Posts by Like a badger

MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian

Re: Thank goodness she said Python

I don't imagine MI6 pays any better than the rest of the civil service

You don't need to imagine, because the Civil Service launders its dirty linen in public in it's regular Civil Service Statistical Bulletin.

The most relevant chart is figure 14.2, if you scroll just below where the link opens the document. The CS is divided up into functions, but that data is incomplete and of little use (!) but also by profession, which is rather more helpful. The relevant profession is "Data and Digital", and perhaps "Science and Engineering", both of which attract worse salaries than the often barely qualified policy officers, economists, social researchers and others. There are professions paid worse than IT: notably things the politicians attach little value to like Security, Counter-fraud, and Intelligence Analysis.

Salesforce willing to lose money on AI agent licenses when customers are locked in

Dunno, but my first thought on the matter was Turkey Bob shouting to his fellow birds: "C'mon boys, help yourselves, farmer's giving double rations all round! Ain't this the best time of year to be a turkey?"

You'd hope that customers would be clever enough to spot a blatant plan for lock-in when they see one, but I fear Salesforce customers are no brighter than Turkey Bob.

Starlink claims Chinese launch came within 200 meters of broadband satellite

Re: SpaceX deflecting much?

"It's hard to envision any operator sophisticated enough to build rockets and satellites deliberately launching a satellite they spent a significant sum building into the path of an existing satellite."

That depends. First up, build an expendable satellite that doesn't have any genuine payload, second use something that's either non-functional or near end of life, third hack somebody else's.

Why do it? Well the US behave as though space is their property for free-of-charge despoilation by the likes of Musk and Bezos. With the current incumbent of the Whitehouse, what chance of any grown up international agreement? The Spacetechbro certainly won't be up for sharing, but if a few commercial sats start getting bumped into, maybe that will help concentrate minds. It's also vaguely plausible deniably practice for knocking out satellites, when ground launched missiles are just a bit obvious.

Parachutists told to check software after jumper dangled from a plane

"Another jumper here... "

All due respect, but I'm surprised and worried by the number of the commentariat willing to jump out of perfectly serviceable aircraft, and then to do it again and again. Is the bowel loosening terror all part of the appeal, or is it simply peer pressure (except for the last man out)?

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

Re: Boom vs aeroderivative vs industrial turbines

"High bypass turbofan engines of the type used on most modern airliners while excellent for aircraft aren't really suitable for power generation."

They may not be ideal, but we had an article in the Reg recently that referenced a company sourcing used GE CF6 aeroengines to convert to stationary power plants? A quick search turned up an article in IEEE Spectrum (albeit more advert than news). https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-data-centers

I would assert that DC builders, AI nutters and hyperscalers don't give a tinker's cuss about the efficiency or environmental impact of these generators, all they're concerned about is getting a source of power, quickly and at moderate cost. For that requirement, it doesn't matter whether ex-wing engines are not an optimal solution for the rest of us, because so long as they can be procured, installed and run the operators are going to be happy. Of course, there's the slight matter of needing available gas infrastructure as a pre-requisite and in many locations operators may find they can't just magick up quickly by splashing the cash, but there will be locations where gas supply isn't a problem.

Home Office kept police facial recognition flaws to itself, UK data watchdog fumes

Re: The Register

Probably not. There's a few of the commentariat who are civil or public servants (self included), but numerically the public sector is hugely under-represented. I'd reckon the likely explanation is that the Reg appeals to people who are or were at the sharp end of IT but there's few public sector employees who are techies, on account of most IT being contracted.

Datacenters are hoarding grid power just in case, says Uptime Institute

How the UK system works

Since a certain commentard has derailed the debate with divisive dribblings, I thought I'd try and post something on topic: For those with time on their hands, here's 28 pages of PDF reading as to how National Grid operate the capacity reservation system. A quck scan will give your most of what you need to know.

Arguably the problem is not "how grids operate", but simply that a capacity reservation can be made and retained without any meaningful financial commitment from the applicant. The commitment needs to ensure that people don't (a) make speculative applications in the first place, and (b) don't then sit on the reserved capacity when the original project gets canned, and (c) there's a substantial charge for reserving capacity that doesn't get taken up. There is currently a fee of £120k simply to make a reservation application although with the prospect of being returned if the project gets canned before substantive works are undertaken. Back in the days of real industry and real money that £120k was probably seen as deterrent enough, but in these inflationary days of cash-rich hyperscalers and DC builders that sort of money is simply small change, we need to be talking millions.

