Administration Admits Obamacare Website Stinks 516
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The WSJ reports that six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government finally acknowledged that design and software problems have kept customers from applying online for coverage. The website is troubled by coding problems and flaws in the architecture of the system, according to insurance-industry advisers, technical experts and people close to the development of the marketplace. Information technology experts who examined the healthcare.gov website at the request of The Wall Street Journal say the site appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation and five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contribute to the problems. One possible cause of the problems is that hitting 'apply' on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user's computer and the servers powering the government website, says Matthew Hancock, an independent expert in website design. He was able to track the files being requested through a feature in the Firefox browser. Of the 92 he found, 56 were JavaScript files... 'They set up the website in such a way that too many requests to the server arrived at the same time,' says Hancock adding that because so much traffic was going back and forth between the users' computers and the server hosting the government website, it was as if the system was attacking itself. The delays come three months after the Government Accountability Office said a smooth and timely rollout could not be guaranteed because the online system was not fully completed or tested. 'If there's not a general trend of improvement in the next 72 hours of use in this is system then it would indicate the problems they're dealing with are more deep seated and not an easy fix,' says Jay Dunlap, senior vice president of health care technology company EXL."
Gov't project (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Gov't project (Score:5, Funny)
Mongo is webscale.
Re:Gov't project (Score:5, Funny)
Mongo loves candy...
Re:Gov't project (Score:5, Funny)
Mongo just pawn in game of life.
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How does Mongo help prevent stupid amounts of javascript files to transfer?
Anything more than just a couple of javascript files is inexcusable for the kind of requirements a site like this has.
There are plenty of ready-made solutions to merge javascripts files for live sites.
I have no doubt there are other problems though, and the persistant storage may well be one of them.
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No, it's because the developers are idiots that used jQuery in the first place.
jQuery has a place, and that is in creating things like word processors and painting programs in javascript. It does not belong in a form that I just have to put some data in and hit submit. (The other place jQuery doesn't belong is games, but that's a browser performance issue.)
Like why in the bloody hell do developers do this?
example.com/jquery1.8.2.js?v=1.8.2
This torpedos caching, and when you start throwing plugins onto jquer
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No, it's because the developers are idiots that used jQuery in the first place.
jQuery has a place, and that is in creating things like word processors and painting programs in javascript. It does not belong in a form that I just have to put some data in and hit submit.
I'm not building anything as serious as that health insurance site, and there's good reasons not to optimise before it's necessary. But anyway, I've used Zepto instead of jQuery: http://zeptojs.com/ [zeptojs.com] which is 9kB, gzipped.
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I thought the government was shutdown ?
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> I thought the government was shutdown ?
You thought wrong. Parts of the govt. that are not funded by congress have been shutdown. Obamacare and many other govt. functions have been funded by congress.
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Keep in mind that the Apollo Program was a cover story for ICBM development during the Cold War.
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Ah... (Score:3)
But how many military/spy satellites did NASA launch into orbit. Then let's re-evaluated the definition of a military organization. NASA is clearly at least a hybrid entity. And I 3 NASA
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Their original funding, designers, and pilots were absolutely military. Even more recently, military satellites make up a large portion of their launches and any craft capable of bringing a launch to LEO must be considered capable of military payloads.
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Wars not make one great.
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Re:Gov't project (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really.
They're built by lowest bidders Serco and QSS Inc. Neither an American company.
If they had decided to hire Americans to do this job, they would have had a very large pool of qualified and skilled workers from which to choose.
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Re:Gov't project (Score:5, Interesting)
I am certainly NOT a proponent of out-sourcing (I will not debate my reasons here). However, let's put the blame squarely where it belongs - on the accepted process of hiring the lowest bidder with no vested interest in getting it right vs one where getting it right would have great impact on the users.
If this work was being done by Americans who actually need to rely on the ACA for their health care coverage, you can bet your ass that it would have been done right - the first time. And, those who are involved can say it was an American success story. Instead, we now have another reason for it's opponents to call the whole program a failure.
Brilliant.
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> If this work was being done by Americans who actually need to rely on the ACA for their health care coverage, you can bet your ass that it would have been done right - the first time.
We'd all like to believe that. Many states that setup their own local exchanges paid the big bucks to Oracle. They had similar problems too.
