Slashdot Mirror
Maine buys 38,600 ibooks for Public Schools
Anderson Silva writes "I just found this piece of news on MacSlash, and since I live in Maine, and I own an ibook, I thought I would pass the word along: The Maine Learning Technology Endowment has announced today that Apple has won the bid to provide Maine 6th, 7th and 8th graders with Apple iBooks and Airport wireless connection points."
Apple has orders for twice the expected production run so they have to get a real company to make the hardware for them. I guess the planned 3,000 units this year wasn't planning some goofus would order a slew for some school system.
To bad there isn't any software they will want to run on it. Oh goody, hypercard and shufflepuck. Though I guess this is the schools way of making sure kids can't play computer games at school.
Whilst I'm aware this is obviously good news for Apple, is this newsworthy ?
:-)
Don't get me wrong, I've got an iBook too, and I love it, but I'm just wondering what "better" news is out there.
Or, are we going to encounter such a bad recession that soon the sale of bic biro gets into the news ?
M.
You may have been branded as a troll for that comment, but only because Slashdot hates the bitter truth. I would be pissed as hell if I was a tax payer in that region and they wasted money on those shitty little ibooks. Look they come in colors what a great fucking concept. Who needs a product base or resonably priced computers. Not me, I just want a colorful computer. They would have been better off buying a bunch of Dell laptops and some spray paint.
Has anyone here ever been to Maine. Imagine a state with millions of people who look just like Steven King, but uglier and with stronger accents. There you have Maine.
Maine is the biggest white trash state in the Union. Their school system is in shambles. It's surprising Steven King can write at all, seeing as how he was brought up there.
Before worrying about computer literacy, how about teaching actual literacy!
Easy:
Wasting more money allows politicians to pad the amount of money they brag about spending on kids in their district.
Helps boost the economy, by increasing the distribution of high priced equipment that is easy to break and hard to upgrade.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
That's a dirty trick, selling your cheap Apple toys to young kids who don't know any better. Let me guess: you even convinced them that iBooks were computers, right? Those poor, damned youngsters. I don't want to see the looks on their sweet young faces when they go out into the Real World and discover that employers expect people to know how to use Windows.
Why, it ought to be a crime to give Macs to impressionable kids. It's like giving them heroin... both heroin and Macs are overpriced trash used by the dregs of society, degenerates who mask their inadequacies under the guise of "artistic personality." Why, I'll show you where heroin and an artistic personality will get you: dead. Just look at Kurt Cobain. Oops, you probably shouldn't have looked at that, he isn't too pretty without a head.
But I digress. The fact is that giving Macintoshes to kids is just wrong. You'll set their technological development back by fuckin' years. I mean, come on... it's a Mac, for Jobs sake. What are these fuckin' jackbooted government thugs trying to do to our children, buying them Macs? I'll tell you what they want. They want these kids in on the Cult. You know, the Crapintrash "True Believers." Those loonies refuse to use real computers, all blabberin' on about the sanctity of Jobs' user interface -- but they can't seem to find "jobs," get it? They're all useless bums and criminals. I don't know why we taxpayers should fund the next generation of dirty Mac users, suckin' welfare off the government teat while moaning about FireWire and AltiVec. I mean, come on.
I don't have anything against givin' kids toys, and a Mac is a fine toy for a little girl, or a boy whom you suspect of being queer. But tellin' these kids that these toys are computers? Why, that's an abomination! I suppose next you'll be tellin' them that "Power Wheels" are just the same as real automobiles, and we'll have kids gettin' run over on the highway! Tell me, people, do you want your children being run over on the highway of life?
A Mac is a fine toy, see, but I recommend buying your young ones GameCubes instead. Both Macs and GameCubes are multicolored plastic toys designed for the underdeveloped mind, but at least a GameCube doesn't have all the fuckin' stigma of a Mac. You want your kids being part of the weak leftist politicians, "subversive" wannabe artists, and child molesters that make up the Apple "community?" Fine. But don't spend my tax dollars doing it, you fucking communists.
I don't expect much sympathy from you Linux folks. You're just as much wannabe-commies and hypocritical Windows-bashers as the Mac crowd, but you can't even afford decent hardware. I intend to prove that each and every one of you is a terrorist, like Anand lal Shimpi. What with all the talk of stealing copyrighted material, violating contractual license agreements, and the like on this sorry excuse for a weblog, I wouldn't be surprised if Osama bin Laden himself is holed up at the Geek Compound. Probably taking advantage of Malda's loose asshole and installing PGP from the Red Hat Power Tools CD, so that he can further injure the American republic. You're going down, Slashdot!
