A fair point. So I took your advice and followed the links to the actual article. It's actually much more interesting than the summary, so I thank you for leading me there. It seems the study was performed by extracting data from the East Flanders Prospective Twin Survey performed in Belgium on 310 pairs of twins between 7 and 15 years old. From the study:

"Mixed modeling was performed to investigate green space in association with intelligence and behavior while adjusting for potential confounding factors including sex, age, parental education, neighborhood household income, year of assessment, and zygosity and chorionicity."

So although they didn't have a direct measure of parent IQ, they attempted to account for it by assuming education+neighborhood = IQ. (A reasonable assumption, although one wonders in this era of social unrest if such a claim might be considered "racist"?)

The study also makes this statement:

"Children in low green areas are more likely (4.2% versus 0%) to have a total IQ of 80 or lower. Furthermore, although 11.9% of those living in a green area had IQ scores in the superior range (>125), only 4.2% of the children living in a low green area had scored in this range."

Maybe it's in there somewhere but what I couldn't find in the study is how many points were added or subtracted from the low-green versus high-green areas to bring them on an equal footing so the "greenicity" might be visible. That is, how much of the IQ difference is not due to green areas. But an interesting read and thanks again for steering me to the source.

Indeed. Perhaps the correlation is due to parents with higher IQs having higher paying jobs and choosing to live in greener areas? To claim that non-green living space lowers children's higher IQ you'd have to correct for this.

Wow! What an excellent set of articles. Many thanks for the post -- this is by far the best set of references I've seen on the topic.

This is just plain wrong -- data centers care very deeply about power consumption. Since data centers pack thousands of CPUs into warehouse-size rooms, even a single extra watt per CPU is a big deal. Higher power consumption means a greater power delivery requirement for the room, more cooling, a bigger UPS requirement, and a bigger power bill. Operating costs are driven by transactions per second per watt.

High performance computing and high-end desktops are pretty much the only remaining markets where power consumption is a secondary concern. This has not been true for data centers in a long time.

A microcode patch is included with the BIOS image and is loaded by BIOS at startup. This isn't the only way to do it -- it is also possible to load a patch from the O/S. But for most users the best solution is for BIOS to do this, and that means updating the BIOS image. So the article is correct.

The article shows this referenced professor uses the same type of reasoning used to "find" bias in police arrests -- that because the gifted/arrested distribution differs from the local populace, racial bias must be taking place.

Her arguments boil down to this:
1) The tests used to find gifted kids are culturally biased. (Without explaining what this means.)
2) Teacher recommendations are also used, and teachers are racially biased. (Without giving the racial composition of the teachers.)
3) The parents of rich kids can afford coaching not available to the poorer ones. (Without presenting any data on how prevalent this may be.)

Guess it never occurs to her that reality might be taking place?

But if no reputable scientists are saying that climate change is a death sentence, why do articles like the one below keep appearing? It's about Christiana Figueres, leader of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. It's titled, "The Woman Who Could Save Humanity".

http://www.realclearpolitics.c...

Sounds like what we really need is a tool to annotate extremists on both sides. Why does this tool do that?

Sigh. If you'd read the article, you'd understand why your statement makes no sense. Tom's Hardware goes on to note that Broadwell is ~5% faster than Haswell at the same clock speed. The reason Broadwell shows slightly lower performance on some benchmarks is that it's capable of dropping down to lower clock speeds to conserve power. But when performance is called for, Broadwell quickly ramps up to the same clock speed as it's predecessor. So for a sustained workload, Broadwell will be faster. It's only for those loads that frequently ramp up and down that Haswell comes out ahead.

So nothing is "stolen" from the CPU. Most of the extra gates proved by the 14nm process in which Broadwell is fabricated are used to enhance the GPU, which as noted by the reviews is now the fastest integrated graphics unit on the market. But nothing was taken from the CPU -- in fact, the CPU is enhanced to be 5% faster on a per clock basis and to also drop to lower frequencies when *idle*. If saving power isn't your thing you can always disable power features through either the bios or the O/S to keep the CPU at higher frequencies most of the time.

Dropping the CPU frequency to lower values when cores are inactive is an important feature in all modern CPUs. Many server customers care more about performance per watt than they do about raw performance. For laptops and handhelds, efficiency is critical. And even for desktops it's a nice feature.

