Project Guttenburg was my first introduction to the foss ethos. Well I suppose there was Wikipedia, but project Guttenburg really spoke to me. This was probably around 2003? So I'm glad to see it still going strong.
"So why isn't there this kind of stuff in routers?"
Specialized hardware is in routers. Typically, for this class of router, what you're buying is a highly specialized proprietary chipset and a stack of proprietary driver software that runs on a couple ARM cores. Most of the actual network activity is offloaded (switching, packet filter, cryptography, etc.,) and the software control plane just manages the proprietary hardware. The specialized hardware is why the thing can handle traffic at full rate in a compact box with little to no active cooling and a ~10W SMPS.
That doesn't exist in this router: it can't because no one has yet integrated a best-of-class hardware data plane with a RISC-V CPU+drivers and made it available to third parties for developing such devices. So nearly everything must be done by the CPU, and the CPU isn't all that fast.
If you'd like to learn about all this, have a look at Tomaž Zaman's YouTube channel and his development of an "open" router.
I never understood why nation states pay outside companies for this stuff. You need the expertise to actually evaluate what you're getting anyway. Incentives are in no way aligned. At the state level you have the scale to do it in house.
If a senior government employee can get a very expensive Palantir contract approved, they have a good chance of a much better paid job at Palantir in the future:
This is a paradox that you see in many countries. I work for a private company that make software for the public sector in France, so I am very familiar with the subject. And to be fair, there are many cases where using contractor does make a lot of sense (seasonality or infrequent demands, shared resources, etc).
But a lot of the population sees public spending as the biggest evil. This lead to the public sector putting a huge pressure on their biggest spending : payroll. This means fewer employees and worse pay. That makes the public sector not attractive to talent and unable to create a workforce for specific project that should have been fully in control of the public entity.
Due to this, the public sector often has to go through private contractor, which ironically often cost more than if you had the skills internally. But increase the number of employee in your municipality and a part of the taxpayers are going to crucify you (somehow they are ok with paying millions to private contractors though).
The internal vs. external spending is a difficult one and there is a lot of subtlety to it. Sadly, in the public discourse it is often reduced to "public spending bad" or "everything should be nationalized".
Because "nation states" are not one making decision either. It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group of them and even best of people who work on such positions usually choose it because of job security and stability.
Spending 10x more on IBM or Palantir can't get them fired, but trying to build something in-house their organization don't have competence for can get them fired.
And this is even if you don't take lobbying or corruption into account.
> It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group
Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework. If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.
I've worked both sides of a 'transparent open-process lowest cost bid' for the US government, and it's pretty easy to get the outcome you want. a lot of the time its not even for reasons of overt corruption, just that that's the vendor you've chosen to work with.
The GDS is one of the more credible parts of government IT in the UK and IME generally well respected. The government websites and online services have largely been well done. But there are limits on how much that organisation can take on with the resources it has and it's still subject to the same challenges around compensation and working environment I mentioned in another comment that make it difficult to hire and retain good people. Unfortunately it's not realistic to build all government IT projects in house that way at the moment.
Buy: you need expertise in contracts and knowing what you need.
Build: you need expertise in contracts, knowing what you need and also software development.
It's obviously easier to buy than build, especially for civil service roles where they can't attract the best developers due to political/ideological constraints.
Plausible deniability. "We paid £5 million for consultants who recommended this system, it's not our fault it turned out to be a steaming pile of crap that wasted £20 million and took 3 years".
Isn't it obvious? Because governments aren't good at management. There's no incentive or feedback loop. A company goes out of business if it's operationally a mess or doesn't deliver value. Not always but it's highly correlated. Governments face no pressure like this. Maybe mild pressure on the very local level. But when you get to the national level, orgs like the Pentagon misplace trillions of dollars with not so much of a protest.
Everything is eventually private. Each employee is a private individual. That doesn't matter. What matters is how money is collected, and if it's forced out of people by tax, instead of being handed over voluntarily, there's no incentive to be good.
if Palantir (or other consultancies) are friends with government decision makers (especially in the US) then spending more on a service is a feature, not a bug.
They do this because the UK is a failing nation state (it's poorer than the USA state of Missouri) that needs to make goodwill with any country willing to trade with it. So of course they will go full tilt into USA branch of neoliberalism. Expect them to talk about privatizing more of the NHS to "save the budget" too come 2030.
While interesting is this ever going to be actually needed? Unless hydrogen is going to be used in a decentralised fashion, which seems unlikely, water can simply be saved from recombining hydrogen and oxygen. So you only ever need a finite amount of water.
Plus there's also futures where harvesting salt / lithium from seawater leaves clean ish water as a by product, or a future where when it's sunny, just boil water to evaporate it with nearly free solar, then electrolyse it. And you'd need near free electricity to make this economic.
Walk into a super market, every product is giving you non textual clues as to what it is, and why it's different from the identical thing right next to it.
You notice the odd ones out because you have to stop and work out what the thing is.
Edit. An example is spreadable 'butter', in the UK and Europe you can't say it's butter, it doesn't say it's butter, but I bet most people have never noticed that because it's in butter type packaging with the design language you'd expect.
I think it depends on how much it's been parted up. A big mess of everything is probably safer than a listing of 15 identical items.
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