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Andy Grove has died

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161–170 of 179 posts

Re: Andy Grove has died

#161
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's far from true. We've been able to license ARM and MIPS ISA's plus implementations for a long time. They and Intel defend theirs with patents. SPARC, the most open of old ones, could be used without license fees or patent risk at all. You just had to make it ISA compatible then pay a $99 fee. Gaisler has a SPARC CPU and pile of SOC HW under GPL that ASIC proven even on radhard, space applications. Enterprise ve…

POWER is FAR more open than Intel. You can actively license it just the same as ARM (not to say the licensing terms are the same, but the concept is). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation

I put it between Intel and ARM because I still didnt know what I got at what price after reading OpenPOWER website. I have that data for ARM, MIPS, and SPARC.

So, what's an OpenPOWER license cost, the royalties if any, and does that come with ASIC-ready implementation?

Re: Andy Grove has died

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They didn't have it easy like Microsoft did where they were virtually the only game in town. They almost lost their position to AMD on more than one occasion, and were under constant pressure from Motorola, IBM, Sun, MIPS, DEC, and others all intent on capturing a dominant position in the highly lucrative desktop and server markets." You're way overstating that. You're whole post, but especially that one, totally ig…

Intel didn't have as many protections as Microsoft did. The attempts to clone Windows, such as the efforts of companies like Parallels and WINE, never came close to being 100% compatible. AMD managed to navigate a patent minefield and ended up with a 32-bit compatible chip that was basically a drop-in replacement, the user would barely notice the difference unless they went looking for one. The Athlon XP became a ser…

Barely. Intel had a headstart and was default in market. They pulled in more money overall plus charged more for the chips. Gave them big R&D advantage. There were compilers, too.

AMD usually played catch up, usually tot for tat making less money, got ahead big on 64bit Opteron, and then Intel caught up. Today, Intel bough Altera while people talk up Xilinx buying AMD. World of financial difference first mover, IP, and lockin can make, eh?

Re: Andy Grove has died

#164
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your description of Bloomberg's beliefs and motivation for it, and I agree that many other organizations, especially start-ups, cargo cult on the back of this. Since the belief that offices are bad in terms of cost or productivity (e.g. Bloomberg's belief that people work better in noisy, open spaces) is demonstrably and quantitatively incorrect, and inflicts undeniable mental and physical health problem…

There's a problem with your analysis: you're assuming that people are all the same, and that work is all the same. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that noisy, open spaces inflict "undeniable mental and physical health problems", or is that just your personal belief? This isn't like smoking: there is zero evidence that smoking is good for your health, and all kinds of evidence that it causes health…

I'm hardly assuming people are all the same -- that's the very thing that places like Bloomberg, which standardize on a one-size-fits-all model for the sake of cheapness yet come up with political stories to plausibly defend it, are doing.

I'm saying don't make all seating open-plan. Don't allow mandates for one-size-fits-all seating. For those who require privacy to be productive, spend the money required to give it to them. For those who thrive in a constant communication stream, spend the money to give it to them.

I'm not going to Google the pile of evidence mounting against open plan offices for you.

But I will say that I worked in quant finance for a while and the idea that an open trading floor is needed, even at the exchange, is a big lie. It's about status and showmanship, and functions as nothing but a hindrance to completing actual job duties.

Open-plan fire-drill quant finance was the first work environment that actually showed me how much of a lie it is. Every single person hated it, and at least in part the bonuses and inflated compensation was required just to get people to engage in the Sisyphean task of trying to get their work done in that environment. It was like hiring Usain Bolt and asking him to break the world record for a 100m sprint -- but to do it in your swimming pool.

There are many high frequency shops and quant hedge funds where they need real-time audio links between traders, and yet they still organize into private offices and use teleconferencing and workplace chat, and it ends up being far more effective than having them physically colocated. In one case, I even remember one of the primary researchers was given special permission to live in San Francisco even though the entire rest of trading team worked on the East Coast, simply because he had family reasons that required him to be on the West Coast. It didn't degrade communication or knowledge sharing, even in rapid trading situations, at all.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#165
post #156

I guess he wasn't paranoid enough.

Please don't post like this here.

Why not ? Evocation of his masterpiece of a business book in the form of a pun that only the knowledgeable will get feels quite on-topic to me for this site's audience. Besides, I have been waiting all his life for this chance to make that joke...

Re: Andy Grove has died

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone else (ARM etc.) has a monopoly on the ISA or they don't even publish it (NVIDIA etc.) Intel actually makes perhaps the most open commercially significant platform.

That's far from true. We've been able to license ARM and MIPS ISA's plus implementations for a long time. They and Intel defend theirs with patents. SPARC, the most open of old ones, could be used without license fees or patent risk at all. You just had to make it ISA compatible then pay a $99 fee. Gaisler has a SPARC CPU and pile of SOC HW under GPL that ASIC proven even on radhard, space applications. Enterprise ve…

Well, currently shipped SPARC's volumes are relatively low AFAIK, and ARM and MIPS (now IMG) are in fact monopolies, they just happen to license the ISA & the implementation because they choose to do this. Intel does not choose to let AMD and VIA ship x86 CPUs and in this sense it's less of a monopoly. Of course you could argue that ARM is more open than x86 in some other significant sense; here I think that the PC is a more open platform than perhaps any widely shipped ARM-based system, in terms of the variety of available operating systems and software and the ease of developing such software, especially if said software is to have reasonably wide applicability and long shelf life, and also in terms of the degree of control that any single entity has over the platform.

