Heeeeeeere's Obamacare!

Spindrift said:
Yes, online video games usually have a lot more money and resources behind them than a governmental website.
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Right... the federal government has the resources to maintain the world's largest military, bail out gargantuan Wall Street firms, and set up a massive domestic surveillance apparatus. But it doesn't have the money and resources to build a simple web application.

DavidJames said:
Can you explain the logical and physical data flow of this specific registration process and what leads you to decide the registration should be faster?

Please be specific, site your sources along with and available data.

Please note, your gut doesn't qualify as any of those.
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Heavy traffic does NOT cause problems such as missing drop down menus, validation that doesn't work, and useless tech support. I should add that load and stress testing should be a part of any project plan, and it's abundantly clear that it wasn't. The website is still having problems despite the administration's promises that the downtime would fix it- which means that they lied about the root cause being more hits than expected, or they are incompetent, or both. You're a fool if you buy the administration's excuse that the website problems are due to heavy traffic.
 
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Here comes the sticker shock for some Bay Area Obamabots:

Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.

Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.

Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.
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Schadenfreude!
 
ravdin said:
Right... the federal government has the resources to maintain the world's largest military, bail out gargantuan Wall Street firms, and set up a massive domestic surveillance apparatus. But it doesn't have the money and resources to build a simple web application.
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It's probably more that they just severely underestimated the demand it would be under and failed to properly stress test it, not that they couldn't build up a large enough server farm.
 
Brainster said:
Here comes the sticker shock for some Bay Area Obamabots:



Schadenfreude!
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The article doesn't say what extra coverage and benefits these people get from their better health insurance that replaces an obsolete plan that covers very little (yes, we've already discussed such plans in another thread).

But it's nice to see that you're desperate enough to find something to complain about with the ACA that you are able to feel shadenfreude for these people.
 
elbe said:
It's probably more that they just severely underestimated the demand it would be under and failed to properly stress test it, not that they couldn't build up a large enough server farm.
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I couldn't agree more that they failed to properly perform stress or load tests.* What I find frustrating about that is that I have done load and stress testing many times, and I take it as a given when you're about to launch a website that has had a tiny fraction of the hype that healthcare.gov has.

I didn't and wouldn't suggest that they failed to build a large enough server farm. That won't save you if you didn't design the software correctly in the first place.

*Load test: ensure that your site will respond properly given expected traffic. Stress test: simulate increased traffic until the web application breaks.
 
ravdin said:
I couldn't agree more that they failed to properly perform stress or load tests.* What I find frustrating about that is that I have done load and stress testing many times, and I take it as a given when you're about to launch a website that has had a tiny fraction of the hype that healthcare.gov has.

I didn't and wouldn't suggest that they failed to build a large enough server farm. That won't save you if you didn't design the software correctly in the first place.

*Load test: ensure that your site will respond properly given expected traffic. Stress test: simulate increased traffic until the web application breaks.
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My company produces "cloud" applications, we're one of the largest two in our industry, but when we released our newest product we found that what we'd stress tested it for wasn't good enough and we had loads of problems, despite our experience with several other successful products. There are plenty of reasons why application launches suffer and this looks, to me, like a mix of poor design, failure to accurately predict initial demands, and, quite probably, unexpected issues that didn't arise in testing. As much fun as it is to just blame the program for their website failures these problems are remarkably common and will, most likely, be ironed out over time.
 
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ravdin said:
I couldn't agree more that they failed to properly perform stress or load tests.* What I find frustrating about that is that I have done load and stress testing many times, and I take it as a given when you're about to launch a website that has had a tiny fraction of the hype that healthcare.gov has.

I didn't and wouldn't suggest that they failed to build a large enough server farm. That won't save you if you didn't design the software correctly in the first place.

*Load test: ensure that your site will respond properly given expected traffic. Stress test: simulate increased traffic until the web application breaks.
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Having been on the wrong end of those kinds of launches before, it's easy to run into trouble. I once did a contest game for a well-known home decorating diva who once spent time in the slammer (NO HINTS!!!), and the game worked in conjunction with moments in the show. Players had to hightail it to the website to look for clues as soon as they were revealed by the host. And the servers they set up were just completely slammed. Everyone thought they'd gotten ready but the sheer volume was beyond expectations. According to the White House, they exceeded their estimates by 500%. Once this initial period is ironed out, this site will run as well as any other federal site. WhiteHouse.gov works fine, right?
 
uke2se said:
The article doesn't say what extra coverage and benefits these people get from their better health insurance that replaces an obsolete plan that covers very little (yes, we've already discussed such plans in another thread).
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And fortunately the government knows better than these ignorant yobs what extra coverage and benefits they need.
 
