Is the math in this article entirely wrong, or am I just crazy??

For True-False exams for example, the number subtracted would most likely be (Number Wrong ÷ 2). Let's see how that would work out, for the sample case above. You, answering two questions correctly and guessing at 98 would be likely, on the average, to get 49 wrong, and so have a final score of 2 + 49 - (49 ÷ 2), or 75.5, while I, again on the average. answering only 1 correctly and guessing at 97, would get a final score of 1 + (97 ÷ 2) - ((97 ÷ 2) ÷ 2)), which comes out to be 25.25. Here there is a substantial difference between our scores, closer to the two-fold difference in our actual knowledge.

2 + 49 - (49 / 2) is equal to 26.5, NOT 75.5 . . . he added it in one case and not in the other. So the actual scores that should be compared are 26.5 to 25.25. The disparity he saw was entirely from a lack of capability at arithmetic. And in all his examples, the numbers are so close not because of a lack of quality in the testing methods, but because his hypotheticals are so extreme (someone who only knows the answer to 2 questions out of 100 is ridiculous). That said, subtracting for wrong answers is still the most accurate way to grade, but not based on the crap that this guy was talking about.

"64 bit is nice, but I doubt the chip will be more powerful than an x86 chip at twice speed."

Where do you get twice the speed? Do you mean twice the _clock speed_? Clock speeds really, really, absolutley, do not determine speed or performance. Did you know that a P4 takes 20 clock cycles to perform a multiply? You can chop up your instructions as much as you want, and increase the clock to hell, but not change performance at all.

The chip IBM is making is a mips based chip, and takes fewer cycles to perform all its instructions. It also has a _ton_ more registers, which means you can perform significant operations without going to or from memory.

Reading or writing a number to memory is about 100 times slower than an arithmatic instruction.

"Nowadays, most CPUs (including x86) have 64bit floating point coprocessors to handle most mathematical code, so 64bit CPUs won't give you much of an improvement there either."

But to use those coprocessors, you have to go into modes like mmx. And bolted on extra instructions like mmx have restrictions on them, like not being to do mmx and floating point math at the same time.

For the future, 64-bit is the way to go, and x86 is not. I think one of these IBM processors will be the ideal linux machine. (It'll be low power too, so I won't need a hairdrier-loud fan like I do with my athlon :) )