It should be the reverse. Class A uses the most power (~20% efficient), Class AB about 60% and D comes in a little under 100% (~90%) or so because the semiconductors are acting as switches dissipating very little heat. The downside is that the high frequency switching can induce all manner of interference which will cause havoc if not properly dealt with.

The problem is that there a lot more SS7 systems out there now and not all under the control of competent/secure telcos but for various reasons (including mobile roaming) there is implicit level of trust between telcos. You might be filtered out in the US, but perhaps not somewhere else. There is already a problem of being able to pull locator info including cell-id for a cell phone from any other SS7 mobile switch. The trick is to get in at that level which isn't hard given the appetite of some regimes for foreign currency.

Plain RFID is fairly good, especially in an already secure area. Otherwise, the oldie but goodie: Something you have, Something you know. RFID+easy PIN? RFID as it doesn't need contact and will work through protective "skins" and a 4-digit PIN to identify the card owner.

There has been a lot of press about traders misbehaving. Normally all communications from the trading room is recorded: Voice and IM. The idea is that if some traders decide to cooperate to set a price that should be set by competition, it will become obvious later and the traders can be prosecuted. This has happened but it needs full logs. As for privacy, the usual rule is that you can make personal calls or messages but not at the trading desk.

The installment of Elop was actually demanded by Nokia's major shareholders.

The word I heard in Espoo was that it was some major US institutional shareholders who also held shares in Microsoft. They saw synergy in raiding one to help the other. Note whilst this was beneficial to shareholders who held money in both (it rescued the Windows Phone brand), Elop's reign was deeply problematic for everyone else.

Consolidating a fragmented industry can be a good idea and has worked to a greater or lesser extent in the past. The problem is that the government is usually too far behind the curve to make the best decisions and a good example would be some of the nationalisations that happened in the UK.

However, in Russia, it is about redistributing the assets privatised in the early nineties. The privatisations were a "fire-sale" in which only a favoured few could take part, however subsequently, the shares traded on a secondary market and became assets belonging to pension funds and the like. Unfortunately, in the early nineties, when Putin and his backers (the so-called Siloviki) came to power, they discovered there was nothing new to privatise so they took some companies back such as Yukos. On the smaller scale, many companies found themselves forced with new directors who had relationships with the Siloviki.

Either way, by undermining corporate governance and the protection of property, the government has made it far more difficult for a normal financial infrastructure to exist.

The key issue with this is that many eyes did not check this code. One way to get many eyes is via university. Open source is great for learning about how existing code is written, including safe practices vs. "performance". Usually people are asked to review smaller pieces of code like kernel components as part of coursework. This demonstrates it is useful perhaps to consider other, less sexy bits. Note that changes are being committed over time so there is always new material.

They should give it to one of Munich's biggest banks which is having a nightmare transitioning between Win XP and Win 7.

When the hell are those damn FOSS slowpokes going to get off their asses and write their own fucking ludicrous substitute for Exchange?

What people want is groupware of some kind backed by the equivalent of Outlook. Most people don't give a monkeys about Exchange, but complain when the normal functions aren't there. The issue is that Exchange interfaces are mostly an undocumented mess. When MS fix something, they then best connectivity (even with older versions of their own clients).

Does not the supposed realibility of VMS have more to do with the hardware (VAX) than the quality of the software (VMS), afaik the VAX could hot-swap cpu:s and ram live if the hw detected a failure.

The machines were quite solid for the time but I'm not aware of models that supported hot swapping. However individual CPUs could fail as well as memory modules and the system would gracefully degrade. When the service engineer came along, you could shuffle your users onto another cluster node and continue until the node was fixed. The file system was usually structured so that the failure of a node would not impact availability.

I think the US military has been using VMS for mission critical applications - payroll!!!!

Except that to join such a consortium would have directly conflicted Google's stated policy of using patents only in self-defence. At least according to their stated policy, if they had won, the patents would have gone into their war-chest and would not have seen the light of day unless someone tried to sue them for violation.

In Germany, I see the reverse. There are many iPhones still around that I see either at work or when I use public transport, but I'm seeing more and more Androids, particularly Samsung. I think it comes down comes down to better marketing and a cheaper entry point and, of course, choice.

Blackberry Message Server. It is well liked by businesses and understood by their IT people. Yep, I know that both Apple and Android let alone Windows Phone will talk to company MSExchange servers, even offering central device management for remote wipes, but there tends to be a lot of inertia. Some of the Blackberry devices also offer a halfway decent battery life which the modern Smartphones are not.

Yep, smartphones sell well to rich people. Poor people can't afford them, and in particular they also have long working days away from charging possibilities. Old style, reliable and long lasting basic phones are still very useful.