“As a retired computer systems manager, I am always fascinated by large, complex software systems that fail — such as the Federal ObamaCare “insurance exchange” currently being rolled out at HealthCare.gov.
This software monstrosity is now in its second week, and most people trying to use it still can’t get into the system”
I reiterate: the thing was created by CGI Canada.
And we’re supposed to trust these nimrods with our personal medical info, right?
#FAIL
Sid –
Concerning Fed record keeping and your private personal data – John McAfee was on radio yesterday saying the online access to the Obummercare system is totally unprotected from attack. He says any hacker can pull identity theft from the personal data.
Another benefit of gangster socialism – shoddy goods and services which aid their criminal kin.
with all that money, and all those brainiacs, and they could still F**K it up, tell me it ain’t so. Me with zero(like in obumbles) knowledge in programing, could have told them how to set this puppy up and at least minimize the problems. I’v went through this $hit before, and the mtg and computer brainiacs are limited in “planning” these things. A good IE dept. could help these fools a lot:-))))
Comment from a Systems Analyst in the HealthCare.Gov Facebook page:
To be frank, anyone who is surprised that a massive interface for multiple relational databases, from multiple insurance agencies, in multiple states, with literally BILLIONS of random combinations of health needs, would crash when between hundreds of thousands and millions went to it, has no business in IT.
Yes, CGI has got fat on Gov’t contracts (starting in QC I think).
They also were involved in the Gun registry in some capacity.
Here in Calgary they wrote a new Production Accounting software system called PAS. They estimated $10M to buiild it and their low ball bid won the contract. Two years LATE and $44M later it was finally rolled out.
I’ve read that something over 60 Javascript libraries are downloaded in a page. It almost seems like the same bunch of idiots that worked on the Ontario healthcare system were turned loose on our cousins to the south. Oh, wait…
I will take a wild guess and say that at least 40 of these are used to funnel information off to NSA, CIA, IRS, DHS, etc…
What a gong show this Obama regime has turned out to be.
Only America could take our screwed up universal well it’s not, but anyway, health care system and screw it up even more. Impressive!
My experience is that the basic problem lies with not utilizing common “off the shelf” hardware and software and trying to network too many systems together. When you pay $5K for a terminal instead of $500, the problems seem to begin. It’s pretty hard to hack into a system that is NOT connected (with a firewall) to the internet.
Hmmm maybe it’s all part of Obama’s genius master plan – get people so frustrated with higher premiums, unworkable insurance exchange websites, etc that they throw up their hands and beg for single payer socialized medicine with flat premium rates for individuals and families.
Genius or Incompetent? I’d still bet on incompetent.
They should have outsourced it to the NSA.
markon….You forgot the most important thing about the PAS system roll-out….it was deemed a success!! (although it didn’t work, and couldn’t talk with other CGI systems without a flat file).
To be fair to CGI, I have a bit of experience in this kind of thing, as do many here. Trying to develop an application, thick, thin, distributed or centralized is next to impossible without a rock solid, locked in chains, requirements doc.
I honestly can’t see the Health Services, or the various gov’ts, agencies, and WH being able to come to any consensus about what they wanted.
I’m willing to bet there was mission creep right up to Oct. 1.
They should have let the real experts at the IPCC handle this. Computer manipulation is their specialty and the input result always comes up exactly how they want it. Obama could have stood proudly already showing a simulated hockey stick graph showing phenomenal sign up rates and half the country would have marveled at the efficiency. The MSM would never question it and anyone that did would be shamed as a denier. They just don’t think these things through. By the time the ruse was discovered the could have gone with the old standby:”at this point, what difference would it make”. Amateurs.
When the phishing web sites start that look identical to Obamacare sites, but work, that’s when the fun will begin. Emails to elderly from Obamacare wanting account info… just click on this helpful link.
It is difficult to get a large IT project right (Hell, it is non-trivial to get a small
IT project right). And there is no quick fix. Witness the Canadian gun registry. Witness the
F-35 software problems.
It’s all so surprising isn’t it?
Such good managers of the public purse.
Vote for them again.
The media compels you.
It is obvious that Skynet has overtaken the Obamacare network. “Death Panel” indeed.