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

Re: silly statement old chap

you're in say Germany, so part of the EU, and you order say a Trump souvenir mug from the Whitehouse gift shop

This is going to a very, very small market though.

I suppose I might order a Flump souvenir mug...but only as a gift for somebody not even worth sending a dog's egg to.

Salesforce has come up with the most credible threat yet to ServiceNow, and Benioff is crowing about it

No advert for Salesforce leaders

This "never really went after this...all of a sudden realised" line suggests to me that Salesforce leaders have been utterly negligent in growing the business; instead of a considered and controlled market exploration with capability expansion led by competent professionals, the Salesforce strategy is to go wherever the latest executive brain fart takes them, after ignoring a profitable lateral market for a decade or more.

Then again, my observation as a business strategist is that most US tech businesses are purely steered by EBF, and even in the UK and Europe about 50% of strategic choices are EBF. Given that we're not going to see this change, perhaps our German speaking readers can offer us a compound noun for the clunky English of "executive brain fart". Words like dunkelflautte and schadenfreude and others have helped modernise English, and a good meaty noun for EBF would be most welcome.

Tech leaders fill $1T AI bubble, insist it doesn't exist

They are sane words if you want to please your own investors.

It's like the emperor's new clothes, with everybody admiring how smartly dressed he is, with none of the grown ups willing to admit reality. In the AI case they see the bubble, but don't want to be blamed for the bursting.

UK pushes ahead with facial recognition expansion despite civil liberties backlash

I suspect, however, that it will generate so many false-positives with a database the size of the UK passport database that it will be basically worthless and result in a bunch of wrongful arrests.

You don't think this is about everyday crime reduction do you? As with digital IDs "to tackle illegal migration", the explanation doesn't fit and I reckon its purely about tracking anybody labelled a subversive.

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Will we see organised crime targeting minimally staffed AI bitbarns for juicy ram & gpus as prices become even more eye-watering?

Possibly, but because the packages for DC use are increasingly customised to their needs, it's not like there's that much that can be flogged on fleabay to consumers. So they'll be looking to steal from Western DCs and then sell into those non-Western markets where stolen goods often end up already.

John Henry still leading the race vs AI in customer service

Correction, the ones who are being paid to speculate wildly.....

Top post there, Rikki Tikki!

But, like the English weather, the erratic nature of England's men's cricket is it's own reward. When we want a job doing properly we send.the women.

Here’s your worst nightmare: E-tailer can only resume partial sales 45 days after ransomware attack

Re: This shows a clear gap in the market

Near enough the same thing, remember when very briefly calls were cheap enough, and shitbag companies would send unsolicited adverts by fax? Didn't last long, thank goodness.

Pat Gelsinger's EUV lithography gig gets $150M wink from Uncle Sam

Re: How many ASML patents will this trample on?

The USA is not our friend

The European over-reliance on the US needs to be rethought, but the burnt bridges caused by a cantankerous old felon can be rebuilt.

On the other hand, Russia and China won't be our friends for the next few decades under any likely future scenarios.

London grid crunch delays new housing amid datacenter boom

Re: Frack off

It is much easier to move data than electricity, so why not build datacentres where the resources are?

Search on the terms new data centres wales, and you'll find that somebody has already had that idea, and various bodies are doing something about it. Obviously they'll have to compete with other DC locations for load, if the economics work then they'll be fine, if they don't then it'll just be another failed investment.

However, what is the one thing South Wales really needs? I'd suggest it isn't bit barns, it is a solid economy with a good number of long term jobs at all pay levels. A few bit barns knocked up on the old Ford Bridgend site aren't going to be helping out very much.

OR start paying into the general fund for this i.e. taxes

That would be nice, but government disagree, and all the bit barn developer needs to do is whisper "AI", and they'll be in line for power subsidies paid for by the rest of us.

Re: That takes away one of the major "advantages" AI datacenter proponents claim

And I'm not sure what "economic growth" a DC brings to an area. Some business rates (usually on a discount), some temporary construction jobs that'll go to big contractors rather than locals, and then about as many permanent jobs at similar pay as a new Lidl store.

I think I'd rather have the new Lidl store.

Re: Frack off

@cyberdemon; There's a lot of truth in your comment, but worth noting that increasingly renewables are funded by CfDs, which mean that the generator gets paid at a fixed rate, not the system marginal price. With more and more generation under CfDs the wholesale market is starting to lose its historic price setting role.

