haminakintu

মঙ্গলবার, ২২ অক্টোবর, ২০১৩

Builders of Obama's health website saw red flags

President Barack Obama gestures while speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Monday, Oct. 21, 2013, on the initial rollout of the health care overhaul. Obama acknowledged that the widespread problems with his health care law's rollout are unacceptable, as the administration scrambles to fix the cascade of computer issues. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

President Barack Obama, standing with supporters of his health care law, speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Monday, Oct. 21, 2013, on the initial rollout of the health care overhaul. Obama acknowledged that the widespread problems with his health care law's rollout are unacceptable, as the administration scrambles to fix the cascade of computer issues. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

White House press secretary Jay Carney introduces Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman who spoke about the economy post government shutdown at the daily press briefing at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2013. Furman said the addition of 148,000 jobs in September is a sign of "solid" growth but forecasts worsening in October because of the 16-day partial government shutdown. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration's showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors.

As questions mount over the website's failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government and not private developers with more expertise.

The details about problems with the website's design emerged as the White House revealed that President Barack Obama's longtime adviser Jeffrey Zients is taking on to provide management advice to help fix the system. White House press secretary Jay Carney says Zients will be on a short-term assignment at the Health and Human Services Department before he's due to take over as director of Obama's National Economic Council Jan. 1.

Carney cited Zeints' expertise as a longtime management consultant and his "proven track record" since coming to the White House in 2009, both as interim budget director and as chief performance officer, when he headed an effort to streamline government and cut costs. "We're engaged in an all-out effort to improve the online experience," Carney said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a post on HealthCare.gov that her agency is also bringing in more experts and specialists from government and industry, including top Silicon Valley companies.

"This new infusion of talent will bring a powerful array of subject matter expertise and skills, including extensive experience scaling major IT systems," she said. "This effort is being marshaled as part of a cross-functional team that is working aggressively to diagnose parts of HealthCare.gov that are experiencing problems, learn from successful states, prioritize issues, and fix them."

Project developers for the health care website who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity — because they feared they would otherwise be fired — said they raised doubts among themselves whether the website could be ready in time. They complained openly to each other about what they considered tight and unrealistic deadlines. One was nearly brought to tears over the stress of finishing on time, one developer said. Website builders saw red flags for months.

A review of internal architectural diagrams obtained by the AP revealed the system's complexity. Insurance applicants have a host of personal information verified, including income and immigration status. The system connects to other federal computer networks, including ones at the Social Security Administration, IRS, Veterans Administration, Office of Personnel Management and the Peace Corps.

Obama on Monday acknowledged technical problems that he described as "kinks in the system." But in remarks at a Rose Garden event, Obama offered no explanation for the failure except to note that high traffic to the website caused some of the slowdowns. He said it had been visited nearly 20 million times — fewer monthly visits so far than many commercial websites, such as PayPal, AOL, Wikipedia or Pinterest.

"The problem has been that the website that's supposed to make it easy to apply for and purchase the insurance is not working the way it should for everybody," Obama said. "There's no sugarcoating it. The website has been too slow. People have been getting stuck during the application process. And I think it's fair to say that nobody is more frustrated by that than I am."

The online system was envisioned as a simple way for people without health insurance to comparison-shop among competing plans offered in their state, pick their preferred level of coverage and cost and sign up. For many, it's not worked out that way so far.

Just weeks before the launch of HealthCare.gov on Oct. 1, one programmer said, colleagues huddled in conference rooms trying to patch "bugs," or deficiencies in computer code. Unresolved problems led to visitors experiencing cryptic error messages or enduring long waits trying to sign up.

Congressional investigators have concluded that the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, not private software developers, tested the exchange's computer systems during the final weeks. That task, known as integration testing, is usually handled by software companies because it ferrets out problems before the public sees the final product.

The government spent at least $394 million in contracts to build the federal health care exchange and the data hub. Those contracts included major awards to Virginia-based CGI Federal Inc., Maryland-based Quality Software Services Inc. and Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.

CGI Federal said in a statement Monday it was working with the government and other contractors "around the clock" to improve the system, which it called "complex, ambitious and unprecedented."

The schematics from late 2012 show how officials designated a "data services hub" — a traffic cop for managing information — in lieu of a design that would have allowed state exchanges to connect directly to government servers when verifying an applicant's information. On Sunday, the Health and Human Services Department said the data hub was working but not meeting public expectations: "We are committed to doing better."

Administration officials so far have refused to say how many people actually have managed to enroll in insurance during the three weeks since the new marketplaces became available. Without enrollment numbers, it's impossible to know whether the program is on track to reach projections from the Congressional Budget Office that 7 million people would gain coverage during the first year the exchanges were available.

