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Apple's School Days are Numbered
prostoalex writes "Business Week describes the current situation in the educational market, suggesting that Apple will lose its share among the high school teachers and students. The worst enemies, according to Business Week, are school superintendents. "We want a single platform," one of them said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it.""
Apple was making a lot of money from the education, I don`t think they will lose it though. I know they are losing a lot of ground but in retrospect they have not been as actively persuing it as they have other markets. Perhaps Apple has a trick up its sleeve for schools. I know where I used to work there was a couple of die hard Apple fans in the tech departement that will now allow the school to be taken over by PCs. :D
"We want a single platform." == "We want EVERY machine to be effected by any virus or worm that's going around." How 'bout doing some research first to see if supporting multiple platforms really does cost more?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Much is made of the Mac's durability, reliability, low TCO (when everything is factored in). Doesn't this have any appeal any more in education?
:P Of course, IT managers don't care about purdy, and I do feel inclined to, once again, make a comment about IT managers recommending what they know and what will keep them in a job...
:P
:s
Quoth the article:
It all comes back to what I call the lemming effect -- the willingness of people to follow blindly along, never questioning as they march in step with everyone else.
Ah, the age old problem. One might say Mac zealots are a similar breed, but I'd have thought that for education, a computer as damn simple as a Mac would be an enormous boon, especially when you think of the savings on support.
And they're so purdy...
Oh well, guess it's all downhill hereon. Still, he shoulda called Apple beleaguered...
iqu
I've worked in an educational setting this whole summer and I can vouch for the administrators' (both educational and technical) point of view. Now throw in another point briefly mentioned in the article:
Gee, a $100-$150 (at most) educational discount on a $1700 IMac (~$1600 total) or a $500 Dell?
Granted, that's not entirely comparing apples to apples (pun intended purely as an afterthought), but that's how most educators, teachers, and students will see it. What would you want to work on or buy if you were a cash strapped student?
http://w1.901.telia.com/~u90121759/ahem.JPG
Look cloesely at the "sponsorship announcement" next to the article.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
haven't we been doing the "Apple is dying" thing since the days before /.? Before teh Intarweb even? :oP
do() || do_not();
It's still a Wintel world.
So, the deal is that the school IT folks have been sold down the river on the concept that a single platform will save them money. Furthermore, they have been sold on the concept that Windows will save them money.
The reality is quite different. For example, a good friend of mine's wife is a grade school teacher. Their school last year had a bunch of LCIII's and IIsi's that they wanted to replace with new Macs. The district IT said no, and they would be replaced with Wintel based machines. So, not only did the Macs work with only a single teacher administering them for over ten years on his own time, they now have a staff of four administering the Wintel machines, their costs have gone up 600% for administration alone and the district tells them the machines will be replaced in four years.
I ask you. How has this scenario saved the district, the school or the taxpayer any money? Administration costs have skyrocketed and the computers will have to be replaced more often. Rather as Cringley and others have stated, it sounds like a consipiracy to maintain IT jobs and expand their budget.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I hate to make the usual Apple enthusiast party-line complaint about the article, but it just seems like a whole lot of assumptions and FUD based on no real facts. Even the comments about the Maine program fail to mention the general budgetary hard times that have fallen on the states (who have to choose between cutting educational computer programs or healthcare, or raising taxes).
Is there anything to this other than more "Apple's about to go under!" talk that we've been hearing since 1984?
As an employer I looked for people who had a range of experience. These people would be able to cope when changes and challenges presented themselves. I remember even twenty years back putting someone one a computer to do some work and they said that they had only be taught how to use another software package and they were completely stumped by what I was asking them to do.
The same is true today. People trained to use MS Office and Windows are frequently hopeless when put in front of another OS. Someone who has learned how to use computers rather than a particular OS and package are much more flexible and know how to read a manual. They will be more productive in the long run than these MS trained drones.
For this reason I would encourage schools to look for less uniformity not more. Mac, UNIX, Linux, Windows, Be, even VMS, it's all good and the diversity helps stem the tide of malware. Whatever happened to the network being the computer? The client shouldn't matter, mix 'em up and we'll have more rounded students entering the workforce.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
all they have is what they use and what they have is oldsh os 9 and windows 95 and 98. and becuse of it i think that our good old macs are not dead becuse the video and graphics use them and the skools are trying what they can to fix them. but a lot of times the skool adims are controled buy pepole that dont know what the hell they are doing and thus cant do a damned thing about it
But it does make sense to use Apple/BSD to educate kids for a Linux world. ;)
Seriously, education platform doesn't really matter. All of what 95% of what kids learn is how to type and use a word processor, and that'll easily translate to any platform.
The other 5% are smart enough to learn other platforms as they go.
Also, and this really ticks me off, education shouldn't be about memorizing facts, but about learning how to learn. That'll really prepare you for the world and do you good for the rest of your life, unlike learning how to use Windows to make iron-on transfers of american flags.
Most students could easily complete everything up to a highschool level education using any computing platform: Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Windows is self-perpetuating: we teach Windows because it's popular, it's popular because it's what people know. It's a shame it's gotten to this state of affairs. Even if a single platform is more cost effective to maintain than a mixed environment moving to Linux or BSD on the existing x86 hardware in a school would be cheaper than sticking with Windows licensing for Windows, Office, NT Server and on the next hardware upgrade cycle moving to Macintosh systems (if that's deamed to be the best move) or upgrading the x86 systems already there. I think a two major reasons for the standardization on Windows has to do with the administrators trying to secure their employment (weekly patches = overtime) and the fear of maintaining something they aren't familar with.
but isnt it good to learn a new os? and i have pleanty of mac pepole that hate skool becuse they have to use a windows machine that crashes left and right on them
Haddad writes about Macs in K-12 education, but he seems to be a little too anxious to make his point.
Haddad said: "Hear what Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison (Wis) school district, told the local Capital Times. He conceded that Macs outperform PCs, but he didn't care. "We want a single platform," he said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it."
Not quite. Here's what the Capital Times printed:
Superintendent Art Rainwater acknowledged that in some cases, Macintosh computers outperform their competitors.
Slight difference there?
