Diebold is known as the voting machine company that caused a lot of commotion in the US during the November elections of 2006. Their Diebold Election Systems division caused quite the ruckus, as evidenced here, here and here. It’s quite apparent that they were the template for the crooked voting machine developer, Delacroy, in Man Of The Year…which wasn’t a comedy, BTW, even though the trailers may have led you to believe otherwise. Recently, the ease at which their voting machines can be broken into has been made public.
Voting technology is not my focus – not right now, anyway. I’ve noticed that many TD branches in the K-Dub area have replaced their NCR bank machines with new ones from Diebold, specifically the Opteva 560. The Opteva ABMs are very attractive compared to the older NCR models; the screen resolutions are greater, and LEDs light up to prompt you at the card and envelope slots.
Yet there’s one thing I noticed about these new machines from Diebold that concerns me. They are slooooow! I first detected a noticeable lag between a key press and the recognition of said key press when entering my PIN. Perhaps the keys are a little stiff and need to be “broken in”? Moving from screen-to-screen is also lethargic. Looking at the specs, this machine runs a Pentium 4 or Celeron CPU on Windows XPe – I doubt that it runs full-blown Windows XP. At any rate, I’m curious to know why these new ABMs are so sluggish. Does Diebold’s system use a stateless connection to the database instead of a persistent one? Has anybody else noticed the snail’s pace of these machines or is it just me?
