Apologies, but I couldn’t help but comment on this.

1. I don’t believe it’s broadcast delay. There is a delay there, but it’s of the order of seconds. His waffle at the end is about the same length. I don’t see what difference it would make – it could make the switch happen earlier (e.g., at 1:40 on the video above) but I don’t see any gain. With people analysing the video, it doesn’t really matter where it happens.
2. I don’t believe it’s split video. That’s horribly difficult to get right, I’m not sure anyone proposing it has actually tried it – particularly since they also broadcast this thing in HD. It’s also not very Derren Brown.
3. I don’t believe it’s a 55k take split. There’s no visible edit split – and there would have to be one, somewhere – and he knew he got all six at the end. The stuff Derren was saying about “sorry if I only get five right” – eh. This idea is plain nonsense.
4. I don’t believe it’s eInk etc. Not very Derren Brown. It’s certainly not projection or quickly stuck on numbers, either.
5. I don’t believe there is a hidden wall. The balls cast a shadow on Derren; if it’s a wall it’s exceptional.
6. I don’t believe there is anything dodgy about the stand. Looks like perspex to me, and the ball’s labels are pointed up and out.
7. I don’t believe the “last ball moved a bit” stuff. The last number out was the 2; which is actually the ball on the far right when they’re turned. If the balls had been replaced, the 2 would be the last in / labelled, so the ball on the far left as it’s turned around should be the one raised…
8. I don’t believe he predicted anything, or used statistics, or that the balls in the lottery were influenced.
9. I don’t believe he palmed the balls. Not enough time, not physically possible.
10. I don’t believe he’s holding anything in front of the balls. The labels are on the surface of the balls.
11. Finally, I don’t believe he’s actually going to give us any insight into how this trick was performed. The fact that people are hanging on the little ball moving or the video thing – clutching at straws. This was a good trick

However.. what I would say…

1. I’m interested to know why the TV got turned off. It was moving out of shot, and presumably they could have had set runner turn it off / down off camera. That makes me think they really couldn’t stick on the show longer than the ball announcement.
2. There is a gap between the numbers being announced and turning around the balls. This gap must be necessary; the writing down of the numbers and stuff didn’t have to happen.
3. The ball holder has sloped-back sides. The front and back of the box are shallow and don’t raise high, but the sides raise up – there’s no need for that; he only needs a box. The slopes match roughly where the labels on the balls are located. Was something attached to the front of them somehow? Looking in between the balls, it could be a line of tape going across the front (particularly between 35 and 39 at about 2:25) – equally though, it could be compression bleed. Not convinced it would give the 3D effect required either.
4. Are they even balls? We know that looking at the inside of a sphere and the outside is very similar – indeed, everyone’s seen those masks at the fair which seem to follow you around. I suspect they probably are balls, though.

Personally, I’m going for tape over the balls, palmed over it somehow. The sides of the holder and the apparent grey between the balls. I doubt we’ll know for sure tho.

I read with interest the various Twitterings about price of disk space – in particular, about Bitfolk, but it applies to any other service really. Andy’s take on this is really worth interesting, although I personally think he’s defending Bitfolk’s pricing unnecessarily.

My basic philosophy on this is that price isn’t an issue; things cost what they cost. What is really at stake is the value of the service: is what I’m paying for worth it? Of course there are plenty of businesses which are effectively discount-merchants – the Ryanairs and Tescos of this world – but they don’t offer an awful lot of value. Trying to compete on price caters for a certain type of customer, but it’s a limited market.

It’s too easy to fixate on the cost of materials. You can look at a sandwich and say, “Oh, that probably cost 20p in bread and filling. £2 is a rip-off”. Things simply are not that simple though, unless you’re really truly price-fixated. If you have time to spend scouring the market for a cheap sandwich that’s similar in quality, fine – personally, my time is much more valuable than that.

Similarly, with VPS services, it’s easy to put together some raw numbers on hardware, divide it by a few people, and assume that it’s very cheap. Occupancy, failure and incidental costs don’t really factor into it, or the time to manage it. With that kind of service, the economies of scale really matter, and it’s difficult to see how you could do it more cheaply for the same price. But at the end of the day, even that doesn’t really matter.

What matters is the value of the service. For me, the value of Bitfolk is excellent: it’s a huge amount of management taken off my shoulders. I don’t want to manage Xen; I don’t want to have to worry about hardware-this and the vast kernel-patch hideousness. I don’t want to have to worry about I/O rates. Bitfolk is a service of good quality, and while it’s never going to offer bullet-proof VPS uptime I suspect you can’t get much better without moving to some canny clustering setup.

This is what I don’t understand: bitching about the pennies. Is £24pa too much for 20 Gb disk space? That’s £2 a month. That’s our sandwich from up there. It’s just not worth worrying about, in budget terms it’s noise. What matters is the quality of the service.