Haddad continued his imaginitive use of quotes further on: "Drama teacher Rebecca Jallings at Madison West High School, for one, is fighting Rainwater's effort to strip her classroom of Macs. She told the Capital Times that she finds them the best machines by far for editing video, an important tool in her acting class."
Jallings may have told the Capital Times that, but it never published it, at least in the version that appears on the Capital Times web archives.
As an aside, Jallings records the students on video and then puts it on the Mac. The Capital Times reports "Rebecca Jallings, a theater teacher at Madison West High School, shoots video of her students as they learn to act. If they're "doing that swaying thing again" during their monologue, she said, she rolls the footage on her Macintosh computer and can prove it to the student immediately."
Quite how that's superior to using a video camera alone is beyond me.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"Why should my child work on a Mac in class when most people use PCs at home and in the office?"
To show them that there are other options besides Windows. What kids really learn on computers at school is how to use applications more than the OS itself... word processors, spreadshee software, video editing... all these things translate fairly easily between OSes. At least having kids "grow up" and learn on a Mac shows them that there are other choices out there for Operating Systems once they leave the nest. The fact that OSX is now BSD-based makes me all the more in favor of it... might get a few more kids interested in *nix/open-source development. If only the decision-makers had a broader vision of the future the say they're trying to make the best of.
I believe the New York Times had a piece on this last spring also. At any rate, it's too bad that Apple is slowly losing this battle too. I believe that they have had the suprerior product for years, but when only a fraction of homes have Macs, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the students to have to learn to use a Mac at school.
Case in point: I go to the University of Nebraska. They used to have Macs all over the school, but now they are all but phased out by PCs. Despite the fact that many of my classmates still have problems with papers getting lost of their floppies (floppies!) and have their computers "break down" on them, they continue to use PCs at home and at school. Just last Thursday I was at a workshop where we were all given iBooks to access a web page. The setup could not have been simpler, for the dock contained exactly three items: the finder, the applications folder, and the trash. And yet people still couldn't figure it out. Their home PCs were familiar and therefore simpler to use. And from their perspective, why should they have to use a computer at school that does not take their floppy disks and is different from their home PCs.
From an administrative standpoint, it is a lot cheaper (in the short run) to get a truckload of Dells for $400. They will break more often, they will be attacked by more worms, and they will continue to reinforce the age-old reliance on floppy disks, but the up-front cost is half that of an eMac, so it's a better solution.
I wish Apple still controlled the education market, and to a large degree, they still do. Schools keep their computers for years, but the new generation of educational PCs won't be stamped with my much-beloved Apple logo. For now Apple is still riding out their honeymoon with schools, but shortsighted thinking and short-term economics may make that a thing of the past.
http://www.walkingtaco.com
The techs at most public schools are dumbasses. It's sad but true. (I apologize if you are a tech at a school that doesn't follow this trend. Keep up the good work.)
My entire school's network accesses the web over one of two T1 lines. Rather than a load-balancing Linux server, they have two 80486 systems with 32mb apiece running illegally purchased copies of NT4, with only service pack 2.
The school's techs worked for 3 damn weeks trying to get an iMac G4 on the school network. Every printer in the school is shared, while none of them have passwords. Every teacher's computer is shared, while none of them have passwords. Hell, the records server's Administrator password is the initials of the school!
In the middle of a budget crisis(we'll go broke Oct 1), the school bought 40+ Athlon computers.
Macs are going out of schools. It's not because OS X is any harder to use (perfect blend of idiot friendliness and power), but rather because idiot-proofing is now being winshit compatible.
Apple computers will always be used in video editing classes, and PCs have wormed their way into the rest of the school years ago. Apple lost the battle during System 7, it's time to move on and accept that the world at large can't be steered by a better product. If they focus on the informed consumers and professionals, they'll survive and flourish.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Schools can only afford low end tech salaries, and thus they mostly get one of the flood of ignorant MSCE sheep. And it doen't take much experience to realize how fanatical they are about Microsoft.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
i disagree, for years i used windows at school, and apple at home (i have my own PC now, oh the joys of counter strike! :D). If anything, it was a good thing, it taught me how to use both systems, to an extent. And i think that some ofmy moronic classmates could use that. Besides, since when does what kids want matter? If it saves money, go for it. A 700 dollar eMac minus (i think) 150 dollars in educational discount, plus fewer staff requirements, and less network downtime, is a far better arguement than,"kids like windows." Also, i think userfriendlyness is important, because i cant tell you how many dumb questions i've had to answer from teachers.
F*ck kids.
Schools should have Apples and oran.. er, PCs... and the PCs should be dual-boot with windows and linux...
Then again, schools can't afford that... guess havin' edumacated kids ain't important...
When I went to high school, we used TRS-80's. At home, I used an Apple II In college, the net was VAX . Later, I used the product of a company that will go unnamed and unlinked. Recently (and for the past half-decade) I used linux because what I learned was the idea, not the platform. Don't underestimate the curiosity and inquisitiveness of young humans. They are amazing creatures.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
...at least not when you consider what ought to be the primary focus of any schoolsystem: to give the children knowledge and prepare them for a life in the real world. A school is not a place you keep your kids until they are old enought to move out, it's supposed to be a place your kids are prepared to become a contributing member of society.
One may or may not like it, but for most kinds of work out there, the Wintel-platform is what it is all about. Working with office-apps? Chances are that you're not using a Mac. Accessing a database? I'll guess ten to one that the clientend is a windowsapp.
As long as the subject matter isn't one where the Mac dominate in the real world, schools shouldn't "miseducate" (sorry, I couldn't think of a word that fitted better) the pupils by using machines from Apple - weither or not they are better / cheaper to maintain / has more fancy colours than a wintel machine. If they do, they are not doing our children any favours.
Towards the end of school, say the last couple of years before people graduate, I think it would be wise to have a "general OS" class, teaching the pupils the basic of not just the wintel or the MacOS, but also divers flavours of Linux, BDS, Contiki and whatnot. Show the pupils that there are many more operatingsystems out there, each with a distinct set of pros and cons, and make them make up their own mind what they will use at home; because when they start working they will have to use whatever the company has decided on.
