… its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?
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.
Wow this I don’t understand at all.
Here have my Lemmy gold 🏆
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.
I like working with legacy systems. Post something, go fart around on your phone for fifteen minutes while you wait for it to post.
I had to do some legacy app modernization for one of the largest telecoms companies in the US, and their mainframe system and the UI, while ugly, performed so much faster than the modern approach.
Given, we weren’t the most talented team out there, but rendering the UI on the server side was unmatched in performance versus what we could get out of a web browser. I was the UI guy so I didn’t really touch mainframe side, but it was wild to me that they made this system like 30 years ago and it worked so much better than our modern implementation
I’m not sure whether I want to work with your team or not, considering all fifteen of those minutes farting I get to bill to the client
lol i was more or less just remarking on the fact that yes mainframe and other legacy apps are pretty old, however that does not mean that they’re necessarily worse than a modern implementation
Its the conspiracy of capitalism. If nothing else this is another example of how megacorps have more say in government operations that the entire population.
It can be, but it’s also an issue of “move fast and break things” doesn’t work in all environments.
You don’t want your bank to have an oops with your checking account, or your medical records to get messed up because someone didn’t code it well enough. If it works and is stable, there needs to be a demonstrable benefit and a guarantee that it will keep working when moving to a newer system. Usually on a budget of “what do you mean you need a budget, just do it”.
This also explains, very basically, why financial systems are the way they are. The backend is ancient but they know how it works so it stays the same and we see it’s weird quirks all the time.
I particularly enjoy the “if you need immediate assistance” note for a telephone line that’s open even fewer hours than the website. it’s positioned as an alternative to the site, but absolutely isn’t. Also, if that message is only displayed when the site is closed, there are no hours when the phone line is open but the site is closed, so who’s it helping? You couldwrite it down and call it when it’s open, but the site is also going to be open then, several hours earlier in fact, so is less “immediate” than the site that’s closed.
I think it’s less “this line is for emergencies” and more “our online process could takes days to get a response, here’s a line to a real human”.
Peak governmental inefficiency.
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.
The Democrats call themselves liberals. Liberalism is considered a centrist ideology across the globe. So not a surprise they are not left wing.
Well, they are left-er than the rightwing nationalist extremists that run the GOP. But yeah, they are center right.
It’s a feature, not a bug.
How and why would that result in a website having limited hours of service?
it’s part of the overall enshittification of that which does not benefit the rich
The excuses vary (taking systems offline to run archaic batch processing, pretending to want to protect jobs by not having machines outperform workers, etc.), but the bottom line is that a certain political faction deliberately writes stupid rules like this as sabotage in order to prove that government doesn’t work.
It’s the same sort of reason why the local license plate office charges a “convenience fee” to renew your tag online even though it costs the public less than paying a clerk to process it in person.
Can you actually prove that? Seems suspect because usually partisan BS remains in Congress, while tiny administrative details like that get written by agency bureaucrats, who in general could care less about said BS.
Archaic hardware and software requiring downtime on the backend to do standard maintenance like backups, software changes, changing vacuums tubes, pulling moths out of relays.
As opposed to modern hardware and software architectures that allow for standard maintenance without downtime.
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.
Well, you see now, if you reverse the letters in the website address it spells exactly why it has issues.
Cause it has a lot of SAS?
One might say that this website has some of the best union behind it, perharps on the entire planet.
Most government sites from NY also keep business hours
I asked my family’s lawyer about it and he said that the time open and closed is a law. So they have to “close down” certain sites at certain times to comply with those laws
You should only pay taxes for purchases/income during their business hours then.
…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?
That’s not going to work on a website with restrictions like this. The restriction is set on the web server, not on the client. Limiting client access by what time it is where THEY are is not a thing.
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.
^this guy govts
In my experience, it frequently doesn’t work within posted hours either
cries in SSI…aand, we’re back to Web 0.0.
By the way, is this how most sites are going to work in Metaverse?
Probs yeah. Though you’ll see it in VR!
It’s probably going to feel more like Watson in that Sherlock Holmes videogame
The NC unemployment was website goes offline for maintenance every night. It’s so needlessly complicated on purpose.
There is a reason and not what you think.
Look here: https://kbin.social/m/mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world/t/162927/-/comment/639904
I can’t see the comments you linked, but do see the other comments regarding data shuffle. My point still stands. Needlessly complicated. This could be updated if the state managed itself properly.
Your point is incorrect. It is not needlessly complicated. It has to do with mainframe batch processing times.
It’s not a conspiracy, it is a technical challenge that is not easy to some. It is complicated, but not needlessly. If it was easy, it would have been fixed.
I am sure there are a number of private companies that do the same but simply don’t tell you.
E.g., every bank has a cut off time for transfers, same reason.
Okay - fair. Good points. I yield. Thank you for the info - truly.
I for one am ready for a public servant AI that gives you form Y34-b and sends you to another AI that then tells you it should’ve been form Y34-a and only the third AI can fix it but they’re currently on vacation so you’ll have to comeback another time on a Monday or Wednesday between 10:00 and 10:30am.
… 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.”
Wdym taxes aren’t going where they benefit people?
$40b in taxpayer money is being dropped on Ukrainian territory right now which will eventually put Ukraine in such a weak position that it won’t be able to prevent the flood of American/European countries coming in to take over all their industry. This will trickle down, no? /s
the university I attended freshman year was ranked top 10 in the US for comp sci (at least as of 4 years ago), yet some of their account management stuff on their website wouldn’t be accessible after like 7pm. absolutely insane
Massive frame batch processing is the usual reason.
And before it ask why not replace it, the short answer outs it is complicated.
It might be a question better speed in eli5.
