> They were aware there were issues, and negotiations happened on how to fix them, with the French leaving them with the impression everything is good.
The French culture is to never deliver bad news before the deadline has arrived. Underlings will never tell their boss that something is impossible, decisions will be made by grande-ecole-bosses without technical expertise and relationships are valued far higher than knowledge and expertise. You'll always get the first impression that all is well and they'll manage before the deadline. If you need a real non-sugar-coated insight as to how the project is going you need to gather your own data. Discreetly.
However, as soon as shit has hit the fan and bosses got involved, they'll bend over backwards to make things work. But you cannot expect meeting the first deadline, ever. Same for the first budget. Subsequent ones depend on the size of the project.
> The French culture is to never deliver bad news before the deadline has arrived.
No, it definitely is not. You have no idea of how this kind of project works.
Naval Group has a ton of experience managing large contracts with state actors. They have worked with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Singapore, Taiwan, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Egypt and I am probably forgetting some. They know what they are doing.
On the original contract in 2016, Germany also bid and in all likelihood could have won, since Germany has far more experience with building non-nuclear subs with Diesel or fuel-cell drives. France had to start the designs almost from scratch since they offered a redesign of their nuclear subs. France desperately wanted the contract and probably only won the bidding by intentionally bidding too low and too quick, downplaying their technical challenges. This behavior of France has bitten various European supposed allies and supposed good neighbors a number of times. Either they got outbid by a phony French bid. Or they were customers of such a bidding process, getting endless delays and price overruns.
So I'd be surprised if there were any substantial EU backing for France in this matter.
The press coverage you linked contradicts you. It says that TKMS' bid is too risky because it requires doubling the size of their existing design, which is risky.
Furthermore, it's entirely on Australia to choose the best bid. If they thought TKMS' bid is risky to upscale, they should also have thought DCNS/Naval Group's bid is also risky due to having to redesign and chosen the Japanese design which was the closest to what they wanted. Considering the fiasco that was their precious submarine acquisition, it's not surprising it failed again.
I don't know what they're going to do while waiting for the new subs to come in the 2050s, the Collins-class isn't supposed to last that long.
These things, like user accounts, more auth methods, flexible endpoints, IP pools, ..., should be integrated in a product in a secure manner. What wireguard does is the irresponsible lazy approach of leaving everything up to the VPN providers and webinterface-monkeys. Who will surely mess up a lot of the upper layers that provide all the necessary "comfort" features. After which the wireguard crowd will wash their hands with the Jobsian "you are holding it wrong".
Context switching overhead is bad for microkernel performance. All the reasons why the userspace wireguard implementation was slower apply to each and every part of a microkernel system. And all of this got worse with spectre and meltdown, secure context switches are now even more expensive. Modern CPUs generally always increase the context switching cost, they optimize for single-process benchmarks.
So microkernels are dead, performance buries them deeper and deeper.
Problem is, "not be paying market rates" will never happen. Market rates will be paid, because disowning anyone for the public good is only constitutional, if market rates are paid as restitution. There have been lots and lots of cases around disowned people lost by the state because of that.
There are often ways around that. For example the state can manipulate the markets, or offer an alternate choice, for example to never raise rents ever.
Lowering rents was part of the plan anyways, I think. Market manipulation through rent caps has been tried before and (in the Berlin version) declared unconstitutional.
Berlin doesn't care about money. Back when separated by the iron curtain, Berlin always got a special deal in federal/state finances because of its situation. After reunification, Berlin was pumped full of money because it was the new designated capital city and showpiece for unification. Nowadays, some of the special deals still remain, plus Berlin is awarded absurd amounts of money from the "Länderfinanzausgleich" (state finance balancing mechanism), meaning that the richer German states pay for Berlin's deficit.
So Berlin is in the comfortable situation of that one no-good family member on social security who will always find someone to pay their bills. Why change anything, why stop spending all that money, if more keeps coming without any effort in any case?
There are, but they can only audit and report. Change and punishment would need to happen politically, but that would need a majority of states. Two thirds of the states profit from Laenderfinanzausgleich (to various degrees) and will not change anything.
Nope, UCS-2. Which is UTF-16, but just the BMP, so only the first 65k codepoints and all characters are fixed-length 16bits. Only later windows versions at some point learned UTF-16.
Well, easy in case of VW: If the optimization involves checking "steering wheel has never moved out of 0 position since engine start" and "intake air is at exactly 293K", then it illegally optimizes for a test.
Red tape. Medical devices need to (depending on type and country) conform to medical device regulations, be approved by a medical device regulator, be sold only to medical professionals or people with a script from a medical professional. Liability in case something goes wrong because of your device is expensive, adversarial and dependent on crossing all the 'i's and dotting all the 't's. There are "lower levels" of this due to regulations being less for more harmless devices. E.g. you can nowadays get thermometer, pulse-oximeter or a blood pressure meter quite cheaply. But anything just mimimally more complicated or critical gets expensive very fast.
Reasons for this beside the red tape are imho the low number of customers (most slightly specialized medical devices are needed once per patient with $rare_disease, once per lab or once per doctors office), the high need for customization (one-size-fits-all doesn't even work for blood pressure cuffs, let alone prosthetics), localization (broken i18n can kill, most customers are elderly and therefore not as versed in engrish), higher component cost (sterilizable plastics are more expensive, bigger displays for vision-impaired elderly clients are more expensive) and acceptance of foreign/small/unknown manufacturers (won't trust my elderly mother's health to a device from "Corty's Refurbished Asbestos Plates, Health Equipment and Luxuries Ltd., Templestreet, HongKong (CRAPHEALLTH)").
There is also a cartel of each medical professionals, manufacturers, insurance companies/public insurance pools and politicians, complete with revolving doors, kickbacks, fake or real -but always suspiciously convenient- scientific data, and exclusionary legal situations. All cementing the status quo and the wealth and standing of all participants (except the patients' of course).
>But anything just mimimally more complicated or critical gets expensive very fast.
"Critical" i understand, "Complicated" i dispute. Our existing technology has significantly brought down this threshold and it should no longer be a limiting factor.
>There is also a cartel of each medical professionals, manufacturers, insurance companies/public insurance pools and politicians, complete with revolving doors, kickbacks, fake or real -but always suspiciously convenient- scientific data, and exclusionary legal situations. All cementing the status quo and the wealth and standing of all participants (except the patients' of course).
This is what i believe is the real reason. In fact sometimes i think i should spend the rest of my career/life to overturn the status quo with the help of professionals from the Open Source community many of whom would gladly spend their time and money in helping their fellow human beings get affordable healthcare.
The French culture is to never deliver bad news before the deadline has arrived. Underlings will never tell their boss that something is impossible, decisions will be made by grande-ecole-bosses without technical expertise and relationships are valued far higher than knowledge and expertise. You'll always get the first impression that all is well and they'll manage before the deadline. If you need a real non-sugar-coated insight as to how the project is going you need to gather your own data. Discreetly.
However, as soon as shit has hit the fan and bosses got involved, they'll bend over backwards to make things work. But you cannot expect meeting the first deadline, ever. Same for the first budget. Subsequent ones depend on the size of the project.