PS: the line 'Here and there you'll still find an original Mac -- not to mention a few Apple IIs -- hard at work in classrooms' isn't really saying anything about the longvity of the mac - but it does say a whole lot about the lack of proper funding of the schools.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Sure, it's a bit more of a challenge if you have to be a sysadmin for both systems (like me), but if you're an end-user, what's the big deal?
IMNSHO, the knowledge you learn about the specific operating system (be it Windows, Mac OS, or *nix) is far less important than understanding how a computer functions. Once you have the concepts of computing down (again, I'm just talking about using them, not administering), you should be able to apply those skills to any computer, any platform.
As a university IT administrator, I can tell you with 100% certainty that other IT admins put PCs in because it's what they know, not because it's what is "best". There are indeed instances where a Windows-based system is the "best", but there are plenty of times where Windows is used for the admin's comfort when a Mac- or *nix-based computer would be a better choice.
Here's another question: does the sysadmin comfort with Wintel come from simple laziness, or is it that they're over-burdened with having to keep up with all the MS patches and system configuration madness that they're too exhausted to learn anything else? Hmmm.
> I think we all knew this.
Perhaps, but I don't think anyone is expecting an unbiased opinion from someone with "x86" in their name.
The unofficial
Of course that money they saved will be spent on removing the first worm or two.
Where to start. The 800 MHz G4 is faster than a 2GHz AMD processor. In certain tests it even beats a 4GHz Pentium4 (hence the name: G4). The Mac also has superior software which uses the 128MB much more efficiently than a Windows PC would. The memory efficiency is about 1:5, so you'd have to have more than 512MB in your Windows PC to keep up. The same goes for the harddisk: have you seen how well Quicktime compresses media data? Makes the 40GB harddisk look like infinite storage. And don't get me started on monitor sizes. The horrible Windows interface wastes screen real estate it's not even funny anymore. Two inch is about as much screen space as the Windows taskbar alone wastes compared to the sexy MacOSX dock. Really, get your facts together before you start comparing prices. It's not just about raw numbers, efficiency matters.
Their methods sound similar to Microsoft's methods for increasing their Market share in the first place.
If they achieve this, they will be teaching kids to conform more, and don't exercise individual choice so much. Is this what we want in our education? It's almost like the OS equivalent of school uniforms.
Standards are important to computing, but if there is one place where it's safe to spend time playing with a variety of standards, it's in the sandbox of education.
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
I teach in one of the largest public school districts in the states, and in my experience this article is both irrelevant and incorrect.
First off, as others have pointed out, the price difference is far from inconsequential. Even under a Preferred Purchasing agreement for Wintel that, IMO, is a slimy ripoff, we would still pay $200+ more for a low end Mac.
Second, Macs are used in precisely the places the article points out as strengths - video editing and multimedia. While my district in general and my school in particular are pretty crude technologically, we do have two small labs of Macs for Graphic Design and Publishing courses.
As for losing other opportunities in the building, Apple's got no one to blame for themselves. As behind as I think we are, we've still got attendance and other functions running on an NT domain. Why? Not because we're close-minded and bought-out (well, maybe we are, but not in this context). But because Apple all but abandoned the educational market years ago. We had the NT domain long before we moved critical functions to it. If Apple had halfway reasonable pricing and a larger educational program four years ago, running those functions on NT might not have been as simple a choice. The argument that "we've got to teach MS because that's what's out there" is powerful, though not as much so as some Slashdotters may suspect. But combine that with a preexisting NT network assembled during years of Apple's educational neglect, and it makes buying Macs for the classroom foolish.
I doubt it harms them much at all. Keep in mind we're not training administrators here. If you can launch word in OS X, you can launch word in windows. Just click around till you see that blue W. I actually think this is better for students. If you see more than one way of doing something, you're more likely to think about why you do it one way or the other, what the real differences are and how they're similar. Hopefully this will lead to building a conceptual model, instead of just performing tasks by rote.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Anyone know if parents are really complaining?
It would sound stupid, even for a non-technie daddy to throw a fit because there is a PC at home, but Macs at school
I hate Macs, BUT like many people in their early 20's now, my first exposure to computers were Apple II E's, IIGS's, and Mac's in elementary school...
My issue here is that I think it's stupid for parents to complain that kids are getting both systems...I think it's good, and on top of that, I think kids should get linux exposure too...if we really want our kids to be computer-savvy, shouldn't they be exposed to the various things people use as home computers? (Macs, PC (Windows), PC (Linux), PC (BSD), etc, etc)
To make your best buy emachine comparable you would have to add a 32 MB radeon for $129.50 and a flat CRT 17" like the emachines eview monitor 17F/17F2 for $209.99
Emachines PC $399.99
32MB Radeon $129.99
17" Flat CRT $209.99
Total $ 739.48
Cheapest emac $799
Difference is $59.50
Ok so $9.50 more than $50, You win!!!
I think to really make it more comparable Windows XP home should be replaced with XP pro to match MacOS X's networking features. And also the iApps. So there goes the difference in proce. The mac looks better even with a slower CPU.
The entire concept of running any decent-sized orginization on a single platform is crazy. Commercial vendors will always want to lock you into their platform. But heed these words well:
Salesmen have to sell whatever they're given.
Most companies will simply shoehorn all thier products into whatever market they can get thier hands on, just so they can compete. But any engineer worth his salt knows that things work best when you use the right tool for the right job.
The real issue here is that people are lazy. So when someone comes along with a song and dance about how all thier support problems are going to be solved by the One True Platform, they swallow the bullshit. Lazy IT people never follow up to figure out if that's actually true. And even if they do, and lazy managers ignore the IT people to make it look like they're 'managing' something by pretending to save money.
