At an event in New York City this morning, Google announced the new HP Chromebook 11. The Chromebook 11 is a low-cost Chrome OS laptop, with an 11-inch, 1366 x 768 pixel IPS display and Chromebook Pixel inspired design. The Chromebook 11, which Google is selling for $279, is available to order from Google Play, Best Buy, Amazon, and direct from HP today.

The design of the Chromebook 11 is quite reminiscent of the now-retired plastic MacBook. It has clean lines and ports on only the left hand side. Despite its smaller size, it still packs a full-size Chrome keyboard and has a fully clickable touchpad. There is also a VGA webcam embedded into the bezel surrounding the display.

The Chromebook 11 is plastic, but Google says that it has a magnesium frame, which makes it stronger and more rigid. The laptop is strikingly light when you pick it up — it's weighs only 2.3 pounds — but it still feels solid and well built. It is powered by a dual-core Samsung Exynos 5250 processor and 2GB of RAM, and has 16GB of internal storage. It also has two Micro USB 2.0 ports and a Slimport video out port.

We'll have more on the Chomebook 11 as we get it, including hands on impressions, so be sure to check back here frequently.

Playing defense in football video games has never really been fun — or at least, it hasn't been as fun as playing offense.

Madden NFL 25 developer EA Tiburon is trying to make it more fun and engaging to play defense in the Xbox One version of the game with a second-screen experience, a SmartGlass app called CoachGlass, that goes much deeper than the "Ask Madden" feature ever could. We spent some hands-on time with CoachGlass on a Windows 8 tablet along with Madden 25 on Xbox One last week, and it seemed like a pretty dynamic duo for defense.

In principle, defense is just as interesting as offense; the ever-shifting battle between them comprises the chess match at the heart of football. But playing defense in a video game gives players much less control and agency. On offense, you always control the guy with the ball in his hands. On defense, you're often attempting to switch to the defender who's closest to the guy with the ball, in an effort to bring him down and prevent your opponent from scoring.

Defense is a cerebral endeavor, a characteristic that already makes it harder to represent in a game than offense. It's not only tough to know which defensive play to choose in a particular situation; it also often feels like the choice doesn't have much of an effect on a play's outcome.

"A lot of players, when they play Madden on defense, kind of don't want to do too much because they think they're probably going to make more mistakes and do more harm than good," said Thomas Singleton, a producer on Madden 25, during a CoachGlass demo last week.

The CoachGlass app, which is exclusive to the Xbox One version of Madden 25, essentially allows its user to act as a defensive coordinator — and it gives that person strategic data that's similar to the information a real defensive coordinator would have. It offers three different levels of interaction and two ways to play. CoachGlass is tied directly to the game of Madden 25 that you're playing, and augments the data set from that single game with data aggregated from tens of thousands of games of Madden that have been played online.

The app takes effect as soon as your opponent calls an offensive play. At its most basic level, the app will analyze the offense's personnel group for that play — how many running backs, wide receivers and tight ends are on the field — and suggest three defensive plays to you based on what Madden users have been calling against that formation. You tap on the screen to select the play, and the game on your Xbox One recognizes the play call instantly.

defense is a cerebral endeavor

If you want to go deeper, you can have the app suggest plays based on your opponent's tendencies. You'll always be able to see a percentage breakdown of how often they're running the ball versus passing, and then choose to defend the run or the pass. CoachGlass also displays a visual breakdown of where your opponent is going with the ball (running to the left, middle or right; making short, middle or deep throws to the left, middle or right).

That allows you to make very specific educated guesses on defense — guesses that only become more informed as the game goes on and data regarding your opponent's tendencies piles up. And for fans who really know football, CoachGlass provides a complete history of the last 64 plays in a game: what the offense called versus what the defense called, along with the outcome of each play in yardage gained or lost. This pane of the app allows users to filter the play history by situation — what has he been doing on 1st and 10? 3rd and long?

Football strategists can use that feature to analyze the progress of a game and identify trends themselves. You can go through a thought process like this: "She tends to run play action on 2nd and short, and when I blitzed last time it cost me, so now I'm going to drop back into zone coverage instead."