This isn't exactly surprising. (Score:4, Insightful)
So the story here is that a large team of software developers with no demonstrated experience in developing, testing, performing quality assurance for, and administering large scale enterprise application deployments get a federal contract and botches it horribly. Color me shocked.
I've been working in development and architecture roles for fifteen years, and have seen exactly the same pattern on a variety of scales over and over again. I've seen a number of rather large infrastructure development projects that worked out very well too, but none of those were public sector projects.
Just remember that the folks responsible for this mess are certainly still taking paychecks while an enormous number of government workers are suffering due to the inability of our Congress to do its job. Good times, huh?
Computer ? Website ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Silly question, but... what happens when you want to apply and you don't have a computer ? Surely, by definition, a sizable portion of the population that requires Obamacare doesn't necessarily have the means to have a computer or an internet connection.
And no, "anybody has a computer these days" is not an answer. I know plenty of people who don't have enough to feed themselves, let alone buy a computer - let alone one that's recent enough to cope with plugins that invariably tell you "your operating system / browser is not supported anymore, please upgrade." every 6 months.
Re:Computer ? Website ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Silly question, but... what happens when you want to apply and you don't have a computer ? Surely, by definition, a sizable portion of the population that requires Obamacare doesn't necessarily have the means to have a computer or an internet connection.
And no, "anybody has a computer these days" is not an answer. I know plenty of people who don't have enough to feed themselves, let alone buy a computer - let alone one that's recent enough to cope with plugins that invariably tell you "your operating system / browser is not supported anymore, please upgrade." every 6 months.
Do you have libraries in america?
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Silly question, but... what happens when you want to apply and you don't have a computer ? Surely, by definition, a sizable portion of the population that requires Obamacare doesn't necessarily have the means to have a computer or an internet connection.
And no, "anybody has a computer these days" is not an answer. I know plenty of people who don't have enough to feed themselves, let alone buy a computer - let alone one that's recent enough to cope with plugins that invariably tell you "your operating system / browser is not supported anymore, please upgrade." every 6 months.
Do you have libraries in america?
You would advise people to input personal details into public access workstations?
Bad IT professional. No. Off to bed with no supper.
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That is a valid concern, but I don't see a reasonable alternative...what did you have in mind?
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What IS unfortunate is the loss of the old card catalogs. It used to be the case that multiple people could access the card catalog simultaneously but with the advent of PCs most have been replaced with a library-software equipped PC which limits use to the numbers of PCs on-hand. For a small library that is typically one.
Don't worry, the current administration is implementing the solution as we post!
After "Common Core" has been fully implemented for a generation or two, there won't be enough people around who are literate to worry about lines/waiting for the library catalog PC. Bonus, very seldom will you encounter "already on loan" when searching for a particular book.
"We're from the government and we're here to help."
Strat
Re:Computer ? Website ? (Score:5, Informative)
> Silly question, but... what happens when you want to apply and you don't have a computer ?
Obamacare by phone: 800-318-2596
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Any computer from the last 10 years would run a web browser well enough. We actually pay people to get rid of our old IT equipment. You really can get an old computer if you want one. Even if you don't want one, you're bound to have a friend, or even a friend of a friend, who has a computer, and probably would be willing to help out for you signing up to Obamacare if you asked nicely.
In some countries, internet access is already a basic human right.
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Silly question, but... what happens when you want to apply and you don't have a computer ? Surely, by definition, a sizable portion of the population that requires Obamacare doesn't necessarily have the means to have a computer or an internet connection.
And no, "anybody has a computer these days" is not an answer. I know plenty of people who don't have enough to feed themselves, let alone buy a computer - let alone one that's recent enough to cope with plugins that invariably tell you "your operating system / browser is not supported anymore, please upgrade." every 6 months.
If they can't afford a computer then they're most likely already on title 19 medical and don't need Obamacare.
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Actually, I know many families that can't make enough to afford a computer but make too much to get free health insurance... or even reduced price lunches for their kids...
Not everyone on slashdot makes a great living... Some of us are just getting by...
Alternatives?? (Score:3)
Why can't they just drop a contract in Oracle's lap to handle the website from start to finish? There has to be more than one CRM platform [wikipedia.org] out there.
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Re:Alternatives?? (Score:5, Informative)
Oregon did just that. About $50mil later they had a website that did not work for the first few days. And it is a view-only site to begin with.
