Overbite in web pages

I'm probably dating myself when I remember (wistfully) the old Dr. Dobb's Journal slogan "Running light without overbite."  Certainly these days, in many parts of the high tech industry,  I don't see a lot of care and attention to load generated by this or that feature.

I returned to my desktop earlier this morning to find the fans cranked up and the cpu spinning at something like 50% load. I wasn't running anything in particular on the machine, no background compiles going on. No, I tracked this down to two web pages with some active content of some kind that I'd casually left open. The pages were: viewing an article on www.economist.com (about 15% cpu); and a friend's blog www.rklau.com/tins/ (bounces between 12-40% cpu).

Remember when 'engineer' was a verb?

en•gi•neer  vt  to contrive or plan out, usually with subtle skill or craft
en•gi•neer•ing  n  the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and sources of energy are made useful to systems

Amusingly, when writing this note I visited ddj.com. It too loaded up a pile of crap, including a video with sound. Boy how DDJ has changed! And I guess (from the video) they don't see their apparent developer audience as populating cube farms.