Live streaming with HLS is equal to distributing static files and can be very low latency.
If you need to go below 3s of latency, yes it becomes harder, but everything else is thankfully solved.
The bigger issue with live streaming are the peaks: 0 views in one second and millions in the next. Even with static content delivery that leads to all kinds of issues.
Is Boom aiming to be faster than the Concorde? I don't think so.
Their website says:
> Overture will carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7
Concorde flew NYC<->LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours. Also, regular commercial flights on NYC<->LON are currently 7 hours.
Also, using Google Flights, I priced LHR<->JFK on first class about T+1month for 7 days (Mon->Mon). It is about 5.3K USD round trip. I am surprised that it is so cheap. I guess that route is very competitive.
I don't understand the excitement on HN about Boom. The market is tiny. This is a terrible investment. What is the global demand for this aeroplane (if they ever build it)? Maybe... max 200. Look at the order book from the 1960s when the Concorde first flew. Less than 100 total orders. Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde. Also, it is terrible for the environment. The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.
> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde.
Remember a few years back when the Canadian-made Bombardier C-Series was selling well, so Boeing got their allies in the US government to impose a 300% tax on them as an "America First" policy?
Well, the rules around sonic booms were similar. Were there sonic booms? Sure. But the real reason for the ban was that they were foreign-made sonic booms.
Now the world's only supersonic passenger plane is being made in America, you might find Congress is much less worried about sonic booms.
This was done to prepare people and gauge the reaction to BOEING sonic booms, for the SST. Everything about a supersonic future was scuttled when it became obvious that people clearly suffered when planes flew supersonic above them.
Keep in mind that the US Air Force still does not go supersonic over populated areas except when absolutely necessary, like during 9/11.
This study mind you was done with SCHEDULED sonic booms. Now imagine, instead of being able to set your clock to a loud, disruptive noise and plan around it, you must deal with completely unpredictable and variable EXPLOSION of sharp noise (130ish decibels is standing 100m from a jumbo jet as it spools up or a trumpet being blasted directly into your ear from a couple feet away)
People already hate the noise of cities when that noise is an occasional quiet siren heard from a mile away a few times a day. Imagine instead if the noise was completely unpredictable explosions. Also imagine you can't move out of the city to get away from it, because the sound blankets an entire flight corridor.
Unless NASA finds a way to magically evaporate all the energy in a sonic boom such that it makes almost no noise at ground level, we would have to literally depopulate mile wide corridors of the US just so a bunch of stupidly rich people can get from NY to LA in an hour? Nah
This isn't true. The backlash to sonic booms grew well before Concorde and was part of why the US government canceled its support of the SST program. Boeing canceled their part of the 2707 because of the (extremely) unexpected success of the 747 program (a larger plane slower addressed a larger market) and the 737 success.
Sources:
Joe Sutter, Creating the worlds first Boeing Jumbo Jet
Sure, being a domestic enterprise might help here, but you will have to deal with regulations abroad, too (and Concorde had arguably the edge there because it had both London and continental Europe as home court).
I'm also fairly sure that softening/undermining noise regulations in general has become harder (less tech enthusiasm, more NIMBYism, especially in Europe).
> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom?
Is it? I lived in Kansas in the 1960s. Sonic booms from the AF base were common. They weren't that loud. Electric storms (a regular in Kansas) were considerably louder.
> The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.
5-7 times as much.
My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you could watch the gas gauge unwind.
> My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you could watch the gas gauge unwind.
Did your dad fly military jets? Most older jets can't supercruise, i.e. go supersonic without using afterburners, and afterburners consume unholy amounts of fuel. Concorde did consume quite a lot of fuel per passenger mile, but it could supercruise.
The one new factor is the route fragmentation that occurred over the Atlantic with the 757 and 767 and the fragmentation that occurred over the Pacific with the 777 and 787. These changed from a model where only hub to hub flights where every seat had to be sold to be viable from a financial point of view to enabling many city pairs to work, and airlines still to make a profit, even if the business class seats are not fully sold. This led to a much larger market, which plenty of room for 3-10k "business class" tickets on these flights.
If boom can hit that same number, they will have success out of the USA <-> Europe market and premium intra-asia flights - the two most profitable route systems in the world.
They claim they have sonic boom solved by modifying the airframe shape. Otherwise, i agree with you. It will be a thing of no real consequence just like the original Concorde.
Firstly, my claim that they say this is evidenced by the link. I did not assert it as historic fact that this thing works, just that this is what they say. The words "Selling point" and "proposed" are in that sentence for a reason: it's not actual yet. But if you think it's a deliberate fraud, then say so.
Secondly: Although the final proof of it is in the full scale aircraft for sure, a lot can be done with software modelling (1) and wind tunnels these days. And with the scale model that just flew, to be followed by "checking the actual performance that was demonstrated against what our models predicted, and how we expected it to fly." (2)
Thirdly, I point you to other "quieter supersonic" aircraft work in progress, the X-59. Some of their evidence-gathering process is detailed at the Wikipedia link, "development" section. (3)
It will be interesting to see how these work out; but if they do not, then it's a failure of modelling and design, not because they missed the directly obvious. But if you are an aerospace engineer and know more about this subfield, then say so.