"The sooner the AI bubble bursts, the sooner we can have affordable electricity and housing again. "

Errmmm, no. Unfortunately, due to the idiotic design* and pricing** of CfDs, these bake in ultra high prices*** for decades**** to come, and worse still CfDs are index linked even for assets where most of the costs are up front capex, such as wind or nuclear.

* Well done Tories

** Well done Tories and Labour

*** Have fun here

**** Originally most CfDs were 15 years, government have just pushed that to twenty years. For Hinkley C, the CfD runs until 2063, all index linked.

If anybody has any doubts what a catastrophic mess UK energy policy is, then they need to read the work of the hugely respected energy expert Professor Sir Dieter Helm. Maybe start with this.

Energy = growth. No energy = no growth. Energy is an input into everything, from steel to cement to fertiliser. Expensive energy = expensive goods. Cheap energy = cheap goods.

If you haven't already, you should check out the work of Dr Tim Morgan which looks at the "energy cost of energy". Rather depressing, and I hope that he's wrong, but his theories are based on a lot of evidence.

"In the UK, fracking is banned"

Even if it wasn't, the economic potential for fracking onshore is limited due to the UK's geology, land use, and structural inability to do anything cheaply. So whilst there's actually quite a lot of shale gas, it wouldn't be a low cost resource, and even the most optimistic estimates indicate that with unfettered shale gas development we'd still be importing 80% of our gas requirements for the next thirty years.

If the UK wants to exploit domestic fossil fuels, then underground coal gasification is likely to be a better avenue than shale gas. Good luck convincing the hippies, and even ignoring that the economics still need to work in our high cost, low output economy.

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

"How they expect people to make pension decisions with no real info and when it takes MONTHS to get a reply to any query IF you get ANY reply at all... its beyond me!"

I'm an unlucky peasant who will have to use this Crapita shambles, but having had extensive engagement with the private sector pension administrators for my three previous private sector pension schemes, I can assure you that in the field of pensions administration Crapita are no worse than their peers, including the likes of Lloyds, AON. All that I dealt with were universally appalling, slow, bureaucratic, obstructive, and incompetent. And just to gloss the turd, so is the laughable Pensions Ombudsman.

Aviation delays ease as airlines complete Airbus software rollback

Re: Something doesn't add up

"I believe unexpected accelerometer readings is what caused the schiparelli mars lander to think it was on the surface when it was a few miles above the surface, with the effect that it decided it no longer needed it's parachute"

Robotic Darwinism.

Dorset Council ditching customized SAP for £14M Oracle overhaul

The Edinburgh University Oracle fuck-up was down to poor communication and poor change management when trying to have people adopt new processes rather than bend the new IT to fit the old process.

Seems either way you do it, there's a very good chance of it going horribly wrong. From personal experience SAP is as bad as Oracle in these respects, and I'd guess the same for any other mature ERP.

Re: Are not council business requirements largely the same across the UK?

And there's a shed-load of commonality: Council tax collection incl overdue and bad debt, same again for business rates, payroll, council finances and reporting, accounts payable/receivable, procurement, planning and licencing, housing benefit payment etc etc.

Any credible council ERP would be modular, if they don't need a module they don't commission it.

Re: Are not council business requirements largely the same across the UK?

If council leaders do not want to do this then we need to start a hunt for brown envelopes, there cannot be any other sensible reason.

Oh but there is. The Universal Power, sometimes referred to as dark matter, the thing that holds the cosmos together, the power that drives gravity, forms the fabric of reality, is in infinite supply and infinite demand, and cannot be destroyed: stupidity. Actually, having played it for laughs, I'll suggest a few better reasons why local authorities don't do this is:

(a) national government won't force them as to do so would be deemed a breach of local democracy (and what do central government know about IT systems?)

(b) Local Government Association could be a starting place but seem intent on avoiding the IT platform issue

(c) There's no credible benchmark data for current systems costs and performance across councils

(d) absent a spec there's a problem even estimating a build and support budget

(e) Most councils are struggling to do what they have to do with the funding they're allowed, and..

(f) few councils have the spare moolah to throw at a speculative project to build a platform that most are many years from needing

Re: £14M Oracle overhaul

Off topic but amusing* update from Birmingham today: The agency bin men who were replacing the striking employees have themselves gone on strike.