Giving lots of money to a large company is no guarantee of success.
Re:Alternatives?? (Score:4, Funny)
Oracle?
Well played sir. I can't tell if you're trolling or being serious.
I'm confused (Score:5, Funny)
I'm confused, I thought that nobody wanted obamacare?
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Nobody wants to pay for Obamacare, but once the state's already gotten your money, you might as well get what value you can out of it.
Besides, who says many people want it? This article's about the fragility of the site, and how to doesn't cope even without load.
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Informative)
The law makes it illegal to sell certain types of insurance, and they're forced to sell you prepackaged insurance similar to the way cable companies package channels.
Yes, the law forbids selling insurance plans with fixed "lifetime caps." Especially those where the payout cap is less than the cost of many major treatments. Now, some people may argue that people who signed up for those very low cost programs did so with full knowledge that their "coverage" wouldn't actually pay their bills, and I'm sure the commissioned sales agents went out of their way to explain this risk, but it sure does seem like a short road to fraud.
ACA also bans policies with "preexisting condition" clauses. Those policies allowed insurance companies to offer substantial discounts to customers who could prove they were healthy and unlikely to actually need anything but trauma care. Unfortunately, they did so by punishing people with genetic predispositions or family history of certain diseases with extremely high premiums. Insurance is about spreading the cost of unusual but expensive events across a large pool of people - essentially averaging the cost and risk - and biasing the cost towards those with the most risk is certainly a legitimate strategy. On the other hand, it seems "unfair" to subject certain people to 3x or 4x insurance premiums just because of who their parents are.
So, yeah, people who were paying for "scam" health insurance are going to have to get "real" health insurance, and real coverage costs more. Likewise, the hordes of healthy, unemployed young people are going to have to pay a little more (or stay on their parents' plan) to reduce the costs to the few really sick people. But that's the whole idea behind insurance.
Re:I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)
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Obamacare was THE major issue of the 2012 election and he won. GET THE FUCK OVER IT. If the situation were reversed and democrats were demanding the abolishion of the second amendment, threatening a government shutdown if it wasn't done, would you be insisting that republicans "compromise"?
REDMAP (Score:4)
Healthcare.gov problems are real (Score:4, Insightful)
Healthcare.gov problems are real. But asking for opinions from people who have a dog in the fight is probably less than ideal. When you ask the likes of Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch's conservative rag) or healthcare technology company EXL (sour that they did not get the contract), you'll get answers that are entirely predictable.
Why is the website a clusterF? Several reasons come to mind.
1. It is a 1.0 product.
2. It is a government project, what do you expect?
3. The states who setup smaller (in comparison) exchanges had similar problems. My state of OR paid Oracle about $50,000,000 for a much simpler setup where you cannot buy anything, but can only view plans on offer. And even that did not work for first few days.
4. The developers were stupid and did not anticipate the traffic they got. Even engineering oriented companies like Google often make that mistake. If you have ever tried registering for Google I/O you would know what I am talking about.
5. Obama's coding skills are simply not up to snuff.
Team Red would like you to think that the govt. has all of a sudden become very inefficient under Obama's presidency. And under their guy Bush, it was a model of transparency and efficiency.
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Inside the liberal bubble (where I don't live, but I have relatives who do), there's another reason starting to be cited:
6) The State of New York is reporting that they had about 4-5 times as many unique visitors as they had uninsured people, and that many of those visits come in waves of 100,000 or so all at once. The suspicion is that opponents of Obamacare have organized DDOS attacks on the exchanges.
No idea if the premise is accurate, but it's certainly something that would be both technically possible
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Isn't it odd how, until 2009, it was considered every citizen's sacred duty to disobey the law and trash the government? If the government did something good, it was every citizen's duty to set it on fire, just on general principles. Then suddenly it changed overnight, and anyone opposing the government was a scary weirdo. People are sternly advised to follow the law in all circumstances, and lawbreakers are our worst enemies.
I used to think the "we have always been at war with Eastasia, we have always be
Re:Healthcare.gov problems are real (Score:4, Insightful)
"Sacred duty to disobey the law and trash the government"? On what planet? Here on Earth, anyone who criticized george w. bush and his harebrained Iraqi adventure was an America-hating terrorist-sympathizing commie Dhimmicrat socialist traitor.
