=============================================
OBOMBO'S GOT A SECRET--The White House has promised a "tech surge" of the "best and the brightest," from Silicon Valley and beyond. But nobody knows, or is telling anyone, who those people actually are.
Contractors grilled at a congressional hearing this week wouldn't name names, and several tech executives questioned yesterday said they had no inside information on the makeup of the government's emergency coder team. NOT reassuring that the floundering admin announced a former White House budget director is now the abominable web site's "fixer."
So who were the dumb clucks that pocketed the $billion tax dollars for the initial botched rollout? O blamed everybody but his sainted grandmother for the massive screwup.
IT GETS BETTER---NY MAGAZINE REPORT Silicon Valley techies say the botched healthcare.gov rollout was emblematic of what's called "state-of-the-art incompetence" .......the dated, old-school approach to the site's development, which relies on a management system known as the "waterfall model," and whose back-end database appears to run on Oracle software, had all but ensured it would run over-budget, late, and riddled with technical problems.
You could have taken any SV engineer and asked them, 'I have a friend — don't mention the government — who's thinking about a five-year, $100 million Oracle installation, and they've hired an outsourced contractor (crony-ridden CGI-Canada)to build it for them. It's going to be proprietary, hosted in their own data center, Oracle-based, with waterfall management."
"What are the odds that it's working on Day One of the rollout?" And everyone in SV will tell you: zero percent.
Silicon Valley's emerging suspicion of government, see the botched rollout as symptomatic of the government's ham-fisted approach to technology.
The healthcare.gov site is "only the latest episode in a string of information technology debacles by the federal government," wrote Clay Johnson and Harper Reed, two programmers with political pasts (Johnson was Howard Dean's lead programmer in 2004; Reed was the brain behind Obama's 2012 digital campaign) in a Times op-ed.
The pair went on: This latest failure is frustrating for us to watch ... We must find a fix to the federal procurement process that spares the government’s technology projects from the self-inflicted wounds of signing big contracts whose terms repeatedly and spectacularly go unmet.
They are talking as if they know what they saying
Oracle is NOT the problem it has been a sound database platform for decades, and they should jump all over anyone who talks like this
This is a perfect example of the know-nothing press talking out of their ass and people believing it.
As a software engineer, I see this entire description as idiocy, with some of the industry buzz-words thrown in to try to sound knowledgeable.
“Waterfall” methodology is not some quaint old-timey software development process, it is a normal function of design development. It is the same process you and I use in everyday life to make decisions- first you start with all the cars you like to buy, then you whittle it down to several good picks, then you narrow that down to good deals in your area, then you buy one...
I expect Obama and his cronies to start saying “waterfall” as a bad word and outlawing “waterfall” use as if that was the problem, and not their incompetence. Same with Oracle, who is looking at being set up to take a fall- and I hope they fight back hard.