* Obviously it's not in the slightest bit amusing for those who have to live in Birmingham, but they did vote for this council.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Re: The tragedy is...

As a certified old buzzard, I can assure you that speaking out of turn is never welcome. I've never felt compelled to keep my politer opinions to myself, but experience is that this never resulted in me gaining a reputation as Badger The Enlightened, Who Went On To Great Things By Pointing Out The Errors Of Management, but it did result in a reputation of Badger The Curmudgeon, Who Was Frequently Bollocked, Was Passed Over For Promotion, And Top Of The List For the Next Downsizing.

And it's no help being right, either. If you're wrong, then of course it's unwelcome, but if you're right then it's doubly unwelcome.

So, kiddies, keep thy traps shut, tug thine forelocks, and openly admire the Emperor's New Clothes. Worship today's false god of AI (or before it blockchain and every other shitty fad), build your skills, take every training or development opportunity, listen to the old buzzards (but only in private), and move job every three years. Except when you get to late 40's, as (excepting some specific skills) business is remarkably ageist and past 50 your CV stands a 75% chance of going in the shredder just because the job spec they forgot to publish includes "young, dynamic arselicker required to agree with management". So in your late 40s you'll want to be putting down some roots, or looking for a role that will enable you to do so unless you got lucky and are already minted.

[Thinks: Can I charge for this invaluable advice]

Asda's 'self-inflicted' SAP mess after Walmart divorce stalls financial revival

If you wish. But to judge by the performance of Isda, all the two top guys did was spout hot air and warm water.

I'd put the blame in one place: Private equity chancers.

They hoped to asset-strip the business, told themselves "supermarkets are just shelf-stackers, how hard can it be?" and relied on a couple of geysers who'd built up a convenience store empire around petrol stations, 'cos that's the same thing innit?

And when they got there, the cupboard was bare of assets to strip, it turned out that running a full line hypermarket was in fact bloody difficult, and the convenience store geysers had no answers, wanted to keep on buying petrol stations, and fell out with each other. Last time I was in Morrisons it didn't seem much better than Asda, for broadly the same private equity reason.

Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane

Both Labour and Tories are happy with the status quo

Back under the Tories, Chris Elmore (then Labour shadow minister for telecoms) proposed an amendment to the Product Security and Telecommunications Bill to allow telcos access to upgrade copper to fibre, but the Tory government of the day blocked because "the government did not accept this proposal, stating that it would infringe too heavily upon private rights" meaning landlord's rights. Come May 2025, and Baroness Janke (LibDem) proposed an amendment to the Renter's Rights Bill to do the same thing, and this time the Labour government rejected that too, with a waffly rejection about the issue needing more consideration.

FFS, Labour idiots, you've had fourteen years to come up with some policies, and the best you've got is plucking the policy of ID cards out of the prime minister's arse?

Swiss government says give M365, and all SaaS, a miss as it lacks end-to-end encryption

I totally applaud Switzerland's decision,

Hold your horses. This isn't a decision taken or ratified by the Swiss government, is it?

AFAICS Privatim is an association of public sector ITsec officers, although I welcome any corrections from the better informed. If that's near enough correct, then they can pass any resolutions they want, but nothing happens until their employing body is in a situation where it can make the choice, and if the body then chooses to move away from (or not move to) cloud and SaaS.

As we've seen elsewhere, it is notoriously difficult to wean most large organisations off Teams and Sharepoint, and even more challenging to prise any finance team out of the evil clutches of Excel.

SK hynix wants you to bond with HBM, so it coated corn in banana chocolate

Re: honey-banana-flavored chocolate layered over savory, square-cut corn chips… edible?

"It got headlines in the tech press. That's the point, and it worked."

We the readers of said tech press already know that SK hynix make RAM, HBM and suchlike stuff. Maybe the point of the campaign is to make us aware of the lower case "h" in hynix?

UK Digital Services Tax raises £800M from global tech giants

Re: How about 20% tax?

"Even the likes of Google are unlikely to be have profit margins significantly in excess of 20%. "

Remember it's the digital services element that is in question. Taking Netflix as a clear example of a content streamer, their net margin after taxes, interest and all business costs was 22% for the last full year. Meta had net margins as a social media platform of about 37%. I'm guessing the digital services margins for Google would be somewhere between those figures.

OBR drags in cyber bigwig after Budget leak blunder

Re: I'll wait and see

Seems to me a fuss about not much.