Re:Healthcare.gov problems are real (Score:5, Insightful)
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Team Red would like you to think that the govt. has all of a sudden become very inefficient under Obama's presidency. And under their guy Bush, it was a model of transparency and efficiency.
I don't care about Team Red or Team Blue, but saying "Obama is better than Bush" is like saying "Obama is better than a retarded monkey." While true, it doesn't inspire confidence.
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4. The developers were stupid and did not anticipate the traffic they got.
I'm not directly affected by this, but I'm pissed off anyway. - I don't see how this ISN'T software for a medical device. - By that qualifier this is a failure of the managers who hired newbie web designers for a job that required experienced engineers.
Considering the volume of patients with medical needs that should be processed, can we not already ascribe actual real, deaths to their failure? - Manslaughter, I believe is the legal term.
I hope they read this. People who fail to realize the full scope of th
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Obamacare Versus The Affordable Care Act (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can we at least try to be objective?
This is about a piece in the WSJ, a.k.a. the higher-class Murdoch outlet, so no.
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Buttloads paid to low quality contractors..... (Score:3)
For a low grade website.
And to fix it they will pay the same low grade contractor more money.
And people wonder why our Government cant do anything right.
Suddenly.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Republican's request to delay by one year looks like it would of been a prudent decision.
Someone forgot a LOT of things. (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider Healthcare.gov as an Engineering project. Under .gov procurement rules. . .
The law: an ~1800-page CONOPS document.
The 10K+ pages of accompanying regulations ? User requirements.
So. . .CONOPS passes approval, User reqs start getting gathered. Someone writes an RFP and puts it out for bid. Given typical Fed procurement requirements, that's 9 months to a year before contract award. PPACA passed in March 2010, so we're probably at March 2011 now.
Winner ramps up, develops a Performance Spec and Initial Design, and starts procurement of infrastructure required. Another 6 months. Sept, 2011 now.
Infrastructure stand-up and development begins. Likely another 3 months. It's 2012 now. Standard development and monitoring/audits. Pilot of basic site for Insurance Exchange, though reviews and changes. 6 months min, 9 months likely, Sept 2012.
In the next year, you need to finalize, get the integration between multiple .gov sites and agencies hashed out and tuned, and THEN go to useability, security, and scaling tests. In ANY .gov program, that's 2 years, minimum.
Which means, the first REALISTIC date for Exchange eligibility would have been October 2014. But the lawyers and politicians didn't bother asking the ENGINEERS how long it would take, they never do.
And **THAT**, is my best estimate of what went on and what is going wrong. . .
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Yeah, everyone is ready to jump on the "they were incompetent" bandwagon but this feels like it was doomed by the project schedule. And the shops good enough to realize it probably wouldn't even bid so you get those who are either going to just "do their best and take your money" or "don't know any better."
Some hiccups for a week or so after launch are probably the best they can hope for.
it was as if the system was attacking itself... (Score:2)
The Crank continued to sit quietly, surveying the panicked faces in front of him. The tears from a young secretary in the corner, the one who had only joined the group to bring hope to millions of elderly people, confirmed his view that this was no place for the sentimental. Slowly, peoples' eyes started to look his way. What were they hoping for? Some magic fix? Some weird incantati
Simplicity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:5, Insightful)
"The WSJ reports that six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government finally acknowledged that design and software problems have kept customers from applying online for coverage."
What software platform does the software run on ?
I think this problem has less to do with the platform and more to do with the fact that this is what you get when you take the lowest bid without doing some basic research on the competence of the bidder. I mean 92 files per 'Apply'? Seriously? And they rolled it out after the Government Accountability Office warned that insufficient testing had been done? This mess says something about the people running the project. It seems to me that those three months could have been well spent hiring software testing contractors to do some load testing although one gets the feeling from the descriptions that team working on this system were scrambling so madly to get it working by their deadline that there would probably not have been any time to fix any except the very worst the bugs the contractors would have found.
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Not really. It has to do with saving money. In this regard, the government is operating the same way that private companies already operate. They have a project that needs to get done, and it makes less sense to hire a ton of workers to get a website built only to have them be mostly useless later, so they outsource the job to a firm that specializes in just that. Sure they might have a few people that will need to maintain it on a permanent basis, but not to build the thing from scratch within a relatively
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just one of those things that the government really doesn't do all that well. Private organizations live and die by their profit margin, so they make damn sure shit works and it works affordably.
