Re: Creating floppies for TS

To me, it seems that the floppy drive in the GEMS host computer is a more practical way of programming the floppy diskettes.

This is a pending RCR. I assume you have considered the label printing issue.

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.

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?

Is an ethernet connection mandatory for all units, or just for one unit kept beside the host computer?

Just the one beside the computer, but the machines are supposed to be generic.

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.

If the units are supposed to work so much like an AccuVote, how do you do a remote download to a floppy diskette? Through the PollBook (which is a standard type computer)?

Through the ballot station software presently.

Let me rephrase. What medium (hardware connection) would you use to communicate between a remote AV-TS unit and the GEMS host computer?

The Poll Book should probably also be given this facility.

Agreed. Do you need me to write an rcr or is there already one in existence?

Why even use an AV-TS to program floppies when it can only be done via a direct connection to a GEMS host computer and not remotely (pretend all of them have accessible ethernet connections)?

I would rather pretend some of them have working modems. It can only not be done remotely because we don't have the skills necessary to make the current TS modem work with 98. This has nothing to do with the design however.

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? But of course, GEMS can't handle 56K modems yet. But perhaps, there are other 33.6 modem cards availble that will work. I'll try to get in a few samples for testing .

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"?

Is there a security issue with programming the floppies on the GEMS host computer?

No.

There is, however, only one floppy drive on the computer.

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? Granted, with the approx. 5 to 1 ratio of AV-TS units to precincts, you're going to have more floppies than you would memory cards, but even if you had eight AV-TS units strung together on a network, how do the logistics work for

executing the download for a particular precinct,
loading/unloading floppies from the drives,
printing the floppy labels,
and attaching the labels to the floppies?

Would you have a team of eight people manning the AV-TS units and one person co-ordinating the downloads? Or would you still only have one person performing all the tasks as I believe we do with memory card programming?

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? Or are we going to be scrambling again at the last minute to figure out how we are going to handle another logistics nightmare?

Ian