I seem to remember that the media had a very dense narrative post election that it was Obama and the Dems who were technological geniuses – managing huge volumes of disparate data and collating into extremely accurate statistical models and data bases. The
Seems very odd to me that this team of celebrated technological geniuses – who’s technological mastery allowed them to handily beat the technologically backward and ignorant out of touch Republican candidate – cant seem to design the system that is to operate the cornerstone to Obamas Presidency/legacy – and the key to future Democrat victories.
Maybe, just maybe these geniuses weren’t quite so clever after all, and the systems they designed functioned about as well as the Obamacare exchange.
But then that would certainly leave one to wonder by what method the Dems and Obama were able to bring so many voters out – well over 100% of the population in various constituencies – to beat back Mitt Romney.
Maybe they did it the old fashioned way – the Democrat way – and did it so obviously that there needed to be a concerted media narrative to provide an alternate explanation to theft of an election in broad daylight.
Absolutely asinine projects like these seem to be a mystery to anyone except real programmers. The dirty little secret of programming is that programming is far more of an art than a science and that the productivity of progammers varies by a factor of over 1000.
Back in the days when I coded for a living, when I was hot, I could easily crank out a thousand plus lines of code/day almost error free. On a bad day, it would have been far more productive for me to just hang out on Wreck Beach as my code was so riddled with errors that it would take a couple of months to debug the same thousand lines of code and then discover the major design flaw in the program.
I suspect that the Obozocare program was the result of contract programmers who were told “the customer wants a program to perform X task” and they wrote uninspired code to perform the task. Then, someone else took all of the modules and cobbled them together into a kludgy system which was flashy enough to convince people who haven’t the slightest knowledge of the concept of scalability that the few people testing out the system would be representative of millions of users simultaneously attempting to use this program.
People have been fooled by the internet which largely relies on open source code crafted by people who really enjoy what they do and make sure that they look at their code from multiple points of reference which allows them to spot inefficiencies that a coder concerned only with a tiny aspect of the problem not knowing how it fits into the overall project would never think of. Considering that ones status in the open source world is determined by the quality of ones code, most open source projects are far superior to closed-source commercial hacks. 40 years ago, computer time was expensive and efficient coding was a prerequisite for success as a coder. Now, M$ bloatware has resulted in the development of hardware with enough RAM and speed to run it quickly gives people the false belief that there’s no need for efficient coding as computers are fast enough to dispense with such ancient notions. For large enough N, an algorithm whose execution speed scales as N^k for k of 2 or more will choke even the fastest supercomputer currently in existence for relatively small values of N whereas a more clever algorithm that scales as log(N) will let an 80386 outperform the supercomputer.
Statists hate open source as “no-ones in charge” and open source is “anarchic”. They automatically gravitate towards hierarchically organized companies in which a programming project is split into ever smaller and smaller bits and the coding-serf’s work on their tiny bit of the code and pass it up the hierarchy at which point a complex program is handed to the government agency that commissioned it. Every such piece of hierarchically produced code that I’ve had the misfortune to use was full of so many inefficiencies that I can’t fathom how such crappy code was produced. For a more detailed exposition of the two forms of coding, people should read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
A government that was concerned with getting working code would have advertised the project on sourceforge.com and offered some incentives like paying the rent of developers whose contributions were included in the final version. That process would ensure that developers who had a personal interest in writing the type of code required would become involved and, with small amounts of seed money, the final program would spontaneously grow from the specifications provided. Of course, it would have to be a project that appeals to the Libertarian-leaning open-source coder and likely a proposal to write code to spy on the whole internet would result in a final product which would make the Stuxnet program look like harmless prank.
Good programmers and statist politicians have almost nothing in common. I’m sure that we’ll be hearing about how the Koch brothers have sabotaged the “affordable” care act registration process in the very near future.
@Loki
Methinks that the AHC(Obamacare) website is a mash-up of gigantic proportions. Likely laden with millions of lines of poorly written JavaScript. Case in point – they’ve now added a peak time “waiting room” to the website.
A friend of mine is employed at an Obamacare call centre.
The federal database is “supposed” to be operational next week (of Oct. 14th).
The Oracle-based interface some of the State contact points are using he has referred to as “error-prone”, “complicated” and “confusing”.
Total mess at both levels.