I cannot let this comment pass. Sorry, but anyone who's worked for a large corporate beauracracy knows this is nonsense. They are just as large, Byzantine, and wasteful. That's simply how large human organizations function.
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supposedly, it's behind akamai :
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.healthcare.gov [netcraft.com]
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:4, Interesting)
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sure. although akamai can take the hit of 56 js files pretty good, i guess :)
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if you're behind Akamai if your website is that inefficiently designed. 56 JS files that are downloaded on hitting apply. WTF?
When I was young we used a thing called HTML forms.
I guess they don't have enough 'zing' for Obamacare in the 21st century, that's why they weren't considered.
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Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:4, Interesting)
Often times the killer is something stupid like incorrect http headers that prevent caching, which means every request to akamai hits the origin.
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Maybe they're using dojo?
Re:What does IT run on .. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a thing called HTTP 1.0, and in it there's a feature called Connection: Keep-Alive. It doesn't spawn a new TCP connection for each of those 56 javascript files. Only one TCP connection per (sub)domain is made when Keep-Alive is in use. This was such a nice feature that in HTTP 1.1, all connections are considered persistent "keep-alive" unless you write Connection: Close. From a network standpoint a few extra lines of HTTP headers between each script isn't going to matter, and if it's cached and/or co-located properly (eg: via Akamai), it actually does matter, since those requests are going to be served from the caches efficiently.
However, the biggest problem is that HTTP is fucking dumb. No, really, it's dumb. Not that it's designers were dumb, just that it's evolved over the years and security was never part of the design. For one, there is no such thing as a "Session". In this day and Age of Information that's ludicrous! Say you use a session cookie to validate every single request for every single resource is valid... because that's what you have to do, then EVERY COOKIE gets sent to the server EVERY TIME you make a request. It's so much face palm, I can feel the back of my skull.
On the security standpoint, neither HTTP or HTML really knows how to actually work with encryption. That happens in TLS. What a fucking crock of shit. HTTPS means you can't cache anything. Most of the files being served are NOT dynamic, but STATIC files. However, since HTTP/HTML are so fucking dumb they can't even provide a simple hash, then you can't trust mixed content. If in addition to the URL of a static resource, you could also include a known hash:
<img src="..." digest="d8b09c45b522e34d81ac9eed95f922c7028e7fb2; type=hex/SHA-1">
Then the browser could hash the unsecured (cache-able) resource as it's pulling it in at the behest of the secured dynamic (uncatchable) page, and verify that the requested unsecured content wasn't tampered with in transit so it wouldn't be a security issue and we could actually FUCKING USE SECURITY EFFICIENTLY, grrr. Especially if you could specify a few bits of salt with the hashes...
<img src="..." hmac="WkRoaU1EbGpORFZpTlRJeVpUTQo=, TlRJeVpUTTBaRGd4WVdNNVpRbwo=; type=base64/SHA-1">
But, no, that doesn't exist. No HTTPS content is cached. Apparently I'm the only one on the planet not drinking the damn cool-aide. The web is bloated and retarded, it needs to die. Long live the Internet, but fuck the web. It took HALF the age of the Internet just to get from HTTP 4.01 to HTML 5... Over a Decade, and this shit still isn't in the spec. Don't hold your damn breath for next version, or for anyone with a fucking clue how things should work to propose sane changes. Even Google with SPDY is just exacerbating the issue with bandaids over the inefficiencies of HTTP.
TL;DR: Yeah, it's a shitty website / backend design, but primarily it's because HTTP/HTML is just fucking retarded.
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doesn't matter if it's not static files.
a bunch of images, no problem. but it's doing requests that depend on some logic, even if just auth, from the server that's the problem.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think a contractor took the government for a ride.
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Do you expect anything more from the same entity that spent tens of millions of dollars to put together some Drupal websites for "data dashboards for american's to observe our transparent government" that were always unimpressive, usually half broken, and could have been put together by a high school student for a few hundred bucks or a few free pizzas?
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Windows XP. It's written in Visual Basic 6.0
Re:incompetance out of leftists is SOP (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, the communist (not Marxist socialist, but actually "to each according to his need") English NHS is awful.
