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Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

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Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#211

Post by TickleSteve »

coffeesn0b wrote: post #204
TickleSteve wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is general is not a real-time system, in that you cannot get deterministic response time from it. For example I'm guessing it doesn't matter if one of your timers are a second late due to Linux deciding to swap a process out or prioritise some upgrade check but imagine if your time constraints were a lot tighter. Similarly if you're attempting to track food on a conveyor belt and Linux decides to prioritise the…

Our tolerance requirements for synchronicity are broad enough that we can tolerate blips like this... at the end of the day we are automating away some simple human interactions (ie; fry the fries or track the food), we aren’t performing surgery with these systems. So far we’ve been satisfied with Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 to be exact) and it’s overall capabilities. Also, don’t forget that cost at scale is a big factor...…

The point about real-time systems is not the your tolerance of 'blips' its about analysis of your worst-case timing requirements. This is what real-time control systems are all about.

Sure, you may be able to tolerate a 1 second 'blip'... how about ten seconds? a minute? do you know for sure how long Linux may put your process on hold for? Linux provides no guarantees at all.

It seems to me that what you are really creating is a traditional control system with web technologies and using the hype-of-the-day (i.e. edge computing) to justify it... with the corresponding increase in overhead and cycles.

This does not seem like a good solution to me, the only novelty here is the inappropriate use of technologies. i.e. you've managed to dig a tunnel with a spoon.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#212

Post by ocdtrekkie »

ochoseis wrote: post #196
wenc wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the power draw like? I once left the reading lights on; car was supposed to have turned it off when the doors locked, but somehow didn't. I found myself calling AAA in the morning to get a jumpstart.

Also curious, does GP have some way to shutdown gracefully when the car turns off, and reboot fast when it turns on? You could potentially handle this with a laptop and some battery-settings but not aware of an external battery solution for the NUC.

I currently use a laptop power adapter for the cigarette lighter, which is only on when the car is. The NUC's BIOS is set to turn it on when the power comes on, but I power it off manually before turning off the car. This is not ideal.

There is an external battery solution for the NUC, and I bought it! http://www.mini-box.com/NUC-UPS But I haven't switched to it yet. The big upside is that it will gracefully shutdown my NUC after I power off the car. But if I use the cigarette lighter for power, it will lose the ability to turn itself on when power is present, because the batteries are always present. NUC UPS supports using a different power connector which can turn on the PC on ignition, but I haven't had it installed in my car as of yet as that's a little bit more work, and I'd need some help from someone who knows more about the car's electrical system.

As far as fast power-on, it's a pretty high end i5 NUC with an NVMe SSD. It boots pretty darn fast, and my software takes less than a second to load once the OS is up. The slowest part of boot is that I don't want my location history easily steal-able, so it's encrypted, and I have to key in the code to unlock the machine. (I'm looking at a security key or similar to replace this step in the future.)

As a note, I'm more or less specced out what's involved in a solar power setup on the roof of my car to independently power my computer all/most of the time when the car is off and otherwise charge a secondary battery off the car's inverter, but there's no reasonable or sane reason to do it. ...But I thought about it.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#213

Post by RandallBrown »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #52
Aloha wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about Nordstrom, I know nothing of their infrastructure.

To add to the curiosity, how is Nordstrom doing anyway, compared to other mall-type retail? I'm wondering if this forward-thinking in tech is allowing them to successfully fight "new" ecommerce such as Amazon

As far as retail companies go, they’re doing well. Stock isn’t doing great, but as far as I know they’re still quite profitable.

Being forward thinking in tech has helped them a lot with regards to being able to move pretty fast on new things. At the same time, a website as old as theirs has a LOT of legacy.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#214

Post by [deleted] »

pluto9 wrote: post #28
scrumption wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here for this. Imagine being so dead inside you feel perfectly fine, even proud of working for Chic-fil-A, lol

Imagine feeling the bizarre compulsion to turn every discussion about technology on HN into yet another tedious political argument.