1) "Boom has perfected its aircraft’s efficient, aerodynamic design using computational fluid dynamics, which “is basically a digital wind tunnel"."
A sonic boom is not necessary when moving faster than sound, the Busemann biplane resolves that completely.
There's been considerable work on sonic boom mitigation for many decades. Boom's long nose, flat underside, top engine, small wingspan delta wings are all designs expected to mitigate a sonic boom. Let's see if it works in practice.
> Concorde flew NYC<->LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours.
I feel that you're getting diminishing returns at the point of reducing 4 hours to 3h30, given that flight time is just a part of the whole "door to door" time, there are several hours at least that aren't flight time, and that the expensive tickets all come with an hour or three in an airport lounge.
I think the real advantage would be for transpacific flights. San Francisco to Tokyo is currently about 11.5 hours, assuming a similar ratio (maybe slightly better due to flying supersonic for longer), Boom’s time would be around 6.5 to 7 hours. Savings would be more significant for East Coast flights, ATL-HND would go from 14.5 hours to under 8.5.
East Coast US to Japan supersonic? This is the stuff of fantasy. With the insanely high fuel burn and very small aeroplane body size, where are you going to put all the fuel for a trans-Pacific flight? NYC<->LON was already nearly the limit for the Concorde. As I understand, they had high priority when landing due to low fuel.
Interesting, I hadn’t realized the range was so short. I guess if they did trans-Pacific it would mostly be limited to Seattle to Tokyo, or routes with a stopover in Hawaii.
Socrates says that profound knowledge is gained through interaction. He compares the written word to a painting, meaning it can be analysed but it doesn’t respond to questions and is therefore not a substitute for dialog.
This mirrors the critique to phones: used primarily to passively watch “paintings” instead of interacting. The viewer’s knowledge and critical thinking is improving only seemingly at best.
Even Socrates could tell when the consumer has become the product, so I guess this is not a new problem.
I wonder if there is some sort of solipsistic voice within us that recognizes when too much exposure or connectivity to other people becomes overwhelming in a way that we lose ourselves in it. I grew up and remember the times before everyone had easy access to the Internet in their homes, let alone on a high-powered terminal that now fits in our pockets. Those of us of a certain age remember a shift in social interaction that rivaled the previous generations telling mine we consumed too much tv (the 24/7 news cycle was a terrible idea for my generation, in retrospect).
On the one hand, kids don't need their smartphones in schools because mine did just fine without them. On the other hand, the smartphones can be used for a force of good, provided those "paintings" they are looking at are enriching their learning and growth in some way, setting them up to ask better questions when engaged in the Socratic dialogue.
But how do we guide usage toward that aim? That is the real question we should be asking.
Try out Singapore and fly for example to Phuket. It’s a very lean process with optimised waiting times (read: nearly none) and walking distances on both sides.
It can be done, most airports are just amazingly inefficient. No idea why that is.
At least in the US the problem is that you can’t afford to shut down existing airports and so a lot of the remodeling ends up being hodgepodge and convoluted extensions and fitting whatever goes into a nook or cranny.
The last major airport to be built in the US was DEN in 1995.
To sell meals, drinks and other goodies. Tired travellers that are forced to wait are easy targets. Add in the occasional perfume store and Bob's your uncle.
Because the UK really doesn't do regional airports. If they did it would help, but basically I dont have many option outside of the London three or Manchester.
Funnelling everyone through such a small number sounds efficient for the airport, but isn't from a travellers perspective. Heathrow and Gatwick, are massive.
I haven’t been to UK airports, but often I find one of the more prominent bottleneck to be central checks per terminal instead of distributed checks at each gate like they happen at more efficient airports. The latter is a major improvement: You can directly go to the gate and bag checks happen there.
You can also do some nice things with https://github.com/getsops/sops, I store encrypted password and secrets on git with sops, but I also use nix so I have near perfect integration with my services.
I use `age` and `agebox` (https://github.com/slok/agebox) but same idea. I set up pre-commit and post-pull hooks to encrypt and decrypt all the env files I use in docker compose.
Tangent, but changes in the electric field travel at the speed of light (in a copper wire, which is slightly slower than in a vacuum). The electrons themselves move much, much slower. The speed of light is what matters for speed of information transfer.
It is analogous to a pipe of water.
If you increase or decrease the pressure of the water at the input of the pipe, you can detect that difference in pressure at the other end long before the water molecules at the beginning of the pipe get at the time of the change get to the end of the pipe.
It depends on the properties of the wire, such as the diameter, the purity of the copper, type of insulation, etc. In a twisted pair wire the length the light travels is also longer than the external lenghth of the wire.
Cat5 is has about the same velocity factor as fiber: 2/3, but Cat7 is closer to 3/4. Coaxial can get even higher.