Oh wait, no, it's the best healthcare system I've ever experienced.
Also the problem here is contracting out to the lowest bidder. The problem was introduction of the private sector into government work - the same problem there always is.
Ofc you're a troll, but a nice launchpad.
Re:incompetance out of leftists is SOP (Score:4, Informative)
The waiting time can be a bit of an issue, and a lot of the hospitals are overloaded due to meddling by government officials who have no notion of what it's actually like at ground level, but even through that it still manages to do a very good job of keeping the population alive and healthy. We're beating the US on every health metric worth considering (Except, oddly, cancer survival rate), and at a substantially lower per-capita spending.
Re:incompetance out of leftists is SOP (Score:4, Insightful)
Aye, we're not the best on waiting times, and the "internal market" tempered centrally is a lot less efficient than pre-Thatcher, but - like Bevan said - there will be an NHS as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.
Something created out of compassion and solidarity is very hard (and I mean this sincerely) for a more capitalistic society to contemplate, let alone implement.
Re:incompetance out of leftists is SOP (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Client-side Caching (Score:5, Informative)
Let's examine an HTTP request for a rather beefy portion of the JavaScript in question from healthcare.gov:
They're not even bothering to set the HTTP Cache-Control, Proxy-*, or Expires headers on this content, which will most assuredly limit intermediary proxy and client caching. To say this is amateur hour would be a gross exaggeration of the skills being fielded by these developers.
Much larger issues undoubtedly exist in their backend infrastructure. Given the shit I've seen in this area, I could probably spend the next hour making educated guesses about how badly they've fucked up in various regards, spend another hour partially validating those guesses, and wind up just saying "yup, they're idiots." Instead, I think I'll go to bed now. I have work in the morning.
Re:Client-side Caching (Score:4, Informative)
That's exactly the quality you get when you outsource to Indian programmers. We've had a decade to evaluate the outsourcing debacle...haven't we learned any lessons from it?
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Where have you been? /. Subs and Mods have also been outsourced.
Re:Client-side Caching (Score:5, Informative)
It has the last-modified header and an Etag. Expires and cache-control are unnecessary. Contrary to popular web developer belief.
http://redbot.org/?descend=True&uri=https://www.healthcare.gov/&req_hdr=Referer%3Ahttps://healthcare.gov/
http://redbot.org/?uri=https://assets.healthcare.gov/global/js/lib/jquery-1.8.2.js&req_hdr=Referer%3Ahttps://healthcare.gov/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache
ETag: "cfa9051cc0b05eb519f1e16b2a6645d7:1370524513"
Last-Modified: Thu, 23 May 2013 15:59:12 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: application/x-javascript
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 11:58:37 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Connection: Transfer-Encoding
General
The server's clock is correct.
Content Negotiation
The resource doesn't send Vary consistently.
The ETag doesn't change between negotiated representations.
Content negotiation for gzip compression is supported, saving 64%.
Caching
The resource last changed 137 days 19 hr ago.
This response allows all caches to store it.
This response allows a cache to assign its own freshness lifetime.
Validation
If-Modified-Since conditional requests are supported.
An If-None-Match conditional request returned the full content unchanged.
Partial Content
A ranged request returned partial content, but it was incorrect.
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I heard on a radio show that the agents who help people find plans (and who have personal information attached to their accounts for the people who they are signing up), were having trouble signing in prior to the opening. The guy who was talking about it was upset about the forgotten password functionality, which apparently had emailed him his password with the wrong capitalization.
I'm sure that we should take radio show information with a grain of salt, but the thing he was upset about was that the capit
Re:Client-side Caching (Score:4, Insightful)
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Incidentally, I'm keenly aware they're using Akamai for CDN purposes. That doesn't make this any better; in fact, given some of their functionality, it makes it worse. Time for bed.
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA is frighteningly-close to tumbling into full totalitarianism.
You were doing so well - and then you threw in this bit of unsupported insanity.
What unsupported insanity... (Score:3, Insightful)
They are listening to your phone calls, reading your emails, and recording all your chats. They are monitoring your vehicle movements. How is that not totalitarianism?
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know. Perhaps the part where you're posting, through a non-anonymous network, onto a public website, claiming this is happening without fear of reprisal?
