Can you? When we're talking about N machines per each voting point, even volume pricing of MS Access may be larger than a dedicated box. Of course the price of designing a dedicated box is non-zero. But if you can reduce the dedicated box spec to <=$100 and reduce the scope of any review (you're not reviewing the whole OS anymore), I'm not sure laptops would be cheaper.
For small productions runs - and it's hard to sell more than a couple hundred voting machines locally - developing the product (NRE) typically dominates costs.
Imagine that you have one developer who can do enough hardware, software, and documentation in a single man-year, and whose fully-loaded cost is $100 000 per year. Then just paying that developer will cost $1000 per box on a 100-box production run; paying a team of three such developers for two years would still cost nearly $700 per box on a 1000-box production run.
(And those would need to be very productive developers; I'd expect a team of 10-20 people if you want to do the above in a year, once you include sales, staff, and specialists doing projects/consulting work for your company.)
Kinda ancillary to your point, but if you think the developers who write stuff like this make $100k/year, you've lived in Silicon Valley or NYC for too long. These kinds of projects are typically done by someone making half that somewhere in middle America.
Kinda ancillary to your point, but if you don't know what "fully loaded cost" is, it might behoove you to look it up before assuming it means "salary".
I've never hired a $50k/a engineer, so I don't know what the multiplier is, but I've heard people throw around "2x" as a rough estimate. So you and JoachimSchipper are assuming the same salary, more or less.
> Then just paying that developer will cost $1000 per box on a 100-box production run; paying a team of three such developers for two years would still cost nearly $700 per box on a 1000-box production run.
That's not correct. Development is a fixed cost -- you don't rewrite all the software and re-design the hardware every time you run a new production run.
Furthermore, this isn't even necessary for hardware stuff where production run size actually does affect cost. If the machines are developed in house and you know you'll be using them for the next 15 years across the whole US, you can do a few medium-sized production runs.
Which is exactly why federal and state governments should have a permanent bank of software engineers and EEs for routine software projects like this. Then they can do what makes sense for the taxpayers, instead of having to play fiddle to the profit motives of an incompetent money grubbing contracting firm.
But that's general cost, not cost compared to current solutions. Hardware, software, documentation also had to be produced for any solution using XP embedded. (Probably shouldn't have continued using "laptops" idea from the parent post, since that's not really what's happening.)