You're mis-understanding the conclusion. Intel did not steal from CPU performance to improve the GPU, and in fact the cores on Broadwell are slightly more efficient than Haswell. Here's a quote from the Tom's Hardware article:

"As host processors, Core i5-5675C and Core i7-5775C should be marginally faster than Haswell-based CPUs at similar clock rates. The issue, of course, is that they employ lower frequencies than a number of previous-gen chips. So, they'll actually post lower scores in workloads that emphasize host processing (like the Sandra Arithmetic benchmark, above)."

Ah, but you're forgetting the impact on the server market. All those smart phones and tablets accessing the web drive the need for more servers. Guess who dominates the server market? There's a reason Intel keeps breaking revenue records every year.

Also, the PC market is far from dead. Despite periodic predictions of its demise, PC shipments picked up last year and modest growth is predicted for 2015.

There are several data sets that suggest the presence of Dark Matter:
    1) Orbital velocities of galaxies within a cluster are too high -- the galaxies should fly apart unless much more mass is present.
    2) Observed rotational velocities of edge-on galaxies are wrong: stars near the edge rotate too fast -- unless there's a cloud of mass beyond the observed disk.
    3) Gravitational lensing effects are too strong for the observed mass of the lensing clusters.
    4) Numerical simulations modeling the Big Bang up to present times work well only if Dark Matter is assumed.

There may be other data sets, but these are the ones that were presented in the Coursera class I took last year titled, "Galaxies and Cosmology".

Amazing. Everything you said about HT is completely wrong. Where ever did you get this information?

Intel's hyperthreading consists of two logical processors sharing the same compute resources. Each logical processor has its own register set but shares decoders, adders, shifters, cache, etc. as it goes about executing its assigned thread. The sharing process is vastly more complex and efficient than you seem to think -- there's no alternating of cycles. Once instructions are decoded into uops, they flow through the pipeline in a dynamic fashion that sometimes leads to one thread using most of the resources while the other one waits. In fact, this is a big advantage of the design -- when one thread stalls from a cache miss, the other one uses all the resources until the first thread's memory access completes. A much better plan than your scheme of using only even/odd cycles.

Managing this process is not simple, and steps must be taken to avoid both deadlocks and livelocks as the two threads compete for resources. But the process is dynamic -- the design allows one thread to run unimpeded when it makes sense to do so, while still preventing one thread from being starved at the other's expense. But this "every other cycle" notion of yours is pure nonsense. The core can retire up to four uops per cycle, and at times these all come from the same thread.

Oh yeah? Picture this: Luke Skywalker's son flying off to be trained in the ways of the force by an aging Jar-Jar Binks. After stopping on the way to pick up Chewbacca's son. On Life Day.

Bet that's the scariest thought you'll have this Halloween.

Actually, the "best gaming CPU for the money" article to which you refer only gives the FX-4170 a rating of "Honorable Mention". These are Tom's Hardware recommendations for gaming CPUs at varying price points (from the July version of the article):

~$70: Pentium G630
$100: Pentium G870
$110: None (FX-4170 Honorable Mention)
$125: Core i3-2120
$180: Core i5-2310
$200: Core i5-3450
$230: Core i5-3570K
$590: Core i7-3930K

Sadly, the best desktop CPU AMD has to offer is bested by the lowly Core i3, and is crushed by any of the Core i5s.

Contrary to your assumptions, mini-floodlights are in fact commonly used indoors. A quick check at the websites for Lowes or Home Depot demonstrates this clearly. In fact, the fixtures into which I placed CFL mini-flood lights were explicitly designed for indoor mini-floods and held incandescent mini-floods at the time. Your assertion that the lights are used incorrectly is, quite simply, wrong. Perhaps you should tell GE and Phillips (among others) that their CFL mini-floodlights are a "f-ing stupid idea" -- they seem to have no qualms about making and selling them.

A casual perusal of a pro-CFL site makes the following statement with regards to CFL statup times:

    "Only the flood light styles start at noticeably less than full illumination, but within 20 to 30 seconds they are at over 80% illumination."

My experience is that this is an understatement -- it takes mine at least a full minute to reach 80% illumination and they don't hit 100% until about two minutes. I've read from other sources that the start up times tend to deteriorate over time, so perhaps that accounts for the difference. But the simple fact remains your assertion that all modern CFLs start up instantly is wrong. Even pro-CFL sites admit as much.

Maybe the fact that you "always end up in this sort of discussions" is due to your refusal to accept the facts of the situation?