Where to start. The 800 MHz G4 is faster than a 2GHz AMD processor. In certain tests it even beats a 4GHz Pentium4
;)
So where do we find these mythical 4 GHz P4's? I could really use a few more points in my system benchmarks, but no matter how hard I try, I keep failing to locate them so far
Because of Mac hardware architecture, the system specs compared to a PC are misleading. It's really not fair to compare based on megahertz alone because there are still things a 733 mac will do better than a 2ghz pentium.3 008,3339307,00.html
In about 2 minutes of searching on google I was able to find this, which compared a 733 mac to a 1.8ghz PC and the Mac came out on top in a couple of the tests. http://www.techtv.com/products/hardware/story/0,2
I don't know a whole lot about Macs but I do know that when you're used to using PCs, Mac system specs can be misleading. So it is very possible that truly comparable macs and PCs differ by about $50 in price.
I can't think of a good sig...
Having just finished HS myself several months ago, I can tell you, its a pain in the ass.
All personal anti-Apple bias aside, I have observed multiple platforms just make life difficult for students. The vast majority prefer Windows.
The unofficial
I avoid OS 9 like the plague, but OS X (NeXt-based) has much better winshit interaction support. Thanks to Class, OS X can run OS 9 software. Linux can do a similar thing with MacOnLinux. Both use the native process rather than emulator, they are fast enough to run Bryce on my G3 iBook.
My school is concidering a Linux server, but they'd have to draft me to configure it. They are also having trouble affording the low end pentium I told them would be necessary.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
i am a school teacher. my district is probably like many. our IT staff are morons. we don't/can't pay industry standards, so we get the bottom. plus, the jobs are secure, so we can't get rid of idiots. anyways...
a little story. a year or so back, district tech at my school brags about coming back from some microsoft conference, (mind you we are a novell network) and he's got freebies galore. XP pro ( no reg key copies), VS.NET, 2K server, office XP (no reg key), and other crap. thrown out like halloween candy. you think they're gonna cut off their source.
another story. 3-4 years ago, we were finishing the wiring at my school. so, the district tech head is there, yada yada. so i ask her about the servers, since we didn't even have a local file server for our one lab, (and I had lots of student work get lost), and she says the district goal is to consolidate on get this, "fewer, more powerful, servers". this at the time that when the industry was moving the opposite direction. and then she retires, and we're half way there, and there is just too much momentum to change. so we go ahead, and have a crappy, unscalable network, and we have win98 clients rather than 2k, because of a multitude of piss poor decisions, we have no money to spend on memory upgrades.
these people have the ears of the PHB's. and let's face it, if it needs 20 admins where another solution would need 10, and their input makes the call, what do you think they're gonna choose.
for those of you who don't quite understand school spending/funding, let me explain. every year, principals have an end of year "wish list", if there is money left over. why? if they don't spend it, they get less next year. so, saving money is specifically NOT DESIRED. in fact, deficits are preferred. don't ever expect linux to make it in this environment. i could go on. get the ear of your school boards. or vote their asses out.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
This individual's Mac Zealot authorization has been revoked. We sincerely apologize for the nonsensical gibberish he/she has spouted. Please rest assured that we have never and will never tolerate exaggerated claims such as these.
Thank you,
Friends of Steve
used a pentium 233 running win98 and tried to do video editing. the teachers never figured out how to use it, so it sat unused. the problem was someone had sold them on the idea of thin clients so they tried to get away with legacy pentiums and 486s (I'm not kidding) running win98 and a dual p3 800 system with win2k advanced server. worst setup I have ever seen. Anyways the point is they would have been far better off if they had gotten a few macs to do their video editing (it was a small enough school that 2 or 3 would be sufficient) and then just used their shitty 486s for their word processing. my $0.02 anyways.
Why not install a free OS then? With a mass market like US school system, I bet you can find a vendor that doesn't make you pay MS tax and sells a system for $450. Even if you don't save much initially, think about upgrades.
Worried about support costs? Well, every school has a few geeks. Get them to download and install Redhat ISOs as a class project. Obviously, you might want to keep them away from PCs used for grading, but for student labs educational exprience you give them outweighs the risks.
I currently know of 9 working Macs in our district, and they are PowerSchool servers. I'm not a big Mac fan myself, but since PowerSchool only works on Windows and Mac OS, we chose the macs (running OS 9). Do I wish we were running it on Windows? Sometimes - OS 9 isn't very configurable and is very clunky for a server OS. Of course, we didn't have to worry about the Blaster worm, either...
Now only if they would make a PowerSchool version for Linux... That would be a Good Thing(TM).
TylerS
... for one thing courses in Spanish and French and German verge on being **TOTALLY* useless for people who already speak English.
... other languages are useless for Americans.
Ther rest of the *world* is learning English so the school system in English speaking countries could save vast amounts of money by simply halting language courses and firing the teachers as redundant: one world, one language
Since computers and spread sheets can do most mathematics and arithmetic we needed to do in thepast WHY TEACH MATHEMATICS??!! People should be left to fend for themselves (using the nwe PC's equipped with the latest most expensive versions of Excel) until university. In university one can learn about hte concepts behind mathematics without having *WASTED TIME* learning it for 10 years in school.
Clearly too much money is wasted in the US school system.
I remember my high school computer teacher in 1991 telling us that we needed to learn DOS and Wordperfect 5.1 because "that's what they use in industry." He always said "industry" as if it was this mythical, magical place, the one place where people paid for computer skills, the monolithic arbiter of everything good and meaningless.
Of course, I used a Mac. And his explanations about our need for DOS seemed strange. We used WordPerfect in computer class, and I wrote my English, Biology, and History papers at home in MacWrite and PageMaker. I learned how to program a simple ASCII charting program in GW-BASIC at school, then went home and wrote a grade record tracking program in HyperCard.
I was, of course, told that my efforts were wasted, because "industry" didn't use Macs. That turned out to be mostly true. But it seemed awfully strange, a year later, taking the second "advanced" computer course to be using Windows, the "future" of the industry and finding myself completely bored to tears. I wrote a simple word processor in C in my spare time from samples in a Mac programming book. The geeks in my school never learned from Windows. They used Macs or they used DOS, and most everybody respected the motive, if not the platform. I learned more from the Mac geeks, though. They just seemed to have more fun, without having to rely on "games."
