… its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?
I’m going to have a guess and suggest that the website is probably integrated with some much older mainframe system and a batch process or several batch processes run daily overnight to shuttle data between the two systems to keep them updated and in sync.
Syncing the two sets of data while the database is live and changing is a pain the the bum, so they freeze it while the data transfers are taking place.
This is the real answer. Main frame batch processing.
And till you haven’t experienced it, it seems like an excuse. Why can’t you simply do it all the time. Why can’t you get rid of the mainframe, etc.
But if only it were that easy. There is a reason IBM can still acquire multi billion dollar companies and then run them into the ground.
My company has maybe a couple million customers and can’t get rid of its mainframe and in areas that it’s gotten the process away from the mainframe, batch patronizing is still a thing. Because that is the only way to guarantee integrity.
So yea. I wish your comment gets more up votes. Because it is not a conspiracy, it is a technical limitation.
We know why but pointing out how Republicans only policy position is “explicitly kneecap everything so we can privatize it and funnel money to our friends at non negotiated rates 5x the normal end user retail cost” is apparently not allowed because some guys like guys and some people want to alter a pronoun by one letter or some such shit.
at this point i don’t even think its that deep anymore sometimes. Sure they do things like that. But at this point…sometimes they really are just fucking cartoon villains. Being evil just because.
That’s how I feel gesturing broadly at the 3 or 4 states they’re still actively fighting against minimum marriage age laws.
Their voters out here voting for them to “protect children” from pronouns, from books, from learning - then turn a blind eye when they vote to make marrying at 12 legal again or to force 12 year olds to give birth or to send 12 year olds back to the mines. Not only are the politicians cartoon villains, in 2023 so are their voters. Full Stop.
The answer is much less exciting. It’s mainframes.
Plenty of systems operate just fine without 4-6 hours of daily scheduled downtime. This is just deliberate.
In my experience, it frequently doesn’t work within posted hours either
cries in SSIcommon government L
…so it would be stupid if this works, but it’s a stupid problem in the first place, so try changing the time on your computer to be within their operational hours.
I recall cheesing videogames with that back in the day, and the UI of a halfway decent videogame would put most govt web design to shame. Worth a shot?
On one hand, this seems unlikely to work because it’s easier to check the server’s clock for the time. On the other, it’d be a mistake to expect the government to take the straightforward option when there’s a perfectly good ass-backwards way to screw it up.
The hours unavailable:
Day Time Offline Start Stop Monday - Friday 4 hours 1am 5am Saturday 6 hours 11pm 5am Sunday 8½ hours 11:30pm 8am Total 34½ hours/week The first one sounds like “scheduled maintenance” gone awry. Like for something that takes 5 minutes to run that you tell your boss will take an hour, who tells his boss it’ll take two hours, boss then says “let’s double that to be safe”.
I wanna know WHY it is unavailable. Does the system crash if there’s not enough paper in the dot-matrix printer? Are the HTTP responses being filled out manually in real time?
Peak governmental inefficiency.
Legacy software exists everywhere.
Not really. The real answer is that different parts of the federal government are underfunded or overfunded according to political ideology and expedience. This is a great example; the SSA is underfunded while the military is overfunded which results in clear performance differences.
You’ll never hear a conservative bitch about the US military saying that it can’t do anything right, and it’s like, yeah, duh, because it has a huge fucking budget and basically gets anything it asks for.
Social safety net programs? Not so much.
No, extreme budget cuts and operational undermining by lobbyist driven right wing politicians who are quite literally trying to take it down.
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That’s the actual difference between right and left. Right is “me, me, me” and offended for every little morsel that does not go to me. Left is we, with all implications.
That said, compared to other countries the democrates aren’t left at all, but instead center right.
Per the New York Times, 2018
Their tor doesn’t seem to be paywalled.
Red counties, which are overwhelmingly Republican, tend to report higher charitable contributions than Democratic-dominated blue counties, according to a new study on giving, although giving in blue counties is often bolstered by a combination of charitable donations and higher taxes.
Maybe they come out more or less even, I don’t know. But to say conservatives are “me me me” and liberals are “we we we” is just ignorant and doesn’t jive with the facts.
I a little bit of hope that you’ll read this and change the conservative strawman you have in your head just a little bit. You can’t engage in honest conversation when you do that.
The problem is that you don’t understand conservative viewpoints. Not that you disagree, that you don’t understand.
Here’s a short reading list, with liberal authors, about it:
- “The Moral Roots of Ideology” by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham (2007):
This study explores the moral foundations theory and suggests that liberals and conservatives tend to prioritize different moral values, leading to divergent political ideologies. Understanding these underlying moral foundations can contribute to a better understanding of political differences.
- “The Ideological Animal” by John T. Jost, Christopher M. Federico, and Jaime L. Napier (2009)
This article discusses the psychological underpinnings of political ideology and explores factors that influence individuals’ understanding of opposing viewpoints, such as openness to experience, cognitive flexibility, and exposure to diverse perspectives.
- “Beyond Ideology: Predicting Political Bias and Attitude Extremity from Personal Need for Structure” by John T. Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie W. Kruglanski, and Frank J. Sulloway (2003):
This study examines the role of psychological factors, such as the need for structure and certainty, in shaping political bias and the ability to understand opposing views.
Or just continue to spew hate. Your call, buddy.
The fact that this is downvoted speaks volumes about this place. Might as well be /r/politics.
It was a link to the NYT and a list of three article by Liberal writers. And it gets downvoted for not being liberal enough.
Have fun with your strawmen, assholes.
… its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?
In case you were unaware, the US government sucks at everything but killing people, and sometimes they take 20yr to do that. They just flat out suck, there’s your “why.”
