No, I
hadn't considered the label printing issue but I'm sure that a small label
printer (driven by Windows, of course) could actually provide you with a self
adhesive label to attach to the floppy instead of a piece of paper attached on
two sides to the floppy with scotch tape.
An order was placed with shipping/receiving a month
ago. Bar codes on the labels would be nice too.
Has anybody considered the odds of
having a relatively loose paper label coming off inside the floppy
drive? Has anybody considered how you would get that piece of paper out
of the floppy drive?
Yes. Luckily, PC-Card slots have no moving
parts.
I guess we'll to generate
another ECO to cover this one. Is there anything else we should be
including in this third-time build of these units? Might as well get it
over with now.
I don't know the scope of this
question. For
starters we don't need the D: drive, and the A: drive should be a flash
card.
Let me rephrase. What medium
(hardware connection) would you use to communicate between a remote AV-TS unit
and the GEMS host computer?
Through the poll
book, typically.
Agreed. Do you need me to
write an rcr or is there already one in existence?
Its on our TODO
list.
Ethernet connections are currently
possible with these Model 2 units, modems are not. I am wondering..., if we can't get these
33.6 modem cards to work in the AV-TS, is there any chance we could use a 56K
modem card instead?
Yes.
But of course, GEMS can't handle 56K
modems yet.
That is an unrelated
issue. GEMS doesn't care what modem the TS has.
But perhaps, there are other
33.6 modem cards availble that will work. I'll try to get in a few
samples for testing .
I understand
existing accounts doing modem upload will be using notebooks, so I wouldn't
consider it a priority. It would be nice to know why the 33.6 modems don't
work though.
With the "Version
5" unit being built, you will be able to do remote download from a TS provided
it has an (optional) modem installed.
What is "Version 5"? I've
never heard that term used before. Is that the unit that Tab is
designing? If it is, what happened to "Version 3" and "Version 4"?
The
name is not official. They are numbered by the different
companies who we have sent money to design/build ballot station
hardware:
- wood kiosk
(IMARK)
- small black unit
(Zycronics)
- large black unit (Touch
Systems)
- white unit
(IAS)
- foam unit (PDE)
So what? It's a labor intensive task to
create memory cards too. Do our AccuVote customers have more than one
machine attached to the GEMS host computer when they are programming memory
cards?
Yes.
Has the total package (even the new
design) been thought through to cover the logistics of going from an
election's start to its finish?
No; we try not
to think through our software designs. Having a design complicates
the implementation process.
...
The design intent is
to be as close to the AccuVote as possible. A request for improvements to
the design and user interface was sent on 9/21/99 to the support list under the
subject "3.10.1 Changes".
If anybody fishes around inside an
AV-TS unit and they don't know what they're doing, they may end up with the
loose end of a cable in their hands and no clue as to where it came
from. Don't say I didn't warn
ya.
Until an external
port is furnished, I don't believe people who "don't know what they are doing"
have an alternative, loose cables and warnings or no.
Ken
|