Recent -K CPUs don't come with coolers as vocal enthusiasts have been telling Intel they just throw away the stock coolers and use third-party ones instead. You can buy Intel coolers separately for CPUs that aren't supplied with one.
You can buy Intel BXTS13A (air) and BXTS13X (liquid) coolers separately.
Or if you want to use passive or liquid cooling
Intel produce liquid coolers too: http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/CS-034340.htm
I tried a few different apps (Feedly, Vienna, RSS Feed Reader, Slick RSS) to replace Google Reader but didn't like any of them.
A couple of weeks ago I switched to The Old Reader [ http://theoldreader.com/ ] and I've been perfectly happy with it since.
At least it saved it getting stuck on the kerb/curb later.
Personally I'd like to have _all_ activity (audio, network, CPU, everything) stopped on every tab except the active one. If I want to be annoyed I can pop the tab into it's own window (or if someone cares to implement it - you could have per-tab controls).
Then go to the Parental Controls Preferences and disable the iTunes Store.
Wasn't too hard, was it?
I got some of those HA-FX67s for about £12 from a supermarket. I wasn't expecting much, but I think they're pretty darned good compared with the Sennheisers at a similar price point I've sworn by in the past. I mostly listen to rock and metal, and with a bit of scooped EQ, they sound pretty good. I suspect they'd work quite well for electronic/dance stuff too.
I picked up a pair of Goldring DR-150s for a bargain price of just under £30 a few years back; they're pretty good for at-home listening, but being open-backed are too anti-social to use whilst commuting etc.
The Sandy Bridge-E models are "enthusiast" CPUs, with the top version priced at $1000. Pretty sure the motivation here is that few enthusiasts use the stock cooler, so they figured they could omit it from expensive enthusiast-only CPUs without anybody raising much of a fuss. The money customers spend on a separate HSF is almost certainly going to go to companies like Thermaltake who build overclocker-style HSFs, not Intel.
I agree; that sounds like the most likely explanation, combined with a bit of obscuring inflation (in the same way food manufacturers are cutting package sizes/weights rather than increasing prices).
Incidentally, I've always used the stock Intel cooler that comes with their boxed CPUs and found them to be reliable and to cool the CPU completely adequately, even in a non-air-conditioned domestic environment. The only things that would drive me to third-party heatsinks would be if I wanted to overclock (I don't - I prefer a machine that I can rely upon to perform to specification at all times) or if I was building a completely silent/fanless machine (even my MythTV box has at least four fans in it, which I really don't notice, given the solidity of the Antec case).
But then the volume of a pizza of thickness 'a' and radius 'z' wouldn't be 'pi z z a' it would be 'tau z z a / 2'.
Emulation would have disadvantages compared with teaching on the actual hardware, but it also has advantages too; it's almost trivial for an emulator to provide In Circuit Emulation-like features, such as being able to snoop on IO, CPU register contents, pause execution etc. Back in the day, devices like the Multiface were the closest thing most people had to debug at the very lowest levels (though some of the POKEs hackers had access to rather more advanced semi-custom built kit).
And FWIW compiling with:
g++-fsf-4.4 smallpt.cpp -o smallpt -O3 -fopenmp -ffast-math -m64 -march=native -ftree-parallelize-loops=8 -funroll-all-loops
gives a runtime for smallpt 100 of 2m31s for my MacBook ("Early 2008" model).
Base 8 is just like base 10, if you are missing two fingers. -- Tom Lehrer