When the SoftArc FirstClass bulletin board/email system was really hitting its stride in 1993, I proposed to the school principal and the head of the computer program the idea of creating a school-wide bulletin board hooked up to OneNet and then, eventually, the Internet. I demoed it on my Mac IIsi. All they could see was the Mac. "They don't use Macs in industry," the computer teacher said. "PCs don't do graphics like that," the principal said. It was all very disappointing. I was trying to point out the possibilities of interaction. All they saw was something that they couldn't do (they could, but they just didn't know) with their Intel-Microsoft computers. I learned that day that it didn't take a lot of imagination to be a teacher or an administrator, and that's why I sift dumpsters for food and clothing now, rather than teach.
Now, I am a mac guy. And every time an article comes up, someone says they are cheaper, they aren't cheaper.
First off, we'll assume that a school is going to buy a computer from a manufacturer. We'll use Dell to compare.
The cheapest eMac isn't $800, it's $700. (Did you actually check the education store, since we are shopping for a school?)
It has an 800 Mhz G4, which is pretty respectable for a mac.
Comes with 128 MB RAM, 40 GB HD, a CD-ROM, 2 Firewire ports, 5 USB ports, built-in ethernet, 17-inch display and a Radeon 7500.
Heading over to Dell's education site, I found a Dimension 2400 for $689.90. It's got a 2.2 Ghz processor, 128 MB RAM, a 40 GB HD, CD-ROM, 6 USB ports, built-in ethernet, a 17-inch display, integrated video, 17-inch display and no speakers.
Both come with a mouse & keyboard, although the Dell does spring for an extra button.
I would say $10 is pretty close for about the same system. I was actually expecting the Dell to win by more, but have something silly like no network card. If you are buying machines without monitors, the Dell low-end trounces Apple; there isn't anything without a monitor at Apple for less that $1200.
Why are those features needed in an educational market at all? For a lab of word processing/basic app machines, like 99% of the k-12 computers are, you don't need anything more than the integrated video chipset to handle display. The monitor's a non-issue because a flat picture tube is only (marginally) beneficial to people who are using it day in and day out. You don't need the networking features of XP pro because once again, you're in an environment where you just need to crank out texts. The iApps are similarly worthless for a great deal of the market we're talking about, and aren't a great added value. So, you're still left with spending several hundred dollars more for a comparable emac. Add to the fact that the PC's non-integrated monitor leads to cost savings down the road as one doesn't have to replace the monitor at the same time as the rest of the system, and the PC is clearly a better deal.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
My school ran macs all the way up until my senior year. Then they got rid of ALL the mac machines and got IBM Windows boxes. Saving money was not on their mind. What was then? They wanted to teach students how to use the most popular OS.
I'm sorry Mac people, but Windows is the most popular OS. The school wants to teach kids how to use the OS they're most likely to use in the workplace. Mac (especially OSX) may be better, but in most people's eyes, popular (meaning compatability) is better and this is the unfortunate but sad truth. Microsoft has simply cornered the market.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
lol man that's hillarious. Apparantly the mods don't think so though.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Then why don't you point us too these 'certain tests' and a source for all your other BS you seem too be full off.
--- No, english is not my mother tongue.
I'm not sure what shocks me more, that my zealotry license has been revoked or that my comment was modded "informative"...
I remember such classics as Wavy Navy, Montezumas Revenge, and Karateka...
on an apple II, later a IIgs
and all while I should have been doing algebra
it's not in the classrooms. That's the tricky part. You don't see the waste that goes on in public school districts because it's off limits even for the teachers. You walk into the classroom and you see this pathetic scene and you think, god these people need money bad. And they do, but that doesn't mean there isn't extravagant waste. It's just that you're not permitted to see it.
The waste is at the district level, not the classrooms. And the worst offenders are usually the district network admins why are owned by MS at the vast majority of American K-12 schools.
In large part, this district level administrative waste is the major motive for the charter school initiative.
It's all rather insidious though because if you ask for more information, you won't get anywhere for so-called security reasons. That's security like as in job security. Call it the corporate/educational complex if you will.
The question comes down to what it includes. For instance, if you care to go all-mac (or even if you don't) it is *very* easy to justice MacOS X Server, with its unlimited client license.
As to the individual computers, that $699 computer comes with things like firewire ports, a 17" flat-screen CRT, and an 802.11g antenna--and MacOS X--a lot there to justify it, particularly if you determine that it will require less support over its lifetime than a comparably priced Windows box.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
No, the reasons morons like you get modded down are because of your unimaginitive flamebait subjects, diarrheatic syntax, and olde troll lines with easy to see hooks.
Oh, and you do care about getting modded down--otherwise you wouldn't have posted as A. Coward.
Imagine if every driving school in the US was to use nothing but Ford. Or every geometry class required kids to buy one particular make of compass, ruler and protractor. Or if every school was required to use exactly the same model and make of chair and table from one manufacturer only, even though independent studies had shown that these chairs and tables had a shorter life span and needed more frequent repairs than the alternatives. There might be problems.
The logical thing, as with other public procurement, would be to have an agreed open standard for school procurement, and allow suppliers to tender freely to meet that requirement. School IT administrators would be trained on the administration and maintenance of the base standard, and any supplier proposing any proprietary modifications would have to declare them and explain the on-costs for support staff training and additional maintenance.
The answer to the parents who complain that children are not being trained to use home PCs is, it is no more our job to teach kids how to use your PC than your dishwasher, your TV or your lawnmower.
Of course it won't happen. But it is the genuinely free market approach (i.e the customer decides the rules and the market delivers). What we have at the moment is literally fascism, i.e. a society in which the State works with and favors particular sections of industry, and in which officials corruptly work in both fields despite the conflict of interest. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a free, democratic, idealistic 1940s US to ride to the rescue any more.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The refutation I've also heard to this is along a slightly different line, but equally valid: XP is nothing like Windows 95 is nothing like Windows 3.1. OS X is nothing like OS 9, which is fundamentally different than OS 7.
That's been in the last 10 years. A kid is trained on Windows XP in high school (or even grade school or middle school!) and the operating system is going to be fundamentally different--even if they are still using "Windows" or "MacOS"--by the time they are out of college.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I work at the IT office of a state-run public university that focuses on research. UMBC's 24-hour student computer labs contain hundreds of terminals with a variety of hardware/OS configurations (PCs, Macs [ranging from G3/4s to eMacs] and a smattering of SGI Indigos/Indys dating back to the mid 90's, when the state budget allowed for such purchases).
