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• I once had high hopes for Linux. I felt sure it could make a real contribution to the success of humanity, now more and more I have my doubts. I have a real and growing fear that if the Mr. Smith's of Linux have their way, in the future they will look back and say: "Wasn't it nice that so many smart people worked to hard for free to forge their own chains."

Well it's easy to use until something goes wrong. But if the registry gets corrupted or some strange hardware problem crops up there is no way to fix it.

Is it possible that you're so blinded by your hatred for Microsoft that you willingly accept the problems that Linux has as if they don't exist? And that you seek out every flaw, major or minor, with Windows and blow it up as big as possible so you can feel better about your decision to use Linux when you know full well it does have issues that are every bit as problematic?

Here is a paper you might be interested in reading.

The "Porsche" phenominon you refer is an example of "cognitive dissonance". Here is a pretty good page on the topic. You may have already known this, but maybe you didn't have a name for it; always happy to help ;-).

Although ideas like this one may not work out, there are is one major effects it can have - it gets people thinking.

When reviewing why this idea doesn't work, people may also discover that a variation of the idea will work. It is a process of elimination.

Although it is now a bit dated, if you get a chance, read Cringely's book "Accidental Empires".

Not only will you learn about the history of microcomputers, but, what I consider to be more important, which is why I'm reading it again at the moment, Cringely identifies the human behaviours that drove the microcomputer evolution.

Who'd have ever thought that a description of cognitive dissonance would be in a book about PCs ?.

Apple hardware is Cheap!

B.S. Apple hardware is expensive, and always will be. It simple economics. Apple has a monopoly on Apple hardware. If you compare a market without competition, to one with competition, guess which one is going to have better prices.

You can try and B.S. about how the Apple is cheaper because you can buy a more expensive PC, but the reality is quite a different story. You can claim a dual xeon costs $5,000 but it doesn't. Not even from Dell. And you're also ignoring AMD.

Apple doesn't sell the bottom of the line machines for $500, for which you'd be better off getting an XBOX anyway, but in tehir price ranges they have much higher performance than the competition.

Wrong, and wrong. An Xbox is not a good deal for a desktop workstation, and Apple hardware does not have better performance than other, similarly-priced hardware.

Thus, Linux on Mac is no problem-- Apple's even putting Linux APIs (I don't know which) into Panther to make porting easier.

That makes it easier to run Linux apps on MacOS. It does not help with running actual Linux on a Mac.

Not flaming you at all, just pointing this out as the myth that apples computers are expensive is really old and really annoying.

It's not a myth, it's reality. It can be explained with simple economics (high quantity produced => lower price per unit, monopoly price, etc), or benchmarks (spec.org). Either way is going to prove my argument.

Cognative disonance at its best: "I paid more for it so it must be better"


Disclaimer: I'm not saying Apple hardware is crap, I'm saying it's more expensive price/performance wise. In 2002, a Pontiac Trans Am was the fastest (straight-line) car under $30,000. If you would rather have a slower BMW/Honda/Subaru/Whatever, fine, there are reasons you might want to do that. The reality will still be that the Trans Am is faster.

Painting with a broad brush, there are two major camps of educators -- those who take an objectivist approach and those who take a constructivist approach. The objectives focus on learning objectives -- where you can say that all learning results in a specific behavior you can test (e.g. using a standardized test) -- while the constructivists believe that you can't standardize the outcomes because groups collectively negotiate and construct their belief systems. So the constructivists encourage learners to look at multiple viewpoints, become investigators, and draw their own conclusions about the underlying reality.

(From the article) [Hakim] wrote an 11-volume series, "A History of US"

Constructivism is popular in teaching the social sciences, where students can be given multiple viewpoints and encouraged to seek out diverse views. It doesn't find much of a home in learning the 3R's, nor in science education -- basic skills education is driven largely these days by the inststance that students pass standardized tests (Textbooks today are hugely accountable to individual state standards defined for that particular course," said Wendy Spiegel, head of communications for Pearson Education) and by the sense that science describes a world in precise, irreducable, and unambiguous terms. Neither of these leave room for the "social construction of meaning" that's so dear to the constructivists.

The technical name is cognitive dissonance.