Instead, officials have selectively cited figures that put the insurance exchanges in a positive light. They say more than 19 million people have logged on to the federal website and nearly 500,000 have filled out applications for insurance through both the federal and state-run sites.

The flood of computer problems since the website went online has been deeply embarrassing for the White House. The snags have called into question whether the administration is capable of implementing the complex policy and why senior administration officials — including the president — appear to have been unaware of the scope of the problems when the exchange sites opened.

Even as the president spoke at the Rose Garden, more problems were coming to light. The administration acknowledged that a planned upgrade to the website had been postponed indefinitely and that online Spanish-language signups would remain unavailable, despite a promise to Hispanic groups that the capability would start this week. And the government tweaked the website's home page so visitors can now view phone numbers to apply the old-fashioned way or window-shop for insurance rates without registering first.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee was expected to conduct an oversight hearing Thursday, probably without Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifying. She could testify on Capitol Hill on the subject as early as next week.

Uninsured Americans have until about mid-February to sign up for coverage if they are to meet the law's requirement that they be insured by the end of March. If they don't, they will face a penalty. The administration says it's working to address the timing issue to provide more flexibility.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., plans to introduce legislation to delay that requirement because: "It's not fair to punish people for not buying something that's not available," Rubio told "CBS This Morning" on Tuesday.

On Monday, the White House advised people frustrated by the online tangle that they can enroll by calling 1-800-318-2596 in a process that should take 25 minutes for an individual or 45 minutes for a family. Assistance is also available in communities from helpers who can be found at LocalHelp.HealthCare.gov.

___

Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.

___

Follow Jack Gillum on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jackgillum or Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-10-22-US-Obama-Health-Care/id-5400bca23f1f4bfc9924f14cfb18c3c8
Category: Texas A&m Football liberace VMA Awards Breaking Bad Season 5 Episode 10 paulina gretzky

Why HealthCare.gov Isn't Like A Typical E-Commerce Site

The federal government's beleaguered health care exchange site, HealthCare.gov, shares little in common with the e-commerce sites consumers use every day. On most e-commerce sites, prices are simple to find. Not so on HealthCare.gov. And that may be one of the reasons relatively few visitors to the site have actually enrolled.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Now, some suggested that in this era of eBay and Amazon, building an online health care marketplace just shouldn't have been this difficult.

Here's NPR technology correspondent Steve Henn.

STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Sina Djafari has built more than one successful online marketplace. He now builds software to make building new e-commerce sites even easier. And he says when you go to any website to buy something, you usually have just one or two simple questions you want answered before you click buy.

SINA DJAFARI: When I went to healthcare.gov for the first time, my only question I wanted answered was how much is this going to cost me? And I just really wanted that answer, you know, as soon as possible.

HENN: If that's the goal of healthcare.gov, Sina Djafari says it should have been designed to deliver an answer to that question as quickly and painlessly as possible.

DJAFARI: You want to actually encourage people to move as far along in the process as possible without requiring any information from them.

HENN: But before you can see how much your policy will cost, there are pages of forms to fill out. They're buggy. They crash. The reason for all this pain is that the price of insurance on the site will change depending on how much you make. The Affordable Care Act offers subsidies. It's the act's defining feature. So the website was designed to figure out what your subsidies could be as its very first step.

And to figure all that out, the sight requires all sorts of sensitive personal information. It requires passwords and protections and security questions. The Fed's built a brand-new IRS database that would look up tax returns to verify your income. And all of that has to happen flawlessly before you get any kind of answer to that basic question you came with: How much is this going to cost? Sina Djafari says it didn't have to be this way. Just think about how you shop for a mortgage. You can go to any one of a dozen websites and type in your income anonymously, then enter your best guess as to your current credit rating, and then type how much you want to borrow.

DJAFARI: You know, it's a marketplace system.

HENN: In fact, it's a pretty good analogy for the health care marketplace. You have a lot of different businesses offering products through one portal. But lenders on mortgage sites all agree to put off the tedious bits, like verifying your income until after you've had a chance to peruse the goods and make a decision. Still, this system works.

DJAFARI: If you don't put the right information in early on, you're wasting your time. So you might as well put in the most accurate information you can now so that when you get an answer, it's the right answer.

HENN: And in the mortgage industry - at least these days - everyone knows your income will actually be checked. In fact, the IRS offers income verification electronically to mortgage lenders. It's not instant, but it doesn't derail the process for applying a loan, either. Jeff Sutherland is CEO of Scrum Inc. He says problems like these should have been spotted long before the site went live.

