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'Best and brightest' techies drafted to fix Obamacare computer glitches
Christian Science Monitor ^ | 10/20/13 | Brad Knickerbocker

Posted on 10/20/2013 6:14:01 PM PDT by NormsRevenge

Two big problems hit the Obama White House on Oct. 1: the government shutdown, which saw hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed, national parks closed, and other disruptions. And the launch of the Affordable Care Act, which was always going to be tricky.

The first problem was solved – temporarily, at least – when Republicans and Democrats worked out a stop-gap spending deal, also heading off (for now) a government default on its debts. By most accounts, the White House came out the winner, although President Obama was careful not to beat his chest too much about it.

The second problem – the president’s signature achievement so far, known as “Obamacare” – has only gotten worse.

The White House reported this weekend that about 19 million people have visited HealthCare.gov and 476,000 individuals have applied online for health insurance.

But officials have yet to say how many people have actually bought a policy. In any case, it's a long way from the 7 million people the administration wants to see enrolled for health insurance through online exchanges during the six-month sign-up period.

Computer “glitches” seem massive. USA TODAY reports that "the federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system."

Obama, presumably, has been asking sharp questions of his staff.

"I think that there's no one more frustrated than the president at the difficulty in the website," Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said on NBC's “Meet the Press” Sunday.

The coming week should see significant political activity surrounding Obamacare.

Obama is scheduled to speak about it at a health care event Monday.

(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Extended News; Government; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: bestandbrightest; drafted; fix; glitches; obamacare; techies
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To: babygene
and some of the data it needs is in flat files....

What data woud that be?
41 posted on 10/20/2013 8:59:40 PM PDT by 867V309 (Obama- he's just crazy enough to do it.)
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To: 867V309

much of the IRS data


42 posted on 10/20/2013 9:08:07 PM PDT by babygene ( .)
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To: struggle
Best and Brightest = OFA script kiddies with confidentiality agreements.

On top of that, wait until the entire system is supposed to "go live" instantly at every hospital, pharmacy, doctor's office, clinic, and government agency. And everybody logs on at once (like a Monday morning),and starts updating stuff. And expects the changes to be available instantly to the millions of people using the system. Massive crashes from traffic tsunamis that will happen from time-to-time. (Like "daily").

The system has to be built to handle peak stresses at least 100x greater than daily activity. Assuming it ever works with more than 4 or 5 real users logged on at any one time in the first place. Anything less than sub-second response time will lead to revolt. And I'm sure they have the safety and redundancy of the world's largest system outside of the NSA all figured out already.

This is the easy part, the slow manual entry of original data, with plenty of time (measured in months, rather than milliseconds) to get things right.

43 posted on 10/20/2013 9:32:42 PM PDT by 300winmag (Whatever CAN go wrong has already happened. We just don't know about it yet.)
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To: babygene

IRS? That’s hard to believe.


44 posted on 10/20/2013 10:34:52 PM PDT by 867V309 (Obama- he's just crazy enough to do it.)
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To: 867V309

“IRS? That’s hard to believe.”

look at in the context of the 80’s. The biggest disk drive was a couple hundred meg. Data was archived on 9 track mag tape... Even the drives to read this data were all gone by 2000.

Now they can store and sort a lot, but if you go back a few years they couldn’t.


45 posted on 10/20/2013 10:46:59 PM PDT by babygene ( .)
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To: Conspiracy Guy
Does anyone still remember how to write code in Basic anymore?

Sure. But Basic was abandoned totally when Windows took hold. Pity.
As an engineer, it didn't take me long to learn and apply it to solve every possible engineering problem, from Astronomy to structural engineering, hydraulics, coordinate geometry.
Even on Commodore 64s!

The best version I ever used, HP Basic, was never ported to truly fast microprocessors. I often wonder how far interpreted basic might have gone, or how popular it would still be, when run on a microprocessor with a speed of 3.4 GHz instead of 500 MHz.
Anyone, literally, with mastery of high school math could use Basic to do almost anything.

46 posted on 10/21/2013 12:08:35 AM PDT by publius911 (Look for the Union label, then buy something else.)
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To: dagogo redux
Let’s hope they do better than the morons involved with Fulfillment By Amazon.

Don't know what you're talking about.
Fulfillment by Amazon has worked for me for years with no glitches that I can remember.

47 posted on 10/21/2013 12:13:39 AM PDT by publius911 (Look for the Union label, then buy something else.)
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To: NormsRevenge

What would motivate the ‘best and brightest’ to ever want to kill this job?


48 posted on 10/21/2013 12:25:52 AM PDT by Radix ("..Democrats are holding a meeting today to decide whether to overturn the results of the election.")
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To: publius911

Don’t get me started. One of the absolute worst experiences of my life.

I suppose I’m just a moron compared to someone of your exemplary capabilities. I’ll try to do better in my next life. In this life, I’ve taken my business elsewhere, and am dang happy for it.


49 posted on 10/21/2013 12:26:13 AM PDT by dagogo redux (A whiff of primitive spirits in the air, harbingers of an impending descent into the feral.)
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To: babygene

file formats are a nonissue. encapsulate the format and move forward.

interfacing with multiple agencies are a non-issue... just define the gateway objects and move on.

it’s all data storage, data shuffle and business rules.


50 posted on 10/21/2013 12:58:52 AM PDT by sten (fighting tyranny never goes out of style)
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To: NormsRevenge
Maybe Nasa has some ideas..

Failure IS an option!