Gradually, our student terminals -- PCs and Mac -- are shifting towards a "common platform": Unix. Our Macs are being upgraded to OSX, and each PC (most are Dell Optiplex GX-110s, GX150s and newer 270s) can be booted into either Windows 2000 or a customized RedHat lab image.
Insects and Grafitti Photos
As is always the case really.. I work for a college, and our ratio of macs to PC's is probably 1 mac for every 150 PeeCee's. And its a case of a viscious circle - no one on the tech team really knows much about them as the college hardly buys any of them... and the college doesn't really want to buy them as hardly anyone knows about how to support them on our team.
Its frustrating for me as I always try and push alternatives - refurbed cheap (but still hugely powerful) SGI's for CAD work, Linux in many situations, etc - but its always the same old story. Some excuse to get out of it and buy Intel boxes.
From a techie point of view it makes the job easier, but I enjoy getting little diversity in the job - it makes it more of a challenge, and it forces the people I work with to learn new things. Most of them find it amusing to chastise Linux even though it is the backbone of the network - the proxy everyone is routed through, the DHCP address provider, and the DNS servers for every machine.
I think the most overriding factor is money.. MacOSX itself is cheap, and if you could buy it for x86 machines, i'd buy it myself in a second - but the Apple hardware just costs too much, when you consider we were able to get Dell workstations with P4 2.4GHz, 256MB DDR RAM, 15" TFT monitors, and about 30GB harddrives for around $800. Apple can compete by providing machines at that price I am sure, but as OSX really does need a bit more horsepower to get the best out of it, then you really need to spend more to beef it up. How do you justify that to your Wintel loving mansgers with tight purse-strings...?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
(This is slightly off-topic, but I just want to get this off my chest)
I don't know about you but I am a lecturer at university level (I'm posting AC because some of my students might recognize me) and for the last five years I've observed a gradual decline in the motivation and, in particular,
They come to the class and sit there like empty receptacles I am supposed to fill in with information that'll be on the exam. If I digress and try to tell them something extra-curricular (like showing photos from my latest trip to the ALS) they'll scream bloody murder (or first they'll ask if this will be on the exam and if it's not they'll scream bloody murder).
You try to ask them questions and you get blank looks. Some students look at each other as if they're confused by the prospect that they'd actually participate in the class. Some people who I know know the answer won't say anything and keep staring at their open book as if there's something particularly interesting in there.
And don't get me wrong. They are not fundamentally stupid people beneath the surface. They just don't know how to use their head until someone tells them how. Some of them actually do know how, but the reason why they are so passive remained unanswered for a long time.
Then, last week, I was visiting my brother who's married with children when her 10-year old niece came to me and asked if "uncle could help with my math homework". The homework was typical 3rd grade mathetmatics and it was apparent that while my niece was mathematically talented, the problem was actually quite hard to solve using the methods they had been taught so far. I skimmed a few pages forwards and lo-and-behold, there was the method I would have used. I showed it to her and said something along the line "You can always go ahead and look for help in the later parts of the book - you're so good with math that you can learn these things by yourself".
She took the book, smiled shyly but looked a bit worried. Then she said something that still makes my blood boil: "But my teacher says that we are not supposed to learn anything by ourselves because we might learn wrong things".
I mean what the hell?! Since when did thinking for yourself and being interested in the subject become "a bad thing"? Learning wrong things?!
I know this is just one case and it's impossible to draw any conclusions based this, but I have a suspicion that something is horribly wrong in the school these days. Could it be that this "do what I say and God help you if you try to learn things on your own!" attitude is prevalent and actually making people into these passive vessels that expect teachers just to pour information into them.
Anyone else experienced anything similar?
Oh, and with my bros permission I called that teacher about the matter and told her in no uncertain terms that if I ever hear that my niece has been discouraged by teachers from thinking and learning, I'll call PTA and the local newspaper and I'll sue the school too.
In the Mathematics department, we have a room full of ugly-ass old iMacs. I've only seen 1 or, at absolute most, 2 machines in the room that were not functioning.
The worst part is that the Pentium III systems are set up on a fancy little "imaging" system, where each boot restores a remotely hosted disk image for whatever OS you choose (Win2000, Win98, or an old Red Hat Linux). So we're not even talking OS problems here - every working machine gets a fresh one every boot. It's pure hardware failures in that room.
The iMacs all run off persistant locally-installed copies of OS something (not OS X, and I'm not much of a pre-OS X Mac user, so I can't tell you if it's OS 8 or 9 or what). No fancy re-imaging on boot or anything. Just an OS that doesn't tend to break, on hardware that doesn't tend to break.
One of our local colleges had a vote among their students. They were faces with a switch to OSX on one hand or a switch to Windows. Both would require a lot of work and a lot of money but their Mac hardware could run OSX.
The student body voted and came back with Windows.
So, the Macs were carted out, sold off cheaply (Yes, I made out like a bandit) and new PCs were installed.
Then the problems started.
Y'see. When the Macs were there, they were pretty open. There aren't too many viruses available for the Mac and the students could while away their lunchtimes playing UT on the iMacs and no-one would care. There just wasn't much malware and what there was, wasn't unrecoverable. All of the Macs had FireWire and I know of half a dozen really good student films that came out of students with a cheap camcorder and a couple of hours on ANY of the Macs there.
The students came in and eagerly logged into their new Windows PCs and then discovered that they weren't permitted to install software. Or change the system clock. Or the language of the system. So, now there's no UT or CounterStrike during lunch.
The other problems were hardware related. 20% of their CDRW drives have already been replaced and they had to buy extra machines for swap-out when the PCs flatline during or just before a class. There's a separate "Video Suite" which has higher quality PCs but the students involved in the film-making claim that it takes too long to edit video on those machines. Instead they bought a low end iMac and do it at their digs. For general use the PCs are fine - to get rid of registry crud and keep them up to date with patches, they re-image them every month and put a fresh install out there.