JEFF SUTHERLAND: We should stop this in its tracks, reset it, fix it in the right way and probably get, you know, 99 percent of the people involved in this off the payroll, because all they did was screw it up.

HENN: Sutherland helped pioneer a software design philosophy that breaks big projects like healthcare.gov down into small, digestible tasks. But he says given how the site was developed and taken live with little testing, failure was almost inevitable. Steve Henn, NPR News, Silicon Valley.

Copyright © 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=239534289&ft=1&f=1019
Similar Articles: Valerie Harper Namaste aapl apple event dairy queen

Amazon's boosting the minimum order eligible for free shipping to $35, a $10 increase.

Amazon's boosting the minimum order eligible for free shipping to $35, a $10 increase. That's the first time in more than ten years the price has gone up. [Amazon via Lifehacker]

Amazon increases free shipping minimum order to $35, pushes Prime membership as an alternative

The minimum order amount needed to qualify for free Super Saver Shipping from Amazon has remained set at $25 for US customers for quite some time -- over a decade, actually. Now, the outfit is pushing the requisite cart total to $35. As part of the announcement, the online retailer was quick to point out that Prime members receive unlimited free two-day shipping on any order as part of their annual $79 dues in addition to unlimited streaming of TV and movies through Prime Instant Video and access to the Kindle Lending Library. Of course, you can try it out for 30 days before committing as the outfit makes the push for Prime.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/22/amazon-increases-free-shipping-minimum/?ncid=rss_truncated
Tags: Federal government shutdown 9/11 Pictures vince young danity kane heidi klum

Paula Abdul Nabs Judging Role on Aussie “SYTYCD”

She’s well-known for her long and successful career as a dancer/choreographer, and pop singer Paula Abdul just added another impressive title to her resume.

The “American Idol” alum was named to the judges’ table on the upcoming season of Australia’s “So You Think You Can Dance” series.

And it sounded like the “Opposites Attract” songstress was geeked about getting the gig, as she chatted with the Sydney Morning Herald.

Paula proclaimed, “Aussie dancers are without a doubt some of the best in the world, and it is an honor for me to be a part of finding Australia’s best dancer.”

Source: http://celebrity-gossip.net/paula-abdul/paula-abdul-nabs-judging-role-aussie-%E2%80%9Csytycd%E2%80%9D-946763
Category: christina milian Steam Controller Grand Theft Auto 5 cheats

Thousands answer Greek appeal on 'abducted' girl

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A Greek appeal for help in identifying an unknown girl who had been living with a Roma couple has triggered a global outpouring of sympathy and tips — over 8,000 calls so far — but no concrete breakthroughs, authorities said Monday.

Greek police on the case are investigating everything from a potential link with child trafficking rings to a welfare scam or even simple charity as they seek the child's biological parents.

The "Smile of the Child" charity, which is caring for the approximately 4-year-old girl, said it has received thousands of emails in addition to the calls. Respondents include people from the U.S., Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, Australia and South Africa.

"The case has touched a chord with lots of people from many countries," Panayiotis Pardalis, a charity spokesman, told The Associated Press on Monday. "We've received photos of missing children and potentially connected cases which we are forwarding to the police, but there are also — and that's the majority — people conveying their support and concern."

Greek police have also sought assistance from Interpol, the international police agency, which has 38 girls younger than 6 on its missing persons database. None of them, however, fit the girl's description and the agency only receives cases when member governments seek its help.

The Greek appeal follows the discovery last week of the girl in a Gypsy settlement near Farsala in central Greece during a police raid looking for drugs, firearms and fugitives. The blond, blue-eyed child was strikingly unlike the couple she lived with, which triggered the curiosity of prosecutor Christina Fasoula, who had accompanied the police.

A DNA test proved that "Maria," as the child was called, was not related to the Gypsy couple she was living with. Police say the couple initially claimed her as their own.

A 39-year-old man and a 40-year-old woman appeared Monday before an investigating judge in Larissa, near Farsala, to face criminal charges of child abduction, which carries a maximum ten-year prison sentence.

Both denied the charges last week, claiming instead to have adopted the child while she was just days old. A defense lawyer said they were motivated by charity, after being approached by an intermediary for a destitute foreign mother who reportedly could not afford to raise the child.

The suspects have also been charged with illegally obtaining official documents such as birth records.

Police allege the woman claimed to have given birth to six children in less than 10 months, while 10 of the 14 children the couple had registered as their own are unaccounted for.

It is unclear whether these all exist, or are fake declarations of parenthood to milk the Greek welfare system. Police say the two suspects received about 2,500 euros ($3,420) a month in subsidies from three different cities where they had registered the children.

