I doubt these sites were really meant to work at all. they probably do not want us to know how bad this program is right now.
Obamacare website looks "like nobody tested it," programmer says http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_...-looks-like-nobody-tested-it-programmer-says/ Some great quotes in this article showing what a disaster the Obamacare rollout has been: "No one knows how many people have managed to enroll because the administration refuses to release those numbers, but the website's launch has been rocky." "Media outlets have struggled to find anyone who's actually been successful. The Washington Post even illustrated that sought-after person as a unicorn, and USA Today called the launch an "inexcusable mess" and a "nightmare."" "It wasn't designed well, it wasn't implemented well, and it looks like nobody tested it," said Luke Chung, an online database programmer. Chung supports the new health care law but said it was not the demand that is crashing the site. He thinks the entire website needs a complete overhaul. "It's not even close. It's not even ready for beta testing for my book. I would be ashamed and embarrassed if my organization delivered something like that," he said. One of the funniest parts is all the media outlets searching for someone who has successfully signed up for Obamacare. Despite desperately searching they have found not one single person. Now they even have a term for it - "unicorn" - oh, yes the search for a magical creature that does not exist.
Testing requires forethought planning and a demeanor geared toward productivity. For Christ's sake man we're talking about career bureaucrats here. Givem'em a <s>break</s> paid federal holiday.
minor details! The frigging IRS once spent $4 Billion and ten years and had nothing at all working. They shut the project down and publicly admitted that they didn't have the talent to do things like that. I'm guessing that the IRS really needed to cover up a lot of stuff since the tax laws actually are exemptions from paying income taxes given to hundreds of thousands of donators. I'm also guessing that the contractors writing the software saw at some point that the IRS couldn't tell them expressly what they wanted so they just wrote code and accepted all the changes in the design as opportunities to milk it by writing more code... the more code you write the less the chances are you will ever finish so there 'ya go; A never ending project.. reminds me of the War on Terror, the War on Poverty [wtf is the exit strategy on that s%^t anyhow?] and all the wonderful stuff the Public Sector does.. almost forgot the War on Drugs. I've argued for years that if that were working the price of H would go higher but it's actually much lower than at the outset of the program...
HealthCare.Gov was originally built in a garage http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...lthcare-gov-was-originally-built-in-a-garage/ This explains a lot.
Cue Ricter, Administration Apologist, to remind us that EverQuest also had problems when it was released.
Let's compare this to something more appropriate. Amazon provides cloud services. Netflix and many other common services are run off of the Amazon cloud. The Amazon cloud offerings would define healthcare.gov as a low load situation as a commerce website and provide their minimum pricing tier. Many Amazon cloud entities get over 250,000 transactions per hour, not 250,000 transactions per day.