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What the f*** is the edge?

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Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#121

Post by expertentipp »

cm2187 wrote: post #116
TeMPOraL wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cycles you mention are each very interesting. Flash/Silverlight/HTML5/WASM - this, to me, is a story of a technology being useful, then growing to give too much power to web publishers - who tend to abuse any given power - then reverting to a weaker technology in order to unscrew the web. Rinse, repeat - HTML5 is already rapidly approaching peak Flash, and introduction of WASM isn't going to help here. Soap/REST/…

I still don’t understand what problems people have with xml. The json vs xml debate very much feels like the tab vs white space debate to me.

The X in AJAX is indeed XML. Quickly appeared though that XML is too heavyweight and redundant for the browser (XML DOM!) and even for the internet speeds at that time, while JSON is as simple as JS' object literal. Web 2.0 adapting JSON formed a critical mass so that later (almost) everyone and everything went (almost) full JSON.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#122

Post by kybernetikos »

Johnny555 wrote: post #57
mehrdadn wrote: post #4

> 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...?

I think the better question is why should a car be relying on a cloud computer at all for real-time decisions -- what would that car do when it's in a cellular dead zone?

While I don't want safety critical decisions to be made by cloud services so that my provider can charge me a premium to unlock even safer decision making, I think that it's pretty reasonable to start with full autonomy only on preprepared stretches of road.

If that was the deal then you could have connectivity built into the road or road furniture and if the car detected a lack of connectivity it should come to a safe stop or revert to manual control.

It seems like we could benefit from a technological principle of Subsidiarity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#123

Post by TeMPOraL »

cm2187 wrote: post #116
TeMPOraL wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cycles you mention are each very interesting. Flash/Silverlight/HTML5/WASM - this, to me, is a story of a technology being useful, then growing to give too much power to web publishers - who tend to abuse any given power - then reverting to a weaker technology in order to unscrew the web. Rinse, repeat - HTML5 is already rapidly approaching peak Flash, and introduction of WASM isn't going to help here. Soap/REST/…

I still don’t understand what problems people have with xml. The json vs xml debate very much feels like the tab vs white space debate to me.

Extreme bloat of the format, which makes it in practice both wasteful and not human-readable.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#124

Post by taikahessu »

I think OP is missing the point here. As he being the sales rep, the only valid answer would have been "Yes, it's on the edge.".

It is a question dedicated to find out if you yourself think the product is good enough or how well you think it positions itself with the competition. Maybe it's just me being stupid here, but I find it funny how the whole discussion here has turned into a technical debate, which the original customer's point IMHO clearly wasn't.

There is no edge. You define the edge by what you believe in.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#125

Post by Dylan16807 »

perl4ever wrote: post #96
Dylan16807 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150ms is no big deal. That's on par with top-notch human reaction time. The big deal is the lack of reliability on that connection.

I would equate "lack of reliability" with "latency that is sometimes rather large".

There is a qualitative difference between a jitter of a few dozen milliseconds, vs suddenly getting no data for twenty seconds because something went wonky.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#126

Post by dskloet »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
wolframhempel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from thick client to butt back to thick client - did you build something that replaces "cloud" with "butt"?

Ooops, forgot about that extension running on the machine I wrote that comment on.

Are you the author of that extension? If not, why would you give full control over your browsing experience to a third party without any benefit?

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#128

Post by krotton »

elvinyung wrote: post #72
vinceguidry wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That fails the sniff test. Markets are made up of agents that want things. Computers only want what humans say they should want, so computers are simply the agents of humanity. 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…

I think there's some questions to be asked about this, but the main one is this claim: > Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable. The word "predictable". What does it mean to be predictable? Are periodic trends with micro-variations considered to be predictable? In that sense, might it not be possible to Fourier-decompose some time-series int…

> abstraction isn't something telling you how you should act, but instead something telling you how you should react?

A little bit OT: I don't think acting and reacting are separate things in the real world. We're always only reacting.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#129

Post by tomxor »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #84
perl4ever wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine if you are going to have your cars remotely controlled with a latency > 150 ms while they operate autonomously as things happen in a shorter time frame. But the other way around seems insane. It's reminiscent of the way people have switched from "human drives, computer deals with emergencies" to "computer drives, human deals with emergencies" as though it was no big difference.

150ms is no big deal. That's on par with top-notch human reaction time. The big deal is the lack of reliability on that connection.

> 150ms is no big deal. That's on par with top-notch human reaction time.

Comparing a single component latency in technology to human reaction time is a complete straw man i see far too often. (I'm not blaming you, you are probably just repeating it). 150ms _is_ a good human reaction time, but in technological terms that includes sensor, network, processor, network bus, actuator and finally any physical latency of action being achieved.

A better and contextually relevant comparison here would be: human pressing a button after light turning on vs autonomous vehicle turning it's wheels 1 degree after seeing a light turn on. I bet you they are very similar, and I would not be surprised if the vehicle was slower.

150ms of network latency is significant because it's on top of the existing latency in the _whole_ system that makes up the car, including the sensors, the actuators whatever bus' inbetween them all. When you stick it's brain in the cloud and add 150ms of latency it's like a human trying to drive a car through a VR webcam, it will make it so much harder, 150ms latency between action and sensor is _very_ noticable even in humans, this is the same reason why cloud based FPS gaming (as in piping the result of the render over the network) doesn't work... no one is going to stick the brain of an autonomous vehicle behind 150ms of _additional_ latency.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#130

Post by erikb »

taikahessu wrote: post #124

I think OP is missing the point here. As he being the sales rep, the only valid answer would have been "Yes, it's on the edge.". It is a question dedicated to find out if you yourself think the product is good enough or how well you think it positions itself with the competition. Maybe it's just me being stupid here, but I find it funny how the whole discussion here has turned into a technical debate, which the origi…

Replace "edge" with any other hot term and that's your IT market. Even without demand and even without innovation a lot of stuff is changed all the time. Current systems are centralized? Well let's decentralized everything. Current systems are decentralized? Centralize. Every. Thing.

Watching it as engineer can be especially painful, because you already know that the other thing is not that much better. And more often this b.s. starts with the optimal trade-offs and turns into exactly what was carefully avoided with good architecture and decision making.

Sometimes I really think some of the managers are sitting there thinking "Yes, I know that you are smarter than me. But that is your disadvantage. Just to get some leverage I will now push for the stuff you told me to avoid again and again over the last 3 years, and you can't beat me in that approach because everything in you is fighting against this."

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