The man also faces separate charges, together with other people from the settlement, for allegedly possessing an illegal firearm and drug-related offences.

Roma, a poor people in a country devastated by an economic crisis, try to make a living on the outskirts of Farsala by selling fruits, carpets, blankets, baskets and shoes. They are already stereotyped by some in Greece and elsewhere in Europe as social outcasts, thieves and beggars — and now fear they will be stigmatized as child traffickers as well.

The case "doesn't reflect on all of us," Babis Dimitriou, president of the local Roma community, told the AP on Sunday.

Dimitriou said the female suspect claimed the child's biological mother was a Bulgarian woman.

"I have seen that woman in our settlement, but she disappeared a few days ago," he said.

Greece's Roma community has for centuries been exposed to poverty and discrimination. According to the London-based Minority Rights Group, some 80 percent of Greece's 300,000 Roma are illiterate.

___

Costas Kantouris in Thessaloniki contributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/thousands-answer-greek-appeal-abducted-girl-101845438.html
Similar Articles: Angela Ahrendts Theresa Vail olinguito mumford and sons oj simpson

First look: Microsoft Remote Desktop apps for iOS and Android

After what seemed like an absurd amount of time, Microsoft has released the first official Remote Desktop client for iOS and Android. Until now, people had to make do with a patchwork of third-party programs -- some good, some bad, and some abysmal. (I know -- I've tried.) Microsoft's official solution is not quite as ingenious or convenient to work with as I'd hoped it would be, but it gets the job done. (No version for Windows Phone has been released yet, but Microsoft has stated it is working on one to be released later.)

Remote Desktop works a lot like its Windows counterpart: It connects to any Windows PC that can support a Remote Desktop connection and is accessible through a network. Once connected, you're presented with the remote computer's screen and can pass mouse gestures and key commands. To use the mouse, swipe with a finger and tap to click, and long-press to simulate a right-click. For typing, the program provides you with the native onscreen keyboard in iOS or Android, albeit with additions for sending special keys. Attached Bluetooth keyboards, such as on my iPad Mini, also work.

Because your local device and the remote desktop are likely to be at different resolutions, Remote Desktop tries to set the remote system to use the display resolution of the local device. For a device like the iPad or an Android tablet, with its relatively large screen, this isn't a bad idea. But for a phone -- such as my HTC One, which sports a 1,080-line HD display -- this can result in serious eyestrain.

To help offset this, Remote Desktop has a zoom function. Tap an icon at the top of the screen and you get a zoomed-in view of a portion of the remote screen. To scroll around, tap on a four-way arrow icon near the middle of the screen and drag in the direction you want to move the viewport to. It's somewhat clumsy on a smaller screen, as a lot of dragging is required to get around.

What's really inexplicable is the way neither client version supports pinch-zoom as a workaround. Time and again I caught myself trying to pinch-zoom both in and out of a remote view, but no dice. Maybe Microsoft can add this as an option in a future version?

Microsoft claims "high quality video and sound streaming with improved compression and bandwidth usage" for the app. My experiences weren't quite so rosy. Audio streamed from the remote machine came through OK, but playing back 1,080p video was too laggy to be useful, even on a local LAN. I suspect the results may vary widely depending on the hardware you're using.

The iOS and Android versions that I tested vary slightly. On Android, there's a graphics acceleration option (you can choose "hardware" or "software") that I didn't see in the iOS edition. But both have gateway and certificate management options, and the behavior of the two is similar enough that a user of one could jump to the other without issues.

Important to remember: Remote Desktop doesn't do anything except connect directly to other machines. It's not a front end for a service like LogMeIn, which allows machines behind firewalls to be reached from any other client. But if you are already using the desktop version of Remote Desktop and have been itching for a proper mobile version from Microsoft, here it is. Just don't expect it to be anything more.

This article, "First Look: Microsoft Remote Desktop apps for iOS and Android," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

Read more about virtualization in InfoWorld's Virtualization Channel.

Serdar Yegulalp is a senior writer at InfoWorld, focused on the InfoWorld Tech Watch news analysis blog and periodic Test Center reviews. Before joining InfoWorld, has written for the original Windows Magazine, Information Week, the briefly resurrected Byte, and a slew of other publications. When he’s not covering IT, he’s writing SF and fantasy published under his own personal imprint, Genji Press. Follow him on Twitter at @syegulalp and Google+.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/first-look-microsoft-remote-desktop-apps-ios-and-android-229146?source=rss_infoworld_top_stories_
Related Topics: obama speech rafael nadal Outside Lands