Maybe it's not a fair comparison and a lot of the blame lies with the sysadmins but at the same time, due to the amount of malware for Windows, they couldn't just leave the machines completely open.
> For a lab of word processing/basic app machines, like
>99% of the k-12 computers are
Stop.
You are assuming word processing/basic app machines, this is not necessarily a valid assumption--I've known schools that do digital video work or teach programs like Photoshop or even use programs such as Lightwave or Maya. These are *not* all that uncommon uses.
Also, on another note, macs now have Quartz Extreme and in 2005 Windows will offer "tiered" user experiences and offload the user interface to the graphics card, an integrated chipset is (likely) not going to fare as well with Longhorn.
>The monitor's a non-issue because a flat picture tube is
>only (marginally) beneficial to people who are using it day
>in and day out.
1) It is better. Whether it is worth paying for is in question, but it is better.
2) If you find another CRT, make sure the quality is good, I've seen monitors in some HS's which were so low-quality they hurt they eyes to even glance at.
>You don't need the networking features of XP pro because
>once again, you're in an environment where you just need
>to crank out texts.
XP Pro is also useful to programmers et al. Programming tools are free with the mac, they are not with the PC, so if you teach AP (or even basic) computer science you are going to need to fork over more for the PC.
You are also looking at Windows 2003 Server, which costs a hell of a lot more. MacOS X's unlimited client license is your friend.
> The iApps are similarly worthless for a great deal of the
>market we're talking about, and aren't a great added
>value.
They still present an added value that (especially with iMovie/iDVD) I can certainly see schools being willing to pick up on.
iPhoto+iTunes, which can be used to create image slide shows and set them to music, also have a good bit of classroom utility.
>So, you're still left with spending several hundred dollars
>more for a comparable emac.
Non-comparable emac, you mean. The school may not see the additional utility as being worth it, or they may, but that is their concern.
>Add to the fact that the PC's non-integrated monitor
>leads to cost savings down the road as one doesn't have
>to replace the monitor at the same time as the rest of the
>system, and the PC is clearly a better deal.
If you are going to factor this in you might as well factor in as well that the Mac is going to cost less to support.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I hate to have to ask this, but why do people call computers with Windows on them "wintels." Should macs be called MIBMS? Should linux be called lamds?
Windows has very little to do with Intel.
bananas like monkeys.
Myself, I'm 25, and when I was in grade school, the Apple II series was a computer I used a lot, and I still love Logo. I would love for kids to still learn to program in BASIC using a fun program like Logo, but now it seems that basic computer knowledge needs to be with MS Office applications instead.
Unfortunately, there is a much higher number of drones than geeks, and the drones need to learn to use whatever their future employers tell them to use. Really, it doesn't bother me as much to hear that Macs are losing ground in grade schools as much as it bothers me that crossplatform apps like OpenOffice aren't gaining ground.
As far as Macs in education, I don't forsee Macs losing any ground in higher education, where things are more specialized. Macs are becoming a very attractive platform for computer science students, since it's a UNIX environment but it's easy to use, meaning lot less lost time learning to fix things that aren't part of the class. And the Mac has never lost its appeal to graphics and video people either.
I would prefer to see a Mac in the place of every Windows machine out there, but that won't happen unless that MS monopoly gets broken up. Right now, it's more important that open source applications succeed. If OpenOffice was the standard, there wouldn't be a such push to go to MS Windows.
Using the Mac as an example, we should see that the "desktop experience" isn't going to win the mass market share. Using Linux as an example, we should see that "security and reliability" aren't going to win it either. Right now, if we want a good OS to beat the giant, we should focus on the apps before the OS.
The premise of the article is ridiculous. The entire premise of people needing to learn the programs the "industry" uses is ridiculous. If you work somewhere you have to learn the software your job requires, not infrequently do businesses use software you've never seen before working there.
I had to go downtown to the Hall of Justice one afternoon to pick up some paperwork. Waiting for the clerk to find the file I needed I was looking around the office. On the clerks desk I noticed an X terminal. Some sort of database search program was open on the screen. When the clerk came back I asked her about it and she just knew the box was a "terminal" and it ran her database software. Way back when my city signed a contract with Sun for a bunch of mainframes so I'm betting the terminal was probably hooked up to a Sun mainframe.
That clerk was using a Unix system and X11. It is entirely likely at home she had a PC with Windows running on it. She was a bit older than me so it is even more likely she had never seen a computer in school. She had never used a computer before and was using SunOS daily. Did she know anything about it? Judging from the way she looked at me when I questioned her she didn't seem to know much if anything about the terminal or the mainframe driving it. She was using the terminal because she was trained to click the right buttons on the database app and type the right things in the right spots. Anyone who isn't a complete moron could be taught the same thing.
At a publisher I worked for the pre-press office consisted of about twenty eight Macs. They were all running a program specifically written to layout and work with advertisements. Being as the program has little use outside of pre-press departments dealing with advertisement composing even the most advanced users in the office did't have it at home. I'd be really suprised if any school had ever taught that application specifically.
Several of the people in the office had PCs at homes. All of the advanced (well paid) artists had Macs at home with most of the software in the office - Photoshop, Illustrator, XPress. My friend had a PC at home with those apps on it. At work he used a G4 PowerMac. Some of the people there while very nice people were computer dummies. They were however still able to use a rather purpose specific graphic design application, a custom written database system, and a Wyse terminal in the corner for order processing.
The idea that people can't figure out how to use a PC because they were taught on Macs in school is simply absurd. If you understand basic computing concepts like clicking bottons on a mouse and typing things on a keyboard you can be trained to use just about anything. Thinking you're somehow going to train third graders useful or even applicable computer skills is an obscenely myopic idea. It would be at least ten years before a third grader ever really needed to use a computer in a professional capacity.
Ten years ago DOS was all the rage and networks were voodoo. Teaching a third grader how to do everything in DOS would not be much help to them in today's job market. The Excel XP tips, tricks, and shortcuts will be equally useless in another ten years. What is important is teaching people the concepts of using computers. With the knowlege of concepts anybody can pick up the specifics pretty quickly.
