Thoughts on the demo

Here's two quick thoughts on the technical side of the demo:

1. We need smaller, more portable machines with smaller (flat screen)
monitors. Lugging big boxes and monitors around is a pain.

Also, mice should be optical - I find them far less troublesome than
mechanical mice when used in demo situations.

Should we consider using inexpensive laptops? (Yes, the screens are
small, but most laptops can drive a bigger external monitor. And yes,
laptop mice are awful, but again most laptops can be driven using an
external mouse [usb or otherwise].)

(I'm actually kinda intrigued by the idea of using a Linux X-Box or a
Linux PDA as a platform, but let's not go off on those tangents. ;-)

2. We need to establish a very limited set of specific operating software
platform - OS, libraries, and applications.

(Personally I'd suggest that we build a boot-from-CD version of Linux,
along the likes of Knoppix, pruning out everything unneeded [including
networking code on non-development versions]. This would let us go
disk-less and it would give us a strong answer to issues of security and
the give county administrators a good method of centrally
building and deploying the per-voting-place configurations.)

                --karl--

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Received on Fri Apr 30 23:17:01 2004