(Note to TRoLLaXoR: you know the truth, so kindly ignore this. :-)
-- The_Messenger
Not really cool to waste money like this, tho. They could have gotten much better PC notebooks with more features for half the price, and put Linux on them. Now that would have been cool, and everyone would have been better off.
You were probably the only one then... "Why do we have to use these Crap-in-toshes?" was pretty much the general attitude where I went to school.
Will someone please explain to me how you can read the headline, "Maine buys 38,600 ibooks for Public Schools" and infer that they were giving them away!
Also they did not sell laptops, they sold the entire solution, with networking, hardware, and support. If a company wanted to put in a bid to provide a solution using Linux laptops they were more than free to do so, but there are several advantages Apple had in a contract for wireless labs:
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
"Lobsterman" is New England slang for "childfucker."
Of course Apple won the bid to provide iBooks and Airport wireless connection points. Its not like Dell or HP can compete with the manufacturer, even if the committee thought that Apple's "level of expertise" in supporting their own products did not exceed those of independent vendors regardless of price.
What I'm saying is, this wasn't an open bid -- for the best hardware or price. A backroom deal was awarded based on a political decision.
You can bet if you see something on every TV show, without fail, it'll be in taught in school before long.
Redundant, or probably going to be modded as a Troll, but I just don't care--
WHAT IS WITH THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM AND APPLE COMPUTERS?
When I was in high-school, they force-fed this crap into our lives, and it's sad to see a generation later that this attitude persists even to this day. Doesn't anybody in the public school system GET IT? The real world uses PC-based hardware and software, mostly Windows based systems, but I imagine Linux has a bigger share of the market than MacOS does. (It certainly has a lot of mindshare in the public.)
Why public schools don't go out and buy (or assemble!) cheap PC's instead of forking out a fortune for Apple crap is beyond me. Sure, these are laptops, so self-assembly really isn't realistic, but you could buy Celeron-based laptops and make out on the cheap fairly well! (Cruise over to Gateway and check out their low-end Celeron systems, hell, even the mid-range Pentium III systems don't break the $2000 mark if you keep off most of the big spendy features (CD-RW drive, for example).
Very irritating that my tax dollars go to NOT helping kids learn how to use real-world systems and software...
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Take them home? That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Have you SEEN what happens to things when you let kids borrow them overnight? That's why libraries have fines, and if you trash a textbook, you are expected to pay for it.
Let's say a school district does check the laptops out to students... What happens when the kid drops it and smashes the display and trashes the HDD? Since the families you mention can't afford a computer, how do you cover the cost of replacement?
Your first thought had better not be my tax money. I'm okay with supplying computers to schools, but not paying for replacements of said laptops when students destroy them.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Oh, wait -- you didn't think that lobstermen actually go out to the ocean in boats and catch lobsters, do you? That's pretty fucking ignorant. I'll bet you've never even been on the East Coast.
"Lobsterman" means the same thing in New Hampshire as it means in Maine and all over New England: hoary old NAMBLA members with beards and raincoats who divide their time between fucking kids and supporting union "labor." Maybe, on the farm where you were born, all words mean what they seem to, be we New England folks are sophisticated. Why, we even have a special word for loud-but-ineffective leftist homosexuals past their prime: "stallman." Just as lobstermen aren't "men who catch lobsters," stallmen aren't "men in stalls." Inceidentally, stallmen can often be found in public bathroom stalls, but that's just one of their many habitats. Stallmen tend to congregate around overrated educational institutions. Recently, stallman subcultures have developed in China and Slovenia. For more information on these annoying, filthy beasts, see the stallman homepage.
-- The_Messenger
"ensuring more than 50% of students actually graduate from high school"
You mean dirty innercity blacks.
Why should their inability to learn by of my concern ?
We do spend on them shitload of money as it is (compared to world standards) yet they continue to be as dumn as ever.
Graphics designers seem to be incredibly naive judging by the fact Apple was able to persuade them that somehow, aging OS and 3rd party apps available for it ( all of them being available on Win boxes ) , are worth paying what is often twice as much as equivalent Windows box.
Furthermore, just about any upgrade down the line will cost 3 times more than the very same upgrade in Wintel world.
I guess they pay thru their nose just to be different (TM).