By comparison: Iranian blogger's death in custody stirs up debate [theguardian.com] Shots fired at huge Iran protest [bbc.co.uk].
Grow some perspective.
No, I'm one who has studied it fairly well... (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'll point out that while WWII started in 1939, but the precepts behind the rise of the Nazis started much earlier.
Totalitarianism does not require mass murder. Especially if the populace is obedient to the authority.
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:5, Informative)
So now Obama can agree to a later start of Obamacare without losing his face: He'll not give in to the Republicans, but just react to deficiencies in the technology.
To add insult to injury, the administration decided to take down the Amber Alerts website, blaming the shutdown, but Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" website is still up. They shut down the PX at Andrews AFB and the WW2 Memorial on the National Mall to WW2 vets, but the golf course at Andrews AFB, which Obama likes, is still open, as is the one at Camp David. Funny what this administration considers "essential".
For this administration it's about not compromising and punishing the American people for supporting their opposition. The pain they intentionally inflict they hope will convince most people to force the opposition to give in. A Park Services Ranger was quoted as saying they were told to make life as painful as possible for people.
"Tell your Senator/Representatives to cave or this kitten (or abducted child that won't show up on the shut-down Amber Alert website) gets it."
1. Nudge
2. Shove
3. Shoot
They are past "Nudge" and are now well into "Shove"...with scattered, mostly kept low-key (for now), but increasingly-numerous incidents where "Shoot" is starting to be employed.
The USA is frighteningly-close to tumbling into full totalitarianism.
Strat
Seriously? You're going to reference The Examiner for the park ranger quote? Come on.
For the rest Reuters has a good explanation of why parts of the government are hit by the shutdown and other parts continue unaffected, the explanation being that the parts that get funding from Congress stop and those and which are funded otherwise continue to function. In the case of the Andrews AFB golf course, for example, it's funded by user fees and is not reliant upon Congress for budget.
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-03/troops-forage-for-food-while-golfers-play-on-in-shutdown.html [bloomberg.com]
But hell...don't let details get in the way of your rant...
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:4, Informative)
You, are a fucking moron.
He didn't shut down the ocean.
http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2013/oct/07/tweets/did-obama-shut-down-ocean-part-shutdown/ [politifact.com]
And he didn't shut down the Amber Alert system. The Amber Alert system is a private non-profit entity at the federal level so he couldn't shut it down even if he wanted to.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/07/tweets/tweets-and-bloggers-say-obama-used-shutdown-close-/ [politifact.com]
I don't know how you could ever post something from Breitbart with a straight face.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Amber Alert site : http://www.amberalert.gov/
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:4, Informative)
The ACA is the compromise. The Democrat idea was single payer Medicare for all. We compromised and used the Republican model proposed in the 90s, and implemented a decade later by Republican Governor Romney in Massachusetts. The ACA passed both houses of Congress. It was signed by the President. It was upheld by the Supreme Court. The Republicans in the house tried over 40 times to repeal it and failed. They are now throwing a temper tantrum because they can't get their way through the established, official, channels. They're not willing to accept that they lost this fight. They'd rather burn everything down than see the other side score a legitimate victory. It's scorched Earth. Spite.
Compromise with Yourself (Score:2)
Whenever I see two Anonymous Cowards arguing back and forth like this, I like to pretend that it's someone with disassociated identity disorder arguing with himself.
It makes it more interesting that way.
Re:Compromise Opportunity (Score:4, Insightful)
When you don't use the word "Obamacare" and you go through the ACA provision by provision, it's overwhelmingly supported. You have to use scaremongering and knee-jerk words, to get people to say they are against it. Ask people, do they think insurance providers should be able to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions? Overwhelming answer is no. ACA does this. Children stay on until 26? They answer yes. ACA does this. And on and on.
And why do you think the Democrats controlled all three branches? How did that happen? They were voted in.
The Republicans biggest fear right now is that they won't be able to stop the ACA in time before people start seeing the benefits, and then they'll never be able to get rid of it just like Social Security and Medicare. Once people see first hand that social programs can actually work, and work well, it becomes a lot harder to sell their private market, anti-government, rhetoric. The ACA is a threat to their brand.
Re: (Score:2)
Whoever hired the site contractor is at fault. Never allow a moron executive to make any decisions on something that he has no clue about.