CoachGlass is "teaching you the sport of football"

You can use CoachGlass as a second-screen experience when you're playing by yourself. But as we discovered during a hands-on demo, the app also works wonderfully in a co-op mode of play. We took turns with another member of the media — they played defense while allowing us to pick plays through CoachGlass, and then we switched roles. Because the app conveys a lot of data well, without succumbing to information overload, this could be a great way to play Madden 25 with a friend or family member who might not be up to the challenge of picking up a controller and playing the game itself.

CoachGlass worked almost flawlessly during our demo, with instant communication between the game running on an Xbox One and the app running on a Microsoft Surface. (As a SmartGlass experience, CoachGlass will be compatible with Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS and Android.) We even held up the Surface to the TV and verified that the play clock was ticking down in sync on both screens.

The advantage of CoachGlass, said Singleton, is that it's "teaching you the sport of football." It may be the best tutorial in the history of Madden, both from a learning standpoint and a fun standpoint.

"How do I play defense? What defense stops what offense? So I learn that over time," he explained. "It opens up a whole different dimension to playing defense [in Madden]."

The more we learn about the development of HealthCare.gov, the worse the situation looks. The site has been serving myriad errors since it launched, including preventing users from creating accounts, failing to recognize users who do have accounts, putting users in inescapable loops, and miscalculating healthcare subsidies. While the administration is claiming a 50 percent reduction in wait times after adding new servers, other serious issues persist.

"I've got an application right now that's like half done, but I have four copies of my wife in it and can’t get rid of it and can’t start a new application," says James Turner, a software engineer and former systems administrator who wrote a critique of HealthCare.gov. "It's pretty clear that they didn’t do a lot of testing, because it's easy to get into states where you can’t get any further or you have bogus data you can’t get rid of."

It’s still unclear exactly what’s wrong with the government’s new online healthcare exchange, because the code isn’t public and errors make it difficult to see even the front-facing parts of the site. However, it’s now obvious that the site launched before it was ready.

"It's pretty clear that they didn’t do a lot of testing."

Developing a site that communicates with multiple government agencies and state-based sites isn’t easy. HealthCare.gov was also built on a tight deadline. But for an administration that seemed to have a deep understanding of the internet, the site was shockingly bad.

How could the Obama administration, the brains behind the most sophisticated online political campaign ever, be responsible for something so bone-headed?

To start, HealthCare.gov wasn’t built by the elite team that built Obama’s campaign tech. The main $93.7 million contract to build the exchange was awarded to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the behemoth Canadian firm CGI Group. As is common with large contracts, CGI subcontracted with other megafirms for different aspects of the site. User authentication and identity is being handled by Experian. The "federal data services hub" was built by Quality Software Services, Inc. (QSSI was also accused of having a conflict of interest after it was bought by UnitedHealth Group.)

The Department of Health and Human Services declined to provide a full list of the contractors, citing shortages in the press office due to the government shutdown. The total number of companies looks to be between 12 and 15, says Alex Howard, a fellow at the Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation who has been closely following the HealthCare.gov launch.

Government contracts are usually awarded to the lowest bidder, and the disincentives for not delivering aren’t very strong. There are also a number of extra requirements for government contracts that made state-of-the-art, Silicon Valley-style development impossible for this scale of government project. For example, contractors that worked on the HealthCare.gov backend were probably required to have Federal Information Security Management Act certification, which rules out the smaller, more agile firms that could have brought a more innovative sensibility to the project.

HealthCare.gov wasn’t built by the elite team that built Obama’s campaign tech

The process for getting these contracts has become so difficult and convoluted that the job doesn’t always go to the company best suited for it, Howard tells The Verge. "The firms that typically get contracts are the firms that are good at getting contracts, not typically good at executing on them," he says.

If the backend of HealthCare.gov reminded us that the government makes terrible websites, the front end actually proved the opposite. The first part of HealthCare.gov launched back in June as a front-facing site with information about the Affordable Care Act. The government hired Aquilent, a web development shop that handles a lot of government contracts, but after that the process took an unconventional turn. Aquilent subcontracted with an innovative Washington, DC, startup called Development Seed. Web designer Ed Mullen was pulled onto the project after he tweeted a mockup of what he thought the new site should look like, along with consultants from the hip design house Teal Media.

