“Male Kind” Eggs

As some of you reading this may know, there has been a video and discussion doing the rounds on the internet about how male chicks are killed at birth by the egg industry. What happens is that when the old batch of egg laying hens are retired from egg production, they need to be replaced by new hens. A male chicken is introduced to the flock so fertilized eggs are lain and the eggs are incubated and hatched. At this point the chicks are sorted into two groups, male and female. The female chicks go on to become egg layers whilst the male chicks are KILLED. The guidelines say they should be gassed but the video and discussion has suggested often their deaths are much more horrific.

Here is a piece on this in The Independent

Here is a Guardian piece about Ethical Eggs

To stop this cruelty I am proposing a new kind of category of egg. At the moment we have categories such as caged, barn raised and free range. Perhaps the new category could be called “male kind”. What would it entail? Well, in “male kind” eggs, the male chicks are not killed but kept alive!

What is done with them then? Well, they are moved to a farm where they can roam free and live a free range life! They are simply left to live. They will be fed, watered and given shelter in the same way a normal free range laying hen would be!

Wont this be expensive?  A little. I think that there are approximately as many male chicks born as females so for every female chicken that is housed and fed there would have to be a male chicken housed and fed. This should almost exactly double the price! that’s all.

I think an egg at double the price of a normal egg, but where you know that no chicks are cruelly killed to produce it would be so worth it.

If you feel the same then please sign my petition Sign here

Linux Browser Comparison Feb 2017

Presented below are the combined benchmarks of the 10 most popular browsers on Linux. These are (as tested) Arora 0.11.0, Vivaldi 1.6.689.46, Chrome 55.0.2883.87, Chromium 55.0.2883.8, Dooble 0.07, Firefox 51.0.1, Midori 0.5.11,  Netsurf 3.2, Opera 42.0.2393.94, Rekonq 2.4.2 and finally for comparison I tested Internet Explorer 11.0.9600.17041 on Windows.

I ran 6 main benchmarks most of which consisted of multiple parts. The benchmarks were:

• BMark  a benchmark testing the graphics capabilities of the browser.
• HTML5 compliance test.  a test that measures out of 555 how many HTML5 features the browser supports.
• Jetstream  a comprehensive JavaScript benchmark consisting of multiple tests.
• MotionMark  another graphics test, testing more advanced features.
• Speedometer  a general HTML/JavaScript benchmark.
• RAM test. I created a 15MB HTML file consisting of graphics, text and JavaScript. I then loaded it into 10 tabs (all browsers supported multiple tabs) and measured how much RAM was being used by each browser process.

The testing methodology was to close all other applications, open browser, load the page, let it settle, then run the nechmark. The test rig* was the same for each browser.

The results for each browser is presented in the table below. A 0 indicated that the browser was unable to run that benchmark. Higher scores are better.

Browser	Bmark	RAM	HTML5 standard	Jetstream	motion	speedtest
vivaldi 1.6.689.46	1670	826.2	505	110.3	173.83	73.01
chromium 55.0.2883.87	1571	899.1	505	111.69	163.77	67.81
firefox 51.0.1	1287	584.9	471	98.596	42.65	36.6
chrome 55.0.2883.87	1105	693.7	507	110.53	188.45	74.2
opera     42.0.2393.94	993	647.9	500	111.19	198.37	72.75
Arora 0.11.0	985	776.2	322	77.84	0	45.68
rekonq 2.4.2	500	299.8	279	67.129	0	41.1
dooble 0.07.	496	235.8	263	66.775	0	0
midori 0.5.11	384	498.3	319	81.298	0	47.51
windows IE 11.0.9600.17041	139	916.184	302	57.449	0	27.1
netsurf 3.2	0	832.2	0	0	0	0

I took the table and normalized the results so they were all on a scale of 0 to 1, I then added each browsers individual scores together to create the final graph.

The browsers seem to be split into two main groups. The big web kit based browsers , Firefox and the smaller lesser well known browsers. Most browsers could run all the tests, however, the smaller ones could not always manage MotionMark. Netsurf as an outlier could only manage to run one test, which was RAM.

Conclusion

The browser that performed best overall was Vivaldi, just edging out Opera and Chrome. Firefox came halfway between the heavyweight browsers and the smaller browser projects. Note that the most memory efficient browser was Dooble, which used around a quarter of the RAM (235MB) as the chromium (899MB). For interest I also bench marked Internet Explorer 11 on the same system running windows server 2008. Apart from Netsurf (which hasn’t been updated since 2009) it came last.

I think the most interesting take away is that the main webkit browsers are useful if you have a powerful machine with plenty of resources since they can run all tests, are highly HTML5 compliant and fast. If however you are short of RAM then perhaps Dooble or ReKonq would be a better fit.

Cleerline

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• Test rig
• System: Host: cleerline-mint Kernel: 4.4.0-53-generic x86_64 (64 bit)
•            Desktop: Cinnamon 3.2.7  Distro: Linux Mint 18.1 Serena
• Machine: Mobo: ASRock model: 970 Pro3 R2.0
•           Bios: American Megatrends v: P1.50 date: 10/02/2013
• CPU:   Quad core AMD Phenom II X4 965 (-MCP-) cache: 2048 KB
•           clock speeds: max: 3400 MHz 1: 800 MHz 2: 2200 MHz 3: 2200 MHz
•           4: 800 MHz
• Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA GT200 [GeForce GTX 260]
•           Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: nouveau (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
•           Resolution: 1920×1200@59.94hz
• RAM: 8GB