean, either, that IE 6 performance is entirely ignorable. Given the statistics for overall browser usage it would be exceptionally improbable that these have an overwhelming role in confounding results, but the landscape could still be measurably different as a result. Given that Javascript engine performance has increased dramatically as a priority for browser manufacturers in the past five years, this data incorporates information from a very broad set of configurations.
At any rate, I find it very disappointing that you chose to focus entirely on one statement about Javascript engines and not consider the rest of my post, or the larger significance of the point I was making. Instead you chose to attack (and violently, I might add) one relatively arbitrary theory when you could have contributed by gently stating any objections, before positing your own.
Here is an example of how to make a rebuttal correctly, for future reference: "over the span of a million data points from across the planet, it seems unlikely that network latency would have presented a bias towards one browser or another, particularly since the differences are on the order of magnitude of several dozen seconds, the application does not need to talk to the server for the player's experience to continue. To produce the kinds of bias observed given the nature of the application, Firefox users would have to be several times further from the Earth than the moon."
Perhaps the phenomenal absurdity of your suggestion explains why none of us are capable of thinking of it. Unless you meant to say network bandwidth, as in "IE users are all on dial-up, which is why they haven't spent the time to download a more secure browser, and it actually takes them 30 seconds to download the page," in which case I sincerely hope your entire post was made in jest, and that you have something better to do than make condescending remarks about intellect.
(To date, no empirical study has validated this claim.)
Here we go, found the actual data in the paper:
browser: 4x4 5x5 6x6
Internet Explorer: 30.9, 73.4, 262
Firefox: 29.4, 70.2, 245
Chrome: 22.0, 61.1, 233
Of course, this doesn't disprove the leading theory, which is that the analysis is total garbage. The number of potential mitigating factors (e.g. "Hey look, solving a browser-based puzzle game reflects the speed of the browser's javascript interpreter!") and alternative hypotheses (such as "IE users haven't invested time in changing their browsers, therefore they aren't interested in investing time to do stuff with their computers in general...") are just too numerous. We can write this story off, entirely, as denigrating propaganda. But maybe that should be expected.
Then to avoid that contradiction, I propose a new hypothesis: IE users are the most likely to have something better to do than sit around all day solving puzzles. I think this really more suggests that Chrome users are the most bored.
Actually, the data were normalized against the Chrome speed for each category. That's not 100 seconds you're looking at, that's 100 percent of the Chrome rate. It's a weird way of displaying a graph, but if the author hadn't done it then the bars for the larger puzzle sizes would have (presumably) dwarfed the smaller ones, resulting in a loss of visible precision. I guess the more standard solution, using a logarithmic scale, either didn't occur to the author or was for some reason infeasible.
But how do you knooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow?
(All tin foil based headwear products 50% off, this Sunday only!)
Oh boy, do I ever. The one really remarkable thing about humans is the tendency to in-fight; internal arms races much moreso than any external evolutionary pressure have made us what we are.
It didn't. There were at least two non-canonical TOS technical manuals, but Sternbach and Okuda were pretty pioneering as far as on-staff nerdistry is concerned.
Ew. No thanks. Humans are hereby "it" from now on. (After all, if you're too lazy to pick a gender or spell out the options, is this person you're talking about really a person?)
No, the female pronoun is frequently the default when the author is giving an example and is too lazy to say "he/she" or some permutation thereof. This replaces the former ubiquitous use of male pronouns amongst the sort of people who are committed to appearing as progressive as possible, and should be read as "trying too hard to impress feminists."
Aha! Once again, the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor!
Yeah, that would be the consequences of substituting Oracle for DEC.
Q: How does a field engineer replace a flat?
A: By switching tires out one at a time until the car can drive smoothly again.
Q: How does a field engineer refill a gas tank?
A: By switching tires out one at a time until the car can drive smoothly again.
Personally, I'm waiting for the obligatory xkcd so I can really start grinding my teeth. It will presumably be posted in one of the side-conversations about Python, since there isn't really a strong one about Javascript.
Your signature is inspiring. Also, if you would like to relive your PDP-8 days, click here for a comprehensive re-enactment. (The part of Digital Equipment Corporation will be played by Larry Ellison for the duration of this production.)
Scratch not so darling. Maybe for the first couple of videos, but then what? Personally, I think the decision to go with JS was a good compromise. This should prove to be the exact opposite of going with Java, which actively drove students away by being too formal for a first date.
I believe you're missing the "evil supervillain holding the world for ransom by manipulating bugs" part. In 5,408 security breaches, surely someone found the password? And has a target in mind that they'd like to drop a space station on?
I think that part has to be done at the time when whatever in question is being manufactured—this isn't going to be like glue you can squirt on stuff. It'll be physically linked to the object instead. Otherwise you'd just be attaching a super-strong glue with a weaker one, which kinda defeats the point. :)
That's correct. Nothing to see here; move along.
(This means you.)
That's news to me. Although this says "it comes as no surprise that a leaked Stratfor client list included a large number of subscribers from the US foreign policy and military bureaucracies." (True, it's not a big contract.)
I didn't say that they were immune. I didn't even mention them. However, unlike over-bloated defence budgets (and let's be honest now, they're offence budgets), there is a small chance that some budget increases may have legitimate substance to them. As someone making a staunchly nihilist claim I realise you're probably opposed to dealing with the concept of any government other than pure anarchism or anarcho-capitalism, but please try to understand that grown-ups sometimes express cynicism too, and that when they do so it is not an invitation to leap into the middle of everything for a few yuk-yuks.
Agreed, Stratfor is hardly the biggest offence in terms of budget misappropriation, although the evidence is highly in favour of the 'no money should be spent on this at all' label, and suggests that the intelligence community is gathering huge amounts of unnecessary data because they have no idea what they need. (We have a similar problem in bioinformatics, but ours isn't caused by baseless paranoia.) Budget-wise, the really scary disasters are things like TRAILBLAZER (also mentioned in the article) which are heavily protected from scrutiny through their deep classification. You might further find the connected story of Thomas Drake interesting.
Apparently you didn't read the article, so you may want to reduce that last sentence to "terrible summary." TFA is about how some of the work Stratfor has done is total crap, and how the intelligence budget is nothing but cronyism hidden behind classification. Their surveillance on the Yes Men, for example, goes no further than publicly-available information provided by the Yes Men, and a substantial chunk of other work is just Google Translate output on news articles.
Reminder: any time you see a budget increase for defence purposes, there's some kind of pork or corruption behind it.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
ALL: They won't!
Presumably the trouble arises when you need to hire someone to keep score for you.