[SGVLUG] Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown

[Rae Yip]

A common issue when you use benchmarking software to stress test a web
app, is that you aren't simulating the connection latency that HTTP
over actual Internet imposes on a system. This can have a big
difference on the queueing behavior (ie. load) of the system.

One wonders what sort of weird interactions will arise once both
parties rely heavily on this sort of data. We could have our elections
being decided by a bug in the statistical analysis or improper
sampling in polls.

Of course, you could say this already happening anyway, only slower,
but there could be a qualitative difference as there is with
high-frequency trading.

-Rae.

On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Miguel Hernandez <migtek at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's also worth noting that Romney's IT team goofed by "jumping the gun" as
> his website announced his win & the transition. It was only up for a short
> while but still. Gaffes everywhere over there.
>
> cheers,
> --miguel
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Christopher Smith <cbsmith at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> It is worth noting that the Obama team apparently built something similar
>> in 2008 and it also crashed on them. Sigh.
>>
>> --Chris
>>
>> On Nov 10, 2012, at 12:46 PM, Miguel Hernandez <migtek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> No QA (or Beta period) will net those results EVERY time hehe. The more
>> important question is: Did Romney not learn anything from Obama's tech team?
>> You know, Obama being the first president to ever openly embrace open source
>> software & whose tech team used open source at most levels of their IT's
>> organizational structure (starting w/Obama's campaign website all the way to
>> recovery.gov, whitehouse.gov & its IT spending dashboard just to name a
>> few). As an example, his IT & Web staff not only used Drupal extensively but
>> also contributed code back to the Drupal community as well as got involved
>> via presenting at DUGs (Drupal User Groups), DrupalCamp's & the largest of
>> Drupal gatherings, DrupalCons.
>>
>> Here's an initial news blurb:
>> http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/whitehouse-switch-drupal-opensource.html
>> Here's a short video:
>> http://drupal.org/whitehouse-gov-launches-on-drupal-engages-community
>>
>> cheers,
>> --miguel
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Arthur Baldwin <eengnerd at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> The burning question on my mind is "have they learned anything from this
>>> experience"?  Will they try Linux servers next time...seeing that around 90%
>>> or more of web site servers are already Linux servers?  I voted for Romney
>>> and I knew that something very wrong had happened.  I told myself that
>>> Americans could not possibly be stupid enough to choose Obama.  This
>>> "meltdown" is poetic justice.  It should teach Republicans that the
>>> Microsoft business model (as set forth in the Halloween documents) is not a
>>> viable path to choose.  Open source makes sense and now they (campaign
>>> managers) have the proof in a hard earned personal lesson.  Let's hope they
>>> learned something.
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: matti <mathew_2000 at yahoo.com>
>>> To: SGVLUGDiscussion List. <sgvlug at sgvlug.net>
>>> Sent: Friday, November 9, 2012 3:32 PM
>>> Subject: [SGVLUG] Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown
>>>
>>> Really!?!? .. wow...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown
>>> Orca, the Romney campaign's "killer" app, skips beta and pays the price.
>>>
>>> "To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed
>>> application consulting firm. The goal was to put a mobile application in the
>>> hands of 37,000 volunteers in swing states .. Part of the issue was Orca's
>>> architecture. While 11 backend database servers had been provisioned for the
>>> system—probably running on virtual machines—the "mobile" piece of Orca was a
>>> Web application supported by a single Web server and a single application
>>> server"
>>>
>>>
>>> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside-team-romneys-whale-of-an-it-meltdown/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>