Partitioning vs Federation vs Sharding : More or less covey the same concept, although subtle differences exist.
Ramblings in Realtime : Michael Abrash's classic ranting derived from his work on Quake 1's software renderer with John Carmack. While I am at it, I am reading this book ( Professional Assembly Language Programming) which comes with a nice chapter on the 'basics' of the IA-32 platform ( core parts of the processor, registers etc ). To this day, I am still somewhat surprised most people who are into 'serious' programming seem to lack the motivation to learn how the hardware they are building their stuff on really works ( and this extends to to the lowest levels of the OS chains etc ).
The new 7 wonders : in full 360degrees viewing glory.
While I am at it, I am reading this book ( Professional Assembly Language Programming) which comes with a nice chapter on the 'basics' of the IA-32 platform ( core parts of the processor, registers etc ). To this day, I am still somewhat surprised most people who are into 'serious' programming seem to lack the motivation to learn how the hardware they are building their stuff on really works ( and this extends to to the lowest levels of the OS chains etc ).
That's because there is very little 'serious' programming done nowadays. And even when it does, it is not necessary or required to be familiar with assembly.
Having said that, most CS and EE students are exposed to low-level PIC/΅P programing, at least they were last time I checked/was one. From that point on, getting to grips with assembly, learning the intricacies of a new platform, becoming comfortable with it, takes a long time and considerable effort and it's rarely beneficial. Sure, that 5% in which it might be actually useful is critical in some fields (Defence/Aerospace, small parts of Systems programming, Gaming, Embedded), but the fact that these are just a small part of the overall development output per unit of time, it goes a long way to explain why not many people have any motivation to familiarise themselves with it.
Personally, while I got exposed and wrote in assembly at a generally young age, it has been a long time since I last used it. I still occasionally take the time to play around with PowerPC assembly, mostly in the form of dissecting applications on my Mac, just for the sake of old times. I haven't touched IA32 assembly code for years and I'd probably need some time refreshing my memory before I could do something useful. Seeing how cheap processing power is and how complex the layering upon layering paradigm has become, I'm not surprised why people are quite keen on ignoring what's happening under the hood. And while it may be unfortunately, there's always some people that will actually take the time and deal with it, while others are content writing their software in Python, Ruby or Java or even C/C++. Each to their own I guess :)
Hmm, I expected the blockquote tag to work. It doesn't. The first paragraph in my comment above is a quotation from your article. You may fix it if you wish and remove this comment while you're at it :)