The scrappy team used principles of "agile development," a rapid and lean style that’s been en vogue in Silicon Valley the past few years, and even published its code on the open source repository Github. The resulting HealthCare.gov, part one, was lauded for nailing both form and function "in a decidedly 21st-century way: cheaper, faster and scalable, using open source tools and open standards," as Howard wrote at the time.

John Pavley, CTO of The Huffington Post, was disappointed when the administration didn’t open source the code behind the second part of the site, the health insurance exchange, the way it did for the first part. The government should have used an internal team supplemented by the open source community instead of relying on large contractors, he says.

"I was talking to some of my engineers about how we would love to be able to pitch in a few bug fixes or help with some open source code of our own," he tells The Verge. "I heard so many good things when the Obama administration came in, but if we're going to continue to build software this way it's going to continue to fail."

"I heard so many good things when the Obama administration came in."

The healthcare exchange that launched last week was designed for 50,000 to 60,000 concurrent users, but got 250,000, US chief technology officer Todd Park told USA Today in one of the only explicit statements the administration has made acknowledging the tech issues.

As of late Monday afternoon, the site was still sporadically overloaded, preventing users from starting an application for health insurance. Fixes for the design bugs are slowly trickling in; for example, the site no longer shows blanks in some dropdown menus.

Citizens have until December 15th to buy health insurance, or face paying a penalty. Until then, HealthCare.gov is in what amounts to a very public beta test. The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the healthcare exchange at HealthCare.gov, is not releasing the number of people who have successfully enrolled. The number is likely in the "low thousands," reports The Wall Street Journal.

Technical experts say the bugs will likely be ironed out soon, but the damage may already be done. "The most important time for a new website is the first three months," Pavley says. "After that, people don’t go back."

Others believe the rocky launch will soon be forgotten. "It’s worth remembering what happened during the implementation of Medicare Part D," wrote Paul Smith, co-founder of EveryBlock and CTO of Public Good Software. "There were many of the same types of reports, from pharmacies that couldn’t connect to government data services, to seniors that were temporarily unable to receive their benefit. Do we think about those stories now when we think about Part D? Of course not."

The proliferation of role-playing game mechanics in other video game genres may have reached its apex with Rollers of the Realm, a game developed by Toronto-based indie studio Phantom Compass that merges traditional RPG ideas with classic pinball gameplay.

Rollers of the Realm was one of finalists at this year's Indiecade festival and, thanks to its smart blending of pinball and role-playing games' better aspects, one of its highlights.

We've seen the game previously, when it was bound for mobile platforms. The game's first destination is for Windows PC, its creators say, and is currently up for voting through Steam Greenlight.

In the Indiecade demo, Rollers of the Realm started players with a playable rogue, who is represented on the gameplay field as a copper-colored pinball. She can be launched onto the field with a battering ram-like plunger, where she can then be bounced around with an array of flippers. Most of the levels we played had no shortage of flippers, but there are two main flippers, each with their own life bar.

The rogue is just one member of a party that players can build throughout the game. A drunken knight, who's heavily armored and therefore plays like a heavier ball, joins the group early on, as does a healer. Those two are represented by a plate armor-covered ball and a gleaming white sphere, respectively. Later on, players will be joined by other characters, each with their own unique abilities. A ranger, for example, can call in his trusty hawk for a multiball attack and an ax-wielding farmer can inflict greater damage against wooden structures, but is weak against armored knights.

Utilizing skills like these and reviving fallen party members consumes mana, which players can collect on the battlefield by taking out foes and shattering objects.

Rollers of the Realm does not strive to be a pinball simulation, game director David Evans told Polygon. It's a digital pinball game, the type that Evans says he's played more frequently than actual physical pinball tables. There are in-game analogs to traditional pinball playfield items — bumpers, poppers, standups and, of course, pinballs — but there's no mistaking Rollers for a recreation of real-life pinball.

There's a story to tell in Rollers of the Realm, which is accomplished through beautifully rendered artwork and voice acted cutscenes.

Rollers of the Realm is slated to be release later this year on Windows PC, with other platforms to follow.