In general I think that the "vertical disintegration" where you have fabs which are open to everyone making chips integrating cheap IPs, instead of companies with their own fabs, has destroyed "openness" - it used to be the case that you knew exactly what the hardware was doing, and it is now the case that you need to sign a draconian NDA to program most of the components in most chips, and this option is only available to select "partners." x86 is an older product and hence more open than most successful newer products; it was perhaps less open than its competitors at the time, which in part explains why it was more successful than those competitors... (A closed platform is a kind of a high-risk, high-reward game.)

Re: Andy Grove has died

#167
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a problem with your analysis: you're assuming that people are all the same, and that work is all the same. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that noisy, open spaces inflict "undeniable mental and physical health problems", or is that just your personal belief? This isn't like smoking: there is zero evidence that smoking is good for your health, and all kinds of evidence that it causes health…

I'm hardly assuming people are all the same -- that's the very thing that places like Bloomberg, which standardize on a one-size-fits-all model for the sake of cheapness yet come up with political stories to plausibly defend it, are doing. I'm saying don't make all seating open-plan. Don't allow mandates for one-size-fits-all seating. For those who require privacy to be productive, spend the money required to give it…

That all sounds great, except that if every single person hates these environments, and there are "many" shops that have private offices, why aren't the places like Bloomberg failing because they can't find qualified people to work there (and/or their productivity is lousy compared to their competitors with private offices)?

Re: Andy Grove has died

#168
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post like this here.

Why not ? Evocation of his masterpiece of a business book in the form of a pun that only the knowledgeable will get feels quite on-topic to me for this site's audience. Besides, I have been waiting all his life for this chance to make that joke...

It's fine for sites that specialize in snarky one-liners, but being both uncivil and unsubstantive, it doesn't belong on HN.

Jokes sometimes do ok on HN if they're particularly clever, but lame/obvious ones tend to get hammered. But it's really the incivility that's a problem here. Using someone's death as fodder for internet humor is not a good fit.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#169
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hardly assuming people are all the same -- that's the very thing that places like Bloomberg, which standardize on a one-size-fits-all model for the sake of cheapness yet come up with political stories to plausibly defend it, are doing. I'm saying don't make all seating open-plan. Don't allow mandates for one-size-fits-all seating. For those who require privacy to be productive, spend the money required to give it…

That all sounds great, except that if every single person hates these environments, and there are "many" shops that have private offices, why aren't the places like Bloomberg failing because they can't find qualified people to work there (and/or their productivity is lousy compared to their competitors with private offices)?

This is a fallacy of presuming the market (in this case labor) has to be efficient, and that any irrationalities would be arbitraged away (better employer swoops in and eats Bloomberg's lunch by providing better workspace) and so therefore whatever we do happen to observe must be the rational, efficient, market clearing condition.

This is absurd of course. If true, then literally every aspect of employment in every company would be the 100% optimal condition as expressed via preference negotiation between employers and candidates and there would be no components of working life that are systematically worse off for the employee. Surely you can't be claiming that? If employment is efficient, why are there things like Occupy Wall St? Not that Occupy is right or wrong, but why would it exist? Why wouldn't those companies, with policies people find socially toxic, fail to find enough applicants and be forced to change policies in response to the market?

Their ability to find workers and make money is not very related to whether their practices are unhealthy or destructive, as is the case with open-plan nonsense too.

Why do any market irrationalities persist? Often there is an aspect of market manipulation. In the labor market this can occur by focusing on hiring visa-based workers and using their visa status as discreet leverage to force them to never complain about conditions. Many companies also do actively illegal things, like threaten employees with retaliation if they discuss their salary, in efforts to prevent collective bargaining and depress employee negotiation power over attributes like workspace.

The more disconcerting thing is the way that younger generations of programmers, basically my generation and younger, have been psychologically manipulated into believing that "dynamic" and "collaborative" are synonymous with open-plan, and they are afraid to express any dissatisfaction lest they are downgraded to "not a team player." It breeds what Michael O. Church described as "macho subordination" -- a desire to compete to be seen as most "loyal" by making a public display of willingness to bottomlessly compromise even basic dignity in the work place, so that anyone who stands up for realistic, humanity-affirming conditions is immediately labeled "toxic" and exiled. The workers enacting this don't even know any better, and few of them have had to take a phone call during the work day about a family tragedy, or discuss an awkward medical condition as they schedule a doctor's appointment, or something, and they place low value on such privacy mostly from a position of naïveté.

Anyway, the circular logic of saying markets must be efficient, therefore whatever we observe in markets must be proving their efficiency is patently ridiculous.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#170
post #55
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloomberg, a company famous for an executive who expressed this same "down in the trenches" preference for cubicles, famously does not have offices. Far from their "egalitarian" culture leading to acceptable working conditions over time, it has only enshrined the idea that no one, ever, may have an office. It is much better that some people have offices even if not all do, for then at least there can be a path to ear…

Then go work for a company that provides offices. As an employee, that's your choice and you are welcome to subjectively value egalitarianism exemplified in this way versus hierarchical "perks" that manifest in personal offices.

My goal is to lobby for broad social change, not merely to locate one single private workspace for just me. Complaining about what is wrong with it is a good way to help others, who might not have even considered that workspace should be treated as a negotiable option for them and reflect their personal work style and needs, and potentially create more momentum among the crowd that reads HN, to help set the trend that it ought to be considered unreasonable when an employer whitewashes over human variation when it's actually more cost-effective to provide offices to any knowledge worker who prefers one.
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