OT: front and back end problems of ACA solved by open source zero cost programs

F. George McDuffee on Wed, 12 Feb

The Student's grades depended on how well they did. Nobody specking out the Official Web site had any incentive to get anything right, nor any knowledge of how the real world works.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

How well does their software scale up to a hundred million users?

One needs to remember that the contractor makes the most money if it is as inefficient as possible without losing the contract. So it is much more pr ofitable to have a hundred poor programmers do the job than to have five re ally good programmers do the programming.

A good book on programming economics is " Software Engineering Economics " by Barry Boehm.

Dan

I doubt the total online count would ever be over several million, but the PostgreSQL software scales up nicely, as does MySQL. Both are fully mature software DBs.

"Michael A. Terrell" on Thu, 13 Feb 2014

Probably better than the software the politician's designed. Not necessarily saying much, but ...

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

It will have to track every person who ever registered through it. Supposedly, that billion dollar boondoggle worked when tested by a few people.

Interesting, but I would not put much faith in that.

The Trident II missile has had 148 successful test flights in a row. And you can not tell if it has any retro rockets by looking at it when it is all buttoned up.

Dan

It's nonsense. Somehow, I seriously doubt that the students implemented the whole 3,000-page law, plus all the subsequent rules. Or interface to all the required legacy databases that cover the entire population. And so on. Probably built just the front end, the part people see. The back end is far larger.

As is designing it so 100,000 people can use it simultaneously. Think XMAS shopping for an idea of the scale.

Joe Gwinn

That's why relational databases and SQL were invented, for massive data flow.

Yes, people who didn't know the first thing about any of it, I'm sure. Government is the Peter Principle in Action!

The database is one thing. The front end is another. Also, the required servers and bandwidth weren't there so it was a crap shoot. That's why I asked how it would scale up, under the same conditions.

Larry Jaques on Thu, 13 Feb 2014

That is presuming that the people being elected were competent at something other than running an election campaign.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

NOTHING scales up without proper server access, so that's a moot point.