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What the f*** is the edge?

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

#131

Post by ownagefool »

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…

I think the author was missing the point, but not in the way where he should lie. Edge in the context asked, with the explanation given, likely was refering to "bleeding edge", "cutting edge", or "leading edge".

As in the customer wants to buy modern technology that makes their company look hip, their developers happy, and gives them an advantage against the competition.

Some rant about CDNs, or where the edge of the network is, seems inappopriate here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_edge_technology

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

#133

Post by andai »

dskloet wrote: post #126
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's a word replacer extension I used a few years ago to implement XKCD's entire list of suggested replacements, to my great amusement. Due to my predisposition I consider great amusement to be of tremendous benefit to my well-being.

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

#134

Post by Sylos »

wolframhempel wrote: post #75
LiamPa wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And chrome.

Thanks for the hint, will do (seems to be iOS specific, hmm)

Apple doesn't allow other browser engines than WebKit in its App Store, so Chrome on iOS uses WebKit, not Blink, and the problem is probably actually WebKit-specific.

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

#135

Post by qznc »

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?

There are edge cases where it is possible. My employer sells Automated Valet Parking [0] where the video cameras of the garage are used to steer the vehicle. Of course, this is a well controlled space where you can ensure connectivity and the car will drive slowly so you can ensure safety.

I don't believe safe real time and 5G cellular networks can be combined at reasonable scale. The latency is enough for some use cases, but reliability/connectivity/safety is not enough. So we still agree here.

[0] https://www.bosch-mobility-solutions.com/en/highlights/autom...

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

#136

Post by wolframhempel »

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…

Author here: When talking to an investor you are only a "sales rep" to some degree. You are the owner of a company looking to raise funding by selling a certain percentage of shares, so much is true - but the mindset is more one of finding the right partner.

Given a promising enough vision and execution there's no shortage of interested VCs and the challenge is in picking the right one for the long term. All VCs offer money, but many offer value beyond that. As the VC(s) you'll choose will hold a significant stake including board seats and voting rights you'll want someone with a deep enough understanding of your industry, technology, market, sales or operational model.

Even if we were talking about selling to a customer here I would argue that one's better off providing long-term value (and forfeiting a deal if one can't) than just catering for any buzzword-driven expectation and watch the whole edifice crumble a few months down the line

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

#137

Post by flowless »

Animats wrote: post #67
zackbloom wrote: post #15

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…

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). Yes. You do not do hard real time over the public Internet. (I've actually had the experience of driving a full-sized vehicle over WiFi. When we built our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004, we had the test capability of driving it remotely over W…

There's a project called wifibroadcast (https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/wifibroadcast-analog-like-tr...) that allows to pipe data between two WiFi nodes in monitor mode so there's no need for association.

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

#138

Post by Macha »

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.

I suspect the reasons that XML ultimately lost are:

1. You could represent it as a nested structure of your language's standard lists & maps, which you already know the API of, which you could directly operate on. For dynamic languages, this is much faster to stick a prototype together, even if it bites you in the ass eventually. But by the stage, you've already chosen JSON.

2. It was less characters to manually type.

3. Particular uses of XML were extremely verbose. The S in SOAP stood for Simple, which looks ironic in retrospect.

4. In a time when payloads didn't routinely use compression, the closing tags could be a noticeable increase in size.

5. The vast majority of communication that now uses JSON didn't benefit significantly from XPath (people prefer to navigate data structures using their language features, not a generic API), namespaces, DTDs, XML Schema etc.

In about that order.

You could argue that much of this is superficial, and it is, but the industry has shown time and again that lowering the barrier to entry, even in ways that make little difference in the long run, usually wins out.

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

#139

Post by expertentipp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #99

> Cynics might of course argue that we have come full circle, from thick client to butt back to thick client, but that would miss the point of what "the edge" is all about: In a world of increasingly ubiquitous computing power we are well advised to reflect on where our computation happens and how we can make the most efficient use of the resources at our disposal. Which is exactly why we the cynics say we've come fu…

Indeed, edge computing for some is the answer for „privacy”. Nowadays the native or mobile app, although running locally will still not even launch without the internet because of the subscription licensing model, and one has no reason to believe the support and marketing that „all data stays locally”, unless one degugged the network traffic with wireshark or similar tool... and it might change with any version upgrade.

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

#140

Post by shady-lady »

expertentipp wrote: post #121
cm2187 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> redundant for the browser (XML DOM!)

I don't quite get this part.

Both HTML & XML cater for DOM models. I think this is & was appropriate.

Browsers had support for executing XSL stylesheets because it made sense for a lot of use cases.

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