The hope is to lock in the contract with totally unrealistic cost/schedule, and then make up the financial risks through Engineering Change Proposals. Those ECPs reflect both requirements instability and cost/schedule "rebaselining" instability. I think managing ECPs is what separates the really good Program Managers/System Program Officers from the merely competent PM/SPO.

Acquisition people have a 3 year block from working for their contractors. I don't know if the same rule applies to requirements people. For the large primes, that can entail a set of duties and a firewall between the part of the company that worked for the acquisition guy. Usually that works pretty well, but there are, of course, significant exceptions (and some people have gone to jail over that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )

In defense of the 'revolving door': Companies really do need an understanding of how the government system works, not just the formal rules but also the 'grease that lubes the gears'. So that can be "What does this requirement really mean?" or "What are the ramifications of this contracting approach? How much delivery risk are we expected to take on to meet requirements?" or "how should this system work with other systems?"

That being said, I've also seen retired generals being hired solely for the use of their rolodex. Nothing pissed us off more (both government employees and support contractors) than having to answer a rocket from some general (or Congresscritter) of the form, "Why aren't you using this product (that my friend/constituent sells)?" Palantir plays that game particularly well, from what I remember back when I was working.

Failing audits is frankly independent from failing programs. The audits usually have problems tracking money flows and then property within the government. The contractor's expenditures are closely monitored. That doesn't mean they're in-line, but they're auditable. And when the audit discovers problems, there are ways for the government to respond. I've seen those applied rather frequently.

One common pattern is a program starts down the wrong path, and blows initial cost/schedule/performance. But that capability is needed badly (often because its predecessor program didn't deliver). So the Service piles on more requirements and 'readjusts the baseline' for additional funding, because "if we don't get it in this Program of Record, it'll be at least a decade before we can start a new Program of Record to get what we need." That just adds requirements to something that is already behind. If I had to guess what happened here, I bet there's some of that flavor over the execution. In my experience, most programs started with the combination of unachievable or under-specified requirements AND unachievable/unrealistic schedule.

(A 'Program of Record', by the way, consists of an approved requirements document, an approved POM budget for the next 5 years showing the RDTE money, the OPA purchasing money, and the OMA maintenance money FOR EACH FISCAL YEAR. If you run out of RDTE money but haven't finished the design, you're in trouble. The third element is the approved procurement strategy, that says how you'll buy it. That includes the kind of contract, firm fixed price or cost plus, the kinds of oversight, when and how prototypes will be delivered and tested, etc.)

Aerospace (and other FFRDCs like MITRE) exist to prevent massive failures like this. I wonder what the Aerospace corporate explanation is. I know from working at another FFRDC that often the worker-bees know the program is heading to disaster, but the managers won't carry the bad news to the customer. Other times, the bad news is delivered, but the government manager decides to carry on anyway. That can be due to pressure within the Service ("Don't f**k this up!, Colonel!"), or pressure from the contractor ("Trust us, these problems are temporary.")

The causes are often requirements instability, overly ambitious/unimplementable/unrealistic requirements, impossible initial schedule ("1 month to make the baby with 9 women"), technology problems (immature technology, vendors can't deliver as promised), and occasionally manufacturing/assembly/integration problems. And of course, substantial amounts of the functionality is in software, and this community knows the ways software projects can go south.

It's no consolation to this project,, its leadership, prime contractors, and customer community, but the last major project I worked on failed at 2 1/2 times the sunk cost of this one.

Well, that does mesh with the article about "maybe we should start charging for Open Source".... https://developers.slashdot.or...

Exploding washing machines: https://www.consumerreports.or... See also https://www.elliott.org/?s=sam... Consumer issues with Samsung where help was needed to resolve the issue.

Given both the quality issues and the enshittification issues, I don't know why anyone would buy Samsung -anything-.

You know, it's funny. During the 2 1/2 years I lived/worked in Canada (British Columbia, under an NDP provincial government), I had the same view of Canadians and their politicians. What I observed was how the party in power was enabled to rule without many constraints. At that time, the US legislative gridlock made me tell my Canadian friends, "Better no government than bad government." But with Trump's success issuing EOs, Congress' willingness to go along, and the active support of the Supreme Court, we have the "party in power can rule" of a Parliamentary system withOUT the ability to rapidly change that government through no-confidence votes.

I'm still not a fan of Parliamentary systems, but I think the current US system is badly broken, with multiple contributors to the political failures.

System crash/panic with reboot? Or just application abnormal termination?

https://storage.courtlistener....

IANAL, but it sure seems to me the administration lost on all of the claims (except for one or two where the judge said, "I don't need to go here, because I've already made it moot.")

Now there's still the other case on this, which is in the DC Court of Appeals, addressing one specific law where the recourse is that venue. Briefs are due in April, so the first hearing will probably be in May. Track that case here: https://www.courtlistener.com/...

Sometimes can make you sick!

There's more to it than just 'smaller'. Cellphone OS are designed to provide a smaller attack surfaces. They provide less access (iOS provides no conventional user-visible file system) in exchange for that security.

But consider: Here an iOS vulnerability makes headlines. A new Windows vulnerability is just "meh".

I find it interesting that some here would want operating system vendors to be legally liable for security vulnerabilities? Will they also accept legal liability for bugs in their own applications? I've been calling for that for decades, but have been mostly shouted down by people who won't accept that responsibility for their own code. (When I left the job where I wrote real production code, I gave my successor a personal warranty. "If you find a bug, call, and I'll help find and fix it for free." She never called, and years later I talked to her. "No problems reported with that package", which was widely used across the application to glue the user interface to the application logic.)

Mark Gurman says a lot of stuff about Apple that turns out to be false. How will that be functionally different from AI Hallucinations about Apple?

I believe there needs to be a coherent approach to countering this. That includes legal actions, political actions, and probably actions on the ground. The core problem is coming up with and then disseminating that approach between now and early November.

Well, when the heavily armed and masked ICE agents arrive at your polling place, I hope you are ready to tell them to go away...

Some significant proportion of states, including some with potentially close elections, have governors who would probably not resist. But the interviews I've heard with state and particularly local election officials show a high degree of concern. (Of course, it's only those who are worried who would get on the radio. But there's enough of those to justify a perception those anecdotal reports represent more than just a couple outliers.)

I think Bernie sits in an economic bubble that is almost as irrational and dense as Trump's bubble. "Medicare for all" at current reimbursement rates would bankrupt much of the health care system. Our local hospital estimated 18 months. "Tax the rich" to pay for current spending would dive deep into the upper middle class and even middle class. And there's no Constitutional basis for a 'wealth tax'.

My friend (college classmate) who lives in Vermont has been railing about Bernie's inability to actually deliver meaningful results for his constituents for a long time. My friend's town was badly damaged by the floods a couple of years ago, and Bernie has delivered no relief to that town in getting the promised federal reimbursements for bridge replacements, etc.