Back in the day when Chancellors treated Parliament with respect, then it would have been a big deal. But this time, every major decision in the budget was "ballooned" well beforehand, and the decision based on people's responses was also leaked.

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

Re: The "3D printed chicken"

"If it's not particularly less healthy (and not likely to spread brain-destroying prions) than the rest of the animal and can be made tasty, then why not eat it?"

In principle I'd agree, in practice "made tasty" seems to mean a four part mix of raw leftovers, industrial additives, salt and added fat.

I'm not sure I'm up for eating cow rectums however cooked, but I suppose they could be deep fried and sold as a Meat McDonuts.

Re: The "3D printed chicken"

Also referred to in UK industry speak as MSM or MRM (mechanically recovered meat), and its the scraps of flesh left on a carcass after all the muscle tissue has been conventionally separated. Can be produced by wire brushing the carcass, using a pressure washer on the carcass, or shoving the whole lot through a high pressure sieve and collecting the sludge that drips out. Not permitted (officially) to produce "beef" MRM for human consumption in the UK, although it's allowed for other meats. Other comments about mystery meat apply, as the horse meat debacle shows. Also worth pondering what happens to all the less popular bits of animal like rectums, spleens, eyeballs, gizards, udders, etc.

Anybody choosing to buy processed and supermarket packet meals or many fast food offerings is voluntarily eating this stuff. Bleuch!

Digital Realty, Equinix battle for €4.5B atNorth acquisition

Equinix is working with...Canada Pension Plan Investment Board

Hopefully Canucks don't mind their pension contributions being used to buy out private equity types just as the entire market is asking "is the AI bubble about to blow?"

Gainsight CEO downplays breach, says only a 'handful' of customers had data stolen

Re: who are they?

Targeted at the was crayon departments of big companies. Those big marketing budgets don't spend themselves you know.

One-fifth of the jobs at your company could disappear as AI automation takes off

Re: Thank goodness for that - I work in a sewage farm!

A long, long time ago i worked for an organisation that ran waste water treatment plants, and those manual jobs were the first to disappear as crude automation and SCADA displaced men with rakes and hammers, You did need to be a special sort of person to spend your life clearing the inlet screens.....

Re: OBR Forecast is BS

The problem government have is that they fully recognise a lack of economic growth is central to many of the country's ills (I know this to be true, I work for a relevant government department). However, both this lot and the last have "prioritised growth" but delivered none. It matters not a jot whether Labour or Tories (or LibDems), the outcome seems to be the same.

Which to my mind means that there is a simple dichotomy: either government don't know what actually drives economic growth and so can't enable it, or they do know what drives economic growth but won't make the necessary choices.

And, when it comes to IT and admin roles there is little fat to trim without cutting services used by the rest of the business.

When did that ever stop anybody? Usually some finance beancunter* will work out that if those horrible, disruptive users have to more of the processing themselves, then the staff employed to pay invoices, expenses and payroll can be cut. It never enters the BC's head that the finance transaction processing staff usually known the systems, what they're needed to do, and pretty cheap to employ, whereas users are generally paid a lot more, don't know or care about the systems, and are remarkably inefficient at these tasks (eg creating a GRN on SAP, linking it to an invoice and a PO, trying to reconcile invoices that cover multiple POs, and/or don't actually quote the PO, and where all of these documents have different values on them). So the BCs sack a few accounting technicians, and hundreds or thousands of employees, often paid far, far more, have to wrangle with systems and processes they don't understand, with more mistakes and business cost that's far higher.

* Not a Freudian slip or a typo.

HPC won't be an x86 monoculture forever – and it's starting to show

Re: Helpful hint

Indeed. Like newspapers with complete libraries of obituaries of the not-quite-dead, ready to be deployed the moment the relevant person's sand timer runs out. Which makes me wonder, how soon do they start? At what age were Musk or Zuck's obituary-to-date first written?

Scottish council still rebuilding systems two years after ransomware attack

Re: Restore from backups ..

It was a ransomware attack, it did hit the backups. Even if the backups had been purely data, and been encrypted by the council, that wouldn't have stopped them being irretrievably scrambled by the attackers, and it was the complete loss of all financial and related data that was the problem. They couldn't just restart bare metal, and declare it Year Zero, there's all the bills to pay, benefits to handout, staff to pay, HR records to be recreated, financial accounts partially reconstructed from what they could find etc

After the event they recognised that backups needed to be immutable, but that was the wisdom of hindsight. Best practice would have been different, but when you're running the Middle of Scottish Nowhere Council the most exciting things that normally happen are outbursts at the planning committee, so your IT department is comprised of limited experience and empty chairs....

