51–60 of 188 posts
But the rest of the article talks about the location of data and servers and it's relationship with the word "edge". Am I missing something? Why is the anecdote unrelated to the article?
We (Cloudflare) have largely stopped talking about the 'edge' for some of the reasons cited in the article. 1. No one actually knows where it is or what it means. 2. It conjures images of classical ‘edge compute’ use cases like the self driving cars in the article. Those use cases tend to be exceptionally specialized (or just silly). 3. Edge implies a core or origin exists, and maybe it doesn’t need to. We would rath…
Why would IoT metric processing be latency sensitive? Whether my thermostat processes the temperature in 3 milliseconds or 30 milliseconds seems immaterial.
> real-world transmission times between e.g. London and San Francisco end up at around 150ms. That's [...] a catastrophe for self-driving cars needing to make realtime decisions. Why in the world would/should a car in London be relying on a cloud computer in SF to tell it how to make real-time decisions...?
A real time controller in car would be perfectly fine with 150ms cycles, it just depends what is controlled. An engine controller is fine with 500Hz, a GPS controller with 10Hz, Formula 1 has 10Khz controllers, ...
So if a costly central computing service is fine to control something in a car, it might be done. But obviously not as described in the article, they are not stupid. A central service would be async and not RT of course. Updating maps, traffic warnings, eg.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is interesting to see that as technology advances, predictions of the past become more and more true, though they may not necessarily look like what the predictors originally thought. In this case, I think of the network is the computer. It's been for a while, but not yet completely, but it's becoming even more so as time passes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage
Slight devil's advocate episteme: what about an even-further generalization? How about: the market is the computer? Not only is the network essentially imbricated with/in the market, but recognizing the market in the role of the computation also means recognizing the roles of all of the different functional components, not just the mechanical/computational "atoms". Basically, I think that thinking this way lets us tr…
You can't abstract out supply and demand, at least, not forever. Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable.
Humans will act predictably for as long as it makes sense for them to do so. Your business model will eventually fail because nobody will want your product / service anymore. Or they won't want exactly how you're delivering it. Or they'll have decided that X company is more reliable.
Someone has to keep on top of what the people supplying the business with life-sustaining revenue actually want. It can't ever be a machine, unless those machines actually become sentient, which is a completely different discussion. The person can use machines, but they can't actually be a machine.
People spend money, not algorithms. People may delegate to algorithms, but it's always a person in the end.
> This front-layer of computing power is also referred to as "fog computing" or "dew computing". The bit about self-driving cars talking to a server to make split-second decisions is laughable but this right here just makes you want to flip the table. If you're requirements are so extreme that you need to be on "the edge" you can do that today, it's called client-side development.
I kid. Mostly. Most sane people would agree with you. However some people can't see the forest for the trees. Has "buzzword-driven development" become a phrase yet?
> real-world transmission times between e.g. London and San Francisco end up at around 150ms. That's [...] a catastrophe for self-driving cars needing to make realtime decisions. Why in the world would/should a car in London be relying on a cloud computer in SF to tell it how to make real-time decisions...?
You don't have to be cynical -- merely to have either been in, or have read about, IT trends over the past few decades would suffice to understand that it's all cyclical.
The cynical observation is that fashionable management trends and/or the market's eagerness to engage in ill-considered change as a convenient substitute for thoughtful progress, manifesting as regular vacillation between a centralised and a distributed approach to compute & storage, 'keeps us all in jobs'.
The anecdote at the start of the article seems to me to suggest the investor talked about "being at the edge of science" or technology - i.e. doing something disruptive and new. But the rest of the article talks about the location of data and servers and it's relationship with the word "edge". Am I missing something? Why is the anecdote unrelated to the article?
The anecdote at the start of the article seems to me to suggest the investor talked about "being at the edge of science" or technology - i.e. doing something disruptive and new. But the rest of the article talks about the location of data and servers and it's relationship with the word "edge". Am I missing something? Why is the anecdote unrelated to the article?
I believe the author intentionally wanted us to believe it was "the edge" based on your definition, but then wanted to make a point that "the edge" is now "the physical edge".
Another explanation would also be that a couple years ago the stereotypical technically-limited VC would ask if this app would be in "the cloud". The author used the same stereotype and adapted it to "the edge".