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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

"It’ll cost about $1.5 to 2 million to replace the Amiga"

I'm doing the job for 1/4 of that money, just pay me economy class trip and a motel.

Seriously, 1.5 to 2 million dollars? The Amiga, although it was an amazing piece of hardware (I owned 500, 600, 2000, and 4000), was far from being certified for any industrial use, so I wouldn't expect any extra spending in that context. Even using the industry standard for the job (PLCs) would be cheaper let alone using smaller single board computers (no, I'm not referring to Arduino or Raspberry PI, there are rugged solutions well below $500) and doing all development in house. Do I miss something or they overextimated that spending by at least one order of magnitude?

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This actually should have been the headline, not the fact that a school is still using some old technology. My guess is that an "approved vendor" has sold them on a ridiculously overpriced system and that 90%+ of that cost would go straight to the vendor's bottom line. The hard part there is becoming an approved vendor. There are companies that do nothing other than go around to various county/state agencies and get these approvals. Then they cozy up to every purchase decision maker at every government entity they can get to within the jurisdictions in which they have been approved, and essentially just drop ship drastically overpriced products to them. It's great work if you can get it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the new system has some features billed as saving tens of thousand dollars a year. That's entirely possible. My tiny little college made winter break 2 weeks longer and saved 200k a year.

saved on what? heating?

in austria, decades ago they invented winter holidays to save on heating for a week. then they found out that it cost them more to reheat the building after that week, so now they just keep the empty buildings heated.

There's a a point at which the off-time is long enough that the cost savings are more than the price to reheat the building. Making winter break two weeks longer is likely to cross that threshold.

that makes sense. damn! if only the policymakers had realized that, we could have had more vacation.

How many fully competent people can execute on this less-expensive plan, and do it correctly? How many of those are motivated to do this project? How many of those carry the necessary certifications to work on the industrial parts of the system? How many of those are 'qualified' to bid on the job?

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