Which software gets the 'least respect?'

During one of this week's sunny afternoons it was good to see the two Mike's at the Intel Ridgepointe office RPT1-3. Sightings of other humans on cubicle-land is rare in this post-COVID WFH generation. Our gathering in the corner reminded us of a ritual we started in 2000, namely getting coffee in the corner on the 4th floor of the DuPont Intel site DP2-4. The decoder ring is 'site | building #-floor #'. 

We cannot really reprise the event at DuPont given recent history of the site mentioned in http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-march-of-time.html. 

For the above picture, I'm on the left, Mike Kinney is in the middle, and Mike Rothman in on the right.

Kinney way back machine of IDF 2003

Rothman way back machine of BB 2006.

Back in the early 2000's when we had a coffee corner in DuPont, Mark Doran was a fixture, too. Sadly Mark's commute to the new office is pretty challenging given the eastside of Seattle traffic, so we grafted him into the above image to reproduce the quartet as a virtual attendee.

Here's a way back for Mark

https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/portal/help/architecture/idfefi.pdf

https://masters.donntu.ru/2020/fknt/yakubov/library/article9.pdf 

It doesn't look like we have many prezos or papers w/ all 4 of our names, but there are a few items like

These couple of drop-e's reminded me of my favorite paper w/ the drop-e that'll be 20-years old next January.

So speaking of firmware and history, rewind to 2012 when I presented at ToorCamp on UEFI, as mentioned in http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2012/08/one-conference-down-one-to-go.html.

On one of the earlier slides in the deck I joked about how firmware gets 'no respect' in the slide below.

Why no respect? Well, hardware teams assume firmware is 'software' and the software teams look at the firmware folks as members of the 'hardware' clan. Rodney Dangerfield provided the ideal quotation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCVR_ajL_Eo https://www.amazon.com/I-Dont-Get-No-Respect/dp/0843101938 that inspired the slide.

This is one of my favorite quotes about firmware, along with the original IA64 platform manager in DuPont who provided me https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-0070-4 in the late 1990's.

Hale & I were definitely in the 'firmware is software' camp in the 2010 prezo associated with the paper http://masters.donntu.ru/2020/fknt/yakubov/library/article6.pdf "Firmware is software so can suffer well known software ills."

So why am I talking about Rodney Dangerfield in 2023? I suspect the Youtube and TikTok generation won't recognize the allusion. The reason comes from a recent event.  Namely, when I visited  https://www.cs.washington.edu/events/colloquia/details?id=3305   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL4H1ct_-dI talk this week

I couldn't help but smile at the oration during the 2:00 minute mark. 

Pat Hanrahan mentioned that when he won his Turing Award https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/hanrahan_4652251.cfm, his congratulatory message from UW Ed Lazowska (the attendee sitting immediately in front of Pat H) read something like "Congratulations on your award for computer graphics which is the 'Rodney Dangerfield' of computer science." If Pat Hanrahan's work is the "Rodney Dangerfield" of comp sci, then I guess BIOS/firmware and my Rodney allusion from '12 is misplaced. Maybe firmware isn't even part of the comp sci software corpus :) ?

Good stuff.

What I did like about Pat H's talk included the fact that he focused on a problem no one else was looking at. It reminded me of the quote from Yan LeCun that the biggest impact in AI will not be in one of the explored domains but instead in an unvisited path. That's why I like reading old math or technology books and papers. They may not demonstrate the cutting-edge change upon the frontier of knowledge, but perhaps there are some alternate views or approaches buried that can be applied in a new context?

Some folks call predicting things 'seeing around corners.' The challenge is when you see around the corner people push back that the effort isn't 'relevant,' but if you wait until the enterprise rounds the corner you are invariably 'late' because driving change in low-level infrastructure 'takes time.'