Links from 2012-10-21

Chefs in a city under siege - Charlie’s Diary

News—I use the word to describe the news distribution media—is not about informing us about newsworthy events going on around us. Rather, it’s about delivering captive eyeballs to advertisers who in turn pay the news media the money they need in order to keep on doing what it is that they do, which is to say, making a profit.

Voyager: the space explorers that are still boldly going to the stars | Science | The Observer

The year 1977 was an important one for music. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks were released. Elvis left the building for the last time, dying at the age of only 42. But amid all this rock’n’roll history another less celebrated but far more significant album was quietly being made. Fashioned from copper rather than vinyl, and plated with gold for longevity,The Sounds Of Earth was compiled by the American astronomer Carl Sagan. It was a broader range of music than most of the other albums released that year, aiming to encapsulate 5,000 years of human culture; from an Australian Aborigine song and an Indian raga to Azerbaijani bagpipes, bamboo flutes, Bach, Beethoven and Chuck Berry.

The Future of Microprocessors | May 2011 | Communications of the ACM

In the next two decades, diminishing transistor-speed scaling and practical energy limits create new challenges for continued performance scaling. As a result, the frequency of operations will increase slowly, with energy the key limiter of performance, forcing designs to use large-scale parallelism, heterogeneous cores, and accelerators to achieve performance and energy efficiency. Software-hardware partnership to achieve efficient data orchestration is increasingly critical in the drive toward energy-proportional computing. Our aim here is to reflect and project the macro trends shaping the future of microprocessors and sketch in broad strokes where processor design is going. We enumerate key research challenges and suggest promising research directions. Since dramatic changes are coming, we also seek to inspire the research community to invent new ideas and solutions address how to sustain computing’s exponential improvement.

Tagged as: delicious, links | Author: Martin Leyrer
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