Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

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> Fiction: “The Lord of the Rings” (J.R.R. Tolkien); “Game of Thrones” (George R.R. Martin); “Slaughterhouse Five” (Kurt Vonnegut); “Blood Meridian” (Cormac McCarthy); “The Stand” (Stephen King).

> Nonfiction: “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (Tom Wolfe); “Halsey’s Typhoon” (Tom Clavin); “Band of Brothers” (Stephen Ambrose); “Into the Wild” (Jon Krakauer); “Guns of August” (Barbara Tuchman).

about 300 titles (not sure what the proportion of navy specific material, public domain and commercially licensed title are).

Note the high price -- $3k/unit. That is typical in that domain. It is funny because a lot of things they assert to have is actually lack of features -- lack of wifi, lack of cameras. And probably most important -- presumably made in US. In that market there are really ridiculous markups. You just have to know someone who knows someone to get the contract. It (this market) is also mostly immune to being exported overseas -- just due to basic security and trade regulations.

Informally one can say, "a new mac is cheaper than that!". And yeah it is. But this is a mac built to spec, all made in Ohio probably. Interesting what macs would cost in that case if there built to order in smaller batches and made in Ohio, all having strange requirements like FIPS-140-2 compliant crypto libraries enabled and other random red tape restrictions slapped on them....

The whole thing is utter BS. When at Lockheed; we sold POS Panasonic ToughBooks in a Pelican case with foam lining, an overall retail value of $2,500 to the DOD at a nice price of $25,000.

No, don't be fooled in thinking "oh, that must have included software licensing costs for X Y or Z."

NOPE

That was millions in separate fees... literally a $25 charge for $2,500 in equipment costs at their RETAIL value (i.e. not what the actual cost TO Lockheed was, as they were bought in qty)

I had commented on a different thread, listing down a bunch of ways money gets transferred from poor/middle class to rich in an institutionalized way.

This is a prime example!

Grumble grumble job creators! something something

"job creator" is the new "slave owner" but hey, somebody has to do it... employ or be employed, no better alternative at horizon I'm afraid.

Was there a support requirement? One of the things that typically drives up the price in military purchases is requirements that replacement items with identical specs, and replacement parts with identical specs, by available for some long (in civilian tech terms) time like 20 or 30 years.

30 years from now, will anyone make the RAM those systems use? The LCD panel? The motherboard? The processor? The battery? The pointing device? Probably not. Much of that high price might be going to dealing with that.

I read this as $3k including title licenses. 300 titles, with at least 50% being in copyright and possibly more, seems valid?

Hard to say, they seem to imply it, but maybe they only have those titles listed as "samples" in the article that they had to pay for, everything else could be public domain and navy doctrine for example.

That $3k will get you an entry level, "assembled in the USA", Mac Pro.

Made in USA vs. Assembled in USA.

You cannot deploy portable electronic devices on the submarine fleet without being absolutely certain there is nothing in it logging any data (sound, g-forces, pressure etc.).

Interestingly, the opposite is also true. The Navy SEALs (and everyone else) use consumer GPS devices because they cannot risk losing a classified M-code capable GPS device.

Nothing surprising - Reading Rogue Warrior - Marchinco stated that when he created Team 6 his explicit goal was to move the unit outside of the military everything. The guys had to be able to blend, so they put a lot of emphasis on improvisation, sourcing weapons and equipment on site, not looking like military etc ...

> certain there is nothing in it logging any data

Even the reading times of the crew in a submarine would provide precious patterns.

Incidentally, should we consider this would be the cost of consumer electronics if we needed proper privacy?

> The Navy SEALs (and everyone else) use consumer GPS devices because they cannot risk losing a classified M-code capable GPS device

And presumably because they can eschew many rules that others are bound by. If they wanted iPhones, they could probably get iPhones. They also often have black budgets and it is a real nice if you can sell to them. They release the money quickly, less red tape. Those deals are hard to come by though.

Without knowing the specs, it's very difficult to say what the actual cost should be, but ...

Given what they did say, $3K per box is a screwjob if there ever was one. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a $2800 per box screwjob.

You're forgetting to price in the endless hours in consultation with the military brass, traversing all the red tape involved in dealing with devices that must interact with security clearances, etc etc.

And just plain low volume. There's no economy of scale with 385 units. Let's say the injection molding tooling costs $20k (cheap!) - that's over $50 per unit just for the plastic enclosure. Ditto for circuit board production, engineering time, software development, prototype and validation units, testing and qualification, and all the other things that go into a product that have setup charges or nonrecurring cost. Not to mention you'll get gouged on the components themselves if you're buying such a low quantity (and if any parts need to be mil-spec - I am guessing not in a device like this but who knows - then that drives up the cost even more).

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