51 posted on 10/21/2013 1:09:08 AM PDT by cynwoody
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To: Springfield Reformer
I’m an attorney and a code jockey. The legislation is incomprehensible. The regulation is worse. How do you get usable requirements from a web of interconnected, cross-referenced, external law referenced, and intentionally vaguely written liberal fantasy law that nobody gets except their personal favorite parts? That’s where the rule base is going to come from? Not likely. No doubt that’s where at least some of the garbled data is coming from for the insurers. Other data issues are probably based on trying to match fields in assorted remote dbs that have a myriad of different normalizations, and fields that should match have the data in incompatible formats. But nothing is so irresolvable as unknowable requirements.

now you're talking a real issue. if the business rules are at cross purposes and unable to resolve logically, then you have a problem with the analysis

such issues would have to be isolated and resolved... while waiting for resolution, a local override would most likely be needed.

in the early 90s i worked for one of the companies providing the tax software for one of the big 6. as i demonstrated the dependency driven calcs and human readable rules associated with the various fields (like a spreadsheet)... i was asked to implement the ability to 'override' any of the calculated fields. as such, the customer could arbitrarily change a field from 'c = a + b' to a fixed value.

this type of 'data fixing' is most likely what they intend to do with 0failurecare... which i figure was their intention all along

52 posted on 10/21/2013 1:10:44 AM PDT by sten (fighting tyranny never goes out of style)
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To: publius911
Sure. But Basic was abandoned totally when Windows took hold. Pity.

On the contrary, Microsoft Visual Basic fueled the rise of Windoze back in the day. It enabled morons to create apps!

53 posted on 10/21/2013 1:11:56 AM PDT by cynwoody
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To: RightGeek
Brooks adds that "Nine women can't make a baby in one month".

Depends on your objective.

Up against the genetic wall, are you? If you just need nine babies in nine months to shake a stick at, then nine women will, on the average, get it done. Over-provisioning will not hurt, obviously. Time to go embarrassingly parallel!

Nine men, one man, just a question of exertion! Given such a schedule, one ought to do it. Just take his time over a week or so. It won't fall off.

54 posted on 10/21/2013 1:29:44 AM PDT by cynwoody
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To: sten

I’ve found with transaction processing, the most productive system designers were not the best and brightest, but some quiet fat guy in a room by himself who nobody thought was that worthwhile because he still programmed in COBOL.

Of course most decent transaction processing programmers already have back doors to most large systems publicly in use,....because at some point in time they had to connect with them in their transaction processing.

It is difficult enough to tie together 7 or 8 RDBMS into one repository, but to try and develop a website following all the rules of the ACA would be absurd and unnecessary. They will focus on just a few areas of data capture, normalized to their larger system enterprise needs.

I suspect they will first focus on unique identifiers within respective systems, else the rest is garbage.


55 posted on 10/21/2013 1:37:45 AM PDT by Cvengr (Adversity in life and death is inevitable. Thru faith in Christ, stress is optional.)
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To: 300winmag

Decent metrics.

Makes you wonder if the number of reported visitors weren’t really a number of hits on one processor’s IP port.


56 posted on 10/21/2013 1:42:36 AM PDT by Cvengr (Adversity in life and death is inevitable. Thru faith in Christ, stress is optional.)
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To: RightGeek

OMG...That is one I should have read. They always used man-month in costing those jobs. That and costing LOC (lines of code).

Apparently some of my colleagues did read it. Thank you for identifying the source!


57 posted on 10/21/2013 4:57:54 AM PDT by SueRae (It isn't over. In God We Trust.)
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To: NormsRevenge

——The coming week should see significant political activity -——

Translation: Panic at all levels will produce a full propaganda effort

Unfortunately, much of the media has already decided to be wary of the effort


58 posted on 10/21/2013 5:07:28 AM PDT by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... Travon... Felony assault and battery hate crime)
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To: Cvengr; sten
There are 2 objectives of ObamaCare software:

1) Control and manipulate data

2) Control and manipulate people

The "miles of code" are the results of, the aim of, the many government bureaucracies that included in 0-care v. 1.0, their own IF ... THEN statements.

Mostly, those departmental and massive "sub-routines," are programmed in DIABOLICAL.

The language of DIABOLICAL - its documentation - is loaded with every version of the ancient bureaucratic language known as OBSEQUIOUS, which was a popular "social networking first" developed by leftists who fought the rise of COBOL.

OBSEQUIOUS was bought by the DNC, and then merged with an in-house package that the DNC and liberal media used together (Rush Limbaugh simplified the description to simply "the DNC fax machines"), known as OBFUSCATION.

Again, it's mostly IF ... THEN statements that basically look for a truth and substitute a lie.

The rest of DIABOLICAL is made up of more modern, trojan-scripts that are designed to scoop information about you, your environment, anything these many "javascripts" can collect from your "world;" and that includes some routines for submitting what you might, about your fellow residents and neighbors.

DIABOLICAL was from its start, the dream of leftists from the moment they realized that they could interrogate you without having to drag you down to their Thought Police Headquarters ... rather, you can be terrorized by the leftists' tactics, "right in the comfort of your own home."

All, brought to you by the same leftist parties that keep insisting that your getting a voter ID, would result in "a chilling effect" that would prevent you from proceeding to the voting booth.

Obviously, getting a voter ID is a whole lot easier than banging your head against the Iron Curtain "moat" that surrounds The Money Pit that is ObamaCare.

59 posted on 10/21/2013 7:45:02 AM PDT by First_Salute (May God save our democratic-republican government, from a government by judiciary.)
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To: bert

saw a snip from an article where a specialist says it may take a re-write of 5 miilions line of software code.

anyone who has been around software knows that ain’t gonna happen overnight,,

and even then, it still may never pull the Obama caboose up Nirvana mountain to Blissville.. much less a trainload of new enrollees.


60 posted on 10/21/2013 9:17:59 AM PDT by NormsRevenge (Semper Fi)
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