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Comment Dark Fibre (Score 4, Insightful) 226

by FalconZero (#34255772) Attached to: UK Minister Backs 'Two-Speed' Internet
But they don't pay for all of the pipes... Remember all that Dark Fibre they bought up in 2007?

I remember thinking they're preparing for this sort of thing (in one form or another) - they're pretty good at anticipating trends. If they've got the backbone bandwidth to trade for last mile bandwidth they'll be able to operate at substantially lower cost than other high bandwidth users (read:Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter - prime competetors all).

Comment Deferred optimism (Score 3, Insightful) 179

by FalconZero (#34159336) Attached to: UK Reviewing Copyright Laws
While I wholeheartedly welcome the opportunity to improve some of the frankly stupid laws floating around at the moment, the pessimist in me wonders how this will be twisted by lobbying into some ridiculous new round of laws. I'm going to wait six months before I celebrate this.

Comment Double emission? (Score 3, Interesting) 129

by FalconZero (#33710432) Attached to: Hawking Radiation Claimed Created In a Lab
So when the virtual particle pair is created at the event horizon, one is trapped stationary beyond the horizon, and the other escapes (becoming real).

In this experiment obviously the event horizon doesn't persist indefinitely, so when the horizon collapses, do the 'trapped' photons escape? and hence is there a time delayed double emission of the hawking radiation? Would this provide a testable signature?

Any physicists know?

Comment Re:Not necessarily a rip-off (Score 1) 551

by FalconZero (#33124292) Attached to: The Recovery Disc Rip-Off
Hope you don't mind me requoting some of my earlier comments :

I've had plenty of hardware failures, it's just that I've never found a restore disc to be that useful. The only real benefit of a restore CD (for restoring, rather than OEM economic purposes) is the drivers, and I find they get out of date pretty fast. When I restore (or repair) a Win install, I'll use a Win disk and download the new drivers directly.

Windows computers I look after either have remote deployment or I already have appropriate physical media (I've got drawers stuffed full of the shiny holographic XPsp2 CDs.)

As for Linux machines, the distros are available everywhere - even if I didn't have a live flashdrive.

I'm not saying unbundling the CD is right for everyone, but it is for me.

Comment Re:Not necessarily a rip-off (Score 1) 551

by FalconZero (#33124218) Attached to: The Recovery Disc Rip-Off

Having a restore disc is really not "optional". It's just as important as having a backup of your files

I can see your point, but I disagree. I've had plenty of hardware failures, it's just that I've never found a restore disc to be that useful. The only real benefit of a restore CD (for restoring, rather than OEM economic purposes) is the drivers, and I find they get out of date pretty fast. When I restore (or repair) a Win install, I'll use a Win disk and download the new drivers directly.

That said, as I've said in reply to a comment above, many of my machines are remote deployment, or Linux (I use Linux personally).

I'm not saying unbundling the CD is right for everyone, but it is for me.

Comment Re:Not necessarily a rip-off (Score 1) 551

by FalconZero (#33123318) Attached to: The Recovery Disc Rip-Off
Nope.

Windows computers I look after either have remote deployment or I already have appropriate physical media (I've got drawers stuffed full of the shiny holographic XPsp2 CDs.) (Although I admit that route loses the install time OEM tailored drivers)

As for Linux machines, the distros are available everywhere - even if I didn't have a live flashdrive.

Comment MD5 (Score 4, Funny) 380

by FalconZero (#32838904) Attached to: Crack the Code In US Cyber Command's Logo
It's (obviously) MD5 length. The results of a quick reverese MD5 lookup are as follows :

USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.

However, as we all know, MD5 isn't 1-1. It could well just be a conincidence, or something completely different.

Comment Productivity (Score 5, Informative) 286

by FalconZero (#32294724) Attached to: A Playable <em>PAC-MAN</em> On Google Doodle
Google handled approx 88 billion searches in Dec-2009. (88b/31)*2=5.67billion searches in two days. If (conservativly) one tenth of those are work related, that's 567m. If one in ten work related users plays this once for 60 seconds, that's 3.4 billion seconds. 3.4 billion seconds is approximatly 108 person-years worth of productivity. (Which at US federal minimum wage is about 1.6 million dollars). That's a low figure as those who need google to work probably don't earn minimum wage. Now that's power! I personally played for more than 60s....

Comment Re:What languages? (Score 1) 1359

by FalconZero (#28500733) Attached to: Emigrating To a Freer Country?
As an Englishman who lives in France from time to time, I can attest to this. In fact it is sometimes hard to get people not to speak English. My early attempts at French were immediately met with English making practice a bit difficult. Incidentally, you should probably go with 'vous' instead of 'tu'. The 'tu' form is for people you know pretty well (family, good friends, etc...).

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