Re: From the report ….

I suspect it's because from the council's own report: "only systems unaffected were those in the cloud, principally Microsoft 365, therefore email, Teams and SharePoint were still available", and because the local backups were also successfully attacked, meaning they couldn't restore them. And what they lost was almost everything - payroll, accounts payable, receivable, housing benefit etc etc.

As the original breach was believed to be employee login credentials, it certainly doesn't follow to me that cloud systems would be notably more secure.

HP to sack up to six thousand staff under AI adoption plan, fresh round of cost-cutting

Re: Crappy printers but good laptops

Then used Canon Pixma all in one - but these expire when the ink pad gets full and are almost impossible to service. A professional service is almost £100 for a £60 printer...

Can't say ours were similar models, but my Pixma megatank AIO ran into the full inkpad wall. Finding guidance on how to fix took little more than a quick search, that included both resetting the counter that assumes the ink pad is full, and removing the ink pad. In my case I went a step further and retrofitted a "printer potty" so that waste ink no longer gets shat into the printer's own basement. Nothing that required skills beyond a screwdriver and a pair of long nosed pliers. I've since replaced the colour print head, so as far as I'm concerned the Pixma's wearing bits are reasonably serviceable.

Having said that, the Canon web site wasn't as much help as enthusiastic amateurs on Youtube. YMMV.

Norway's most powerful supercomputer will use waste heat to raise salmon

Re: Finally some sense

Well, begs the question why Norway are warming the water for a fish that they've successfully sea farmed for many decades. I presume there's some gain, perhaps growth rate or reproduction, but it all smells of fishy greenwash to me.

US Navy scuttles Constellation frigate program for being too slow for tomorrow's threats

Re: This isn't to speed up delivery to the fleet

"And now need two supply chains. So it's probably cheaper to standardise on yours, and change the design......And generating outrage by calling people stupid and/or corrupt for making perfectly sensible, but expensive, decisions is far too easy and gets far too many likes. Plus up-front cost is often a poor guide for systems that are going to be in service for 20-40 years - and the supply-chains and training pipelines that are required to support them"

That's all logical and well argued, but leaves us not that much further forward in terms of (for the most part) bloody expensive weapons, delivered late, often with fundamental flaws or capability gaps and with little commonality with likely co-combatants. During peacetime having overly expensive weapons is merely a cosmetic problem - the government just cut the number bought to control costs, payoff the deaf squaddies, and the military get fewer toys to churn up Salisbury Plain (or scare the rabbits around Spadeadam, or the fish off Aberporth, as appropriate). But as you're well aware, our governments are wakening up to the need to have bigger and more capable militaries against the possibility of a hot war, and in that case it does actually matter how quickly assets can be built, and how many their unit cost. I take on board the challenges of value-share when buying from another nation, but we've seen that effectively solved several times on big ticket defence programmes.

And generating outrage by calling people stupid and/or corrupt for making perfectly sensible, but expensive, decisions is far too easy and gets far too many likes.

I don't think I've made any accusations of corruption. My first job after graduation was working in MoD, that was a loooonnnggggg time ago, but to judge by all recent defence procurement and the outrageous size of MoD little has changed. Individually I'd hope that everybody in MoD is competent and has the best of intentions, but collectively they have been consistently associated with poor outcomes. Asserting that "it is complicated" may be correct, but that's not an explanation or a justification for those poor outcomes.

Re: You have got to be shitting me

Does this mean the Navy will soon be building negative numbers of ships ?

The LCS should count as negative ships.

And will they be able to do that on time ?

No. Over budget, late, didn't work. And started as small, simple, cheap, modular, quick to build, and ended up none of those things.

Re: This isn't to speed up delivery to the fleet

Surely there's someone in the US Navy that realises this?

Of course there are many people, but not with the influence to change much. It's the same with the UK and other countries' crap defence procurement - there's actually lots of people who know their stuff even in the much maligned DoD, MoD and similar - but they get held back by colleagues who don't know their stuff (or more likely can't de-prioritise their own functional interests when needed) and even more problematic, the decisions ultimately get made by politicians who know nothing of any value or relevance.