[deleted]

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#215

Post by coffeesn0b »

jedberg wrote: post #208

Sure, they have the biggest cloud in the US, but it's down on Sundays. Kidding aside, do you guys do maintenance on Sundays or is that forbidden by company policy?

They’re really reasonable about it... you do what you need to do.

That being said, it’s really REALLY nice to mute pagerduty for a whole day every week.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#217

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

abraham_lincoln wrote: post #184
swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a chickfila greatly increases realestate value for the landlord though, more so than other restaurant chains like McDonalds.

That doesn't mean the local cable company will put in $100k of poles and coax to your restaurant. Also, McDonald's corporate owns all their real estate, franchisees, too.

Im not 100% sure its all of them (malls and airports come to mind) but yes its a vast majority.

True I didn't consider the cable investment either. Normally the landlord pays for this but I imagine chickfila probably pays for part of the bill. That I dont know though

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#218

Post by TickleSteve »

coffeesn0b wrote: post #206
coffeesn0b wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more about network outages than latency specifically... although in several remote locations latency is permanently low due to slow providers.

Credit card transactions, mobile orders, timer synchronization, order receiving (tablets etc), iot devices (cameras, cooking devices) and other things planned for the future.

Ok, lets go thru that list:

- Credit-card transactions don't have low-latency requirements, its 'nice' if they're quick, same as everything else. The bottleneck here is entirely dependent on your ISP tho. No 'edge-computing' here.

- Mobile orders. This will necessarily go thru to a central server. This is traditional client-server stuff. Again, no 'edge-compute'.

- Order receiving. Simple local data entry. Again, no 'edge-compute'.

- IoT devices. Hopefully these have local control systems without the server being in the loop. Control systems are not 'edge-compute' either.

'Edge-compute' is generation of knowledge at the edge rather than shipping raw data to a central server. This reduces required bandwidth.

What in your system takes a high rate of data and generates a low-rate of data for transfer to a server for further use. I see no analysis of raw data into a more processed form, this is simply traditional data entry and CRUD activites.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#219

Post by pvg »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #173
pvg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's a crappy definition that does not reflect current usage. It doesn't even reflect the definition in the OED, if you want to check there. 'Bigotry' is not limited to difference of opinion. Nobody uses it like that, you can take a look at the quoted usage examples here, which are from current publications. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigotry

The OED is a historical dictionary; the Oxford Dictionary of English and the New Oxford American Dictionary are explicitly meant to reflect more current usage. At any rate, I think this is getting awfully pedantic; the definition you linked is "obstinate or intolerant devotion to one's own opinions and prejudices," which seems similar enough that I'm not really sure what the point of this argument is. Given that I'm…

The point is that the definition posted is narrow and bad. This isn't some obscure technical point, a debate about the proper usage of 'less' and 'fewer' or whether 'literally' literally means what it says in some odd case. All you have to do to convince yourself of its badness is read a newspaper or magazine or listen to a news report. What exactly would 'racial bigotry' mean if the posted thing was the only definition of 'bigotry'?

As to pedantry, you're the one who started arguing this clearly lousy definition is not lousy, brought up the OED, decided the OED is no good, finally acknowledged the existence of a broader definition but then somehow decided that it's, in fact, as good as identical to the narrow bad definition. I'll be the first to acknowledge I have a habit of getting involved in some deeply silly threads but I'm left utterly flummoxed by this Cirque-du Soleil-level display of mental gymnastics.

I just hope the authors of that lousy definition aren't holding your cat hostage.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#220

Post by TickleSteve »

symlinkk wrote: post #203
coffeesn0b wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have frequent internet outages and still need to run compute loads at the edge.

> compute loads What are you computing? This is what everyone is wondering.

There is no real edge-compute loads here, just traditional CRUD data entry type systems.

Riding the hype-wave methinks....

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