Unabogie said:
Having been on the wrong end of those kinds of launches before, it's easy to run into trouble. I once did a contest game for a well-known home decorating diva who once spent time in the slammer (NO HINTS!!!), and the game worked in conjunction with moments in the show. Players had to hightail it to the website to look for clues as soon as they were revealed by the host. And the servers they set up were just completely slammed. Everyone thought they'd gotten ready but the sheer volume was beyond expectations. According to the White House, they exceeded their estimates by 500%. Once this initial period is ironed out, this site will run as well as any other federal site. WhiteHouse.gov works fine, right?
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I've been on the wrong end of glitches related to website launches too, and I know it's no fun. However, as a fellow techie I think you know already that it's not just about the traffic. For example, did you know that hitting "apply" causes an update on 92 separate files, 56 of which are Javascript files? Small wonder then that heavy traffic would cause problems, but why on earth would it be necessary to shuttle back and forth that much data for a straightforward form submit?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013...are-technology-analysis-idUSBRE99407T20131005
 
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Spindrift said:
As a software professional for 30 years, here's a dirty little secret: Most software sucks. Software done for the government is often especially bad because they either hire the wrong people, over and over, or they do it in-house with nowhere near the resources required to do it correctly.
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They undoubtedly contracted it out. And the SOP for bidding on government contracts is to underbid and then make money from the inevitable fixes and upgrades. I've worked with some massively face palm-inducing systems that have been purchased by DoD and NASA from some well-known companies (such as a DoD system that had "12-minute time-outs" - the system would stop for 12 minutes if the user made a mistake!).
 
ravdin said:
I've been on the wrong end of glitches related to website launches too, and I know it's no fun. However, as a fellow techie I think you know already that it's not just about the traffic. For example, did you know that hitting "apply" causes an update on 92 separate files, 56 of which are Javascript files? Small wonder then that heavy traffic would cause problems, but why on earth would it be necessary to shuttle back and forth that much data for a straightforward form submit?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013...are-technology-analysis-idUSBRE99407T20131005
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It sounds like the developers used a bunch of jQuery plugins but didn't minify them. The 92 separate files part doesn't mean much since the rest of the files are probably static images and CSS files. Either way, it's not atypical for that many requests to happen on a large site.

I just checked Amazon.com, and in Firebug I saw 151 separate file requests.

ETA: I just went to healthcare.gov and hit "apply".

I got just 11 JavaScript files. So either that "expert" was mistaken or the problem has been fixed.
 
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uke2se said:
But it's nice to see that you're desperate enough to find something to complain about with the ACA that you are able to feel shadenfreude for these people.
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All Republicans have are anecdotes. They avoid like the plague any unbiased analysis because it upsets their bias.
 
All that being said, they better get these glitches resolved soon. It just feeds into the narrative.
 
Brainster said:
Here comes the sticker shock for some Bay Area Obamabots:

Schadenfreude!
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Covered California spokesman Dana Howard maintained that in public presentations the exchange has always made clear that there will be winners and losers under Obamacare.

"Some people will see an increase who are already on the individual market purchasing insurance," he said, "but most people will not."
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Oh yeah, I remember that well. When this abomination was being rammed through, the perpetrators were out there making sure everybody knew that there would be "winners AND LOSERS" under Obamacare. Yep, really made perfectly clear right from the get-go. Nobody out there talking about how everybody was getting a reduction, no siree.

"Of course, I want people to have health care," Vinson said. "I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."
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BWAAHAHAHAHAHA - *sob* - HAHAHAHAHA
 
Peephole said:
So, what is your alternative, Mike Denk?
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At this point, I have to admit single-payer (i.e., government) is starting to look preferable. Which may be the idea. Screw Obamacare up so badly that everybody recognizes we need a patch on the patch.
 
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