The pre-press workers and clerk I mentioned had been trained to use systems they were entirely unfamiliar with. They understood enough however to know what a keyboard and mouse were for. They were able to grasp the concept that clicking on-screen widgets would cause the program to do things. People who could not so much shut down there computers without help were able to lay out very nice looking advertisements. It is a shame people want public schools to become vocational daycare for minors.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I strongly suspect you are a troll, but here goes.
First: Touch typing is a critical skill in most of today's society.
Second: Last I heard Dijkstra's _grad_ students took a minimum of 6-7 years to graduate with their Ph.Ds.
Second (a): If you are gong to learn Computer Science, a little time working without a language or a computer can be very useful. If you are going to be an Chemist or an Engineer, but need a little programming, it is probably best if you learn it on a computer a little more rapidly (albeit it should be a language like Python, not C++, but that's another matter).
Third: Office Apps, such as the ability to use word or excel, or put together a presentation in powerpoint, are exceedingly important when you get to college.
Fourth: There is a broader skill set requirement in many fields, and programs that are required to use them. It is becomming increasingly common to cover things like Photoshop in school--I consider this a good trend.
Fifth: Comp Sci AP. You generally get one semester/year to teach this, better make sure you do it well.
Sixth: There are now programs to help teachers teach their classes more effectively. One program lets students self-pace in mathematics, making them much more effective, and it allows one teacher to teach more students and to teach them all more effectively than he/she could before (seriously, I've seen the results out of these programs and the student's comments as well).
Seventh: "Hasn't been shown to improve learning" is incorrect--I've spoken to many teachers who have found it a useful aid in teaching basic english (one teacher used a dictionary with a built in vocalizer to help students with definitions and pronunciations of different words--that way she needed less involvement).
Eighth: Most people are basically comptuer illititerate. With the number of jobs/COLLEGES that prefer basic computer literacy, it is a *good thing* to cover this in HS (or before).
Ninth: LD students. I am twice-exceptional and have dysgraphia. Through being an accomplished touch typist, I can overcome this and take lecture notes faster and more completely than most people can write them out.
Tenth: Handwritten assignments vs. Typewritten assignments. I have never seen a college professor accept a handwritten paper. Most college applications I looked at even specified typewritten assignments, and this was some years ago.
I can go on, and on, and on if you would prefer....
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I think we have this the wrong way round. Surely we should be teaching children how to use a computer and not how to use Microsoft Whatever (TM).
It'll be great for them in 10 years when some other company or consortium is producing the dominant operating system and all those hours of IT classes will be for absolutely nothing.
I don't know what they're teaching kids these days, but a word processor is a word processor and a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet no matter what it says on the box or what operating system it uses. Shouldn't they be teaching people to look beyond the Microsoft Excel toolbar and realise that when it boils down to it, practically all these programs do the same thing? Sure perhaps OpenOffice.org doesn't do pivot tables like Microsoft Excel does them. But I have yet to see a school that teaches kids how to do pivot tables.
Teaching them exclusively on one platform leads to the possibility of giving them a false sense of intuitiveness. Just because a you can't find C:\ or the Start Menu doesn't mean a platform is harder to use - unfortunately this is what many people seem to believe these days.
If taught right, you should be able to pick up the basics of pretty much any program or operating system in about an hour.
Wintel is short for "Windows running on Intel."
The unofficial
Any Mac under 2 years old with 256MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS X. And any native G3 or G4 with a CD-ROM and 192MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS 9. (And I'm talking Virtual PC 6, of course - latest and greatest.)
That means the schools can have their "single platform" in terms of hardware support -- yet also have diversity. OS X? Check -- and of course, you can run Office:X on it, if you want your students to learn to be mice, er, MOUSes. OS 9? Just start Classic. DOS? It's in Virtual PC. Any Windows version you like? Virtual PC. Linux? Probably Virtual PC - or if you just want to run apps, a lot of them are available through Fink. X Window apps? X11's already available for Jaguar, and I've heard it'll be built into Panther.
Schools aren't the only places that want a single platform. Scientific users have glommed onto OS X Macs because they can run "UNIX apps," Mac stuff and "Windows apps" on a single machine. It frees up desk space, and while a Mac may not be cheaper than a Windows PC, it's most certainly cheaper than a Mac plus a Windows PC plus a UNIX or Linux box.
Yeah, it'll get a little slow if they try to run it all at once on a G3, but oh well, don't do that, then. Unless you're going to do a screen capture of it. :)
For the vast majority of systems, it is, though. On those systems that the extra video card is needed, throw it in. To get to the emac's level of video display wouldn't be more than $50-$60.
Or, it'll be just like windows XP, where you can turn off the new GUI eye candy and use the traditional UI with no problem.
Depends on the needs. Most labs could do just fine with a good 15" monitor -- the emac's 17" would be overkill. If we're talking about a homogeneous computer lab, than chances are, you can easily go cheaper, especially when buying in bulk.
Ever hear of cygwin or mingw? They're free too, ya know. And they run under XP Home.
Or you run a Linux server, and admin it through a tool such as webmin and save yourself some money on a server. Unlimited clients there, too.
Depends on the IT department. I'd be willing to wager that a good IT policy, and proactive maintenance steps could bring PC and mac support costs to near equity.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I consult for a couple of schools. The inertia built up by Apple is much more difficult to overcome than this quarter's--or even the next three quarters's--sales figures indicate. There is an enormous investment in software, hardware, expertise, money and time in establishing and maintaining a school computer.
One of the schools I work with just installed a 24-station publishing lab. Do you think Dell pulled off a coup and supplied the machines? Do you think Apple delivered a pallet of iMacs? No. The vice-principal in charge of technology bought two dozen Macintosh LC II's, upgraded the motherboards, memory and hard drives, equipped them all with Ethernet cards, and started teaching for less than $200 a seat with site-licensed software. I was brought in to deal with a little SCSI voodoo. I couldn't argue with the VP's logic or implementation. More bang for the buck (and the only machines affected by Blaster were the mission-critical IIS servers running Windows 2000.
The article is based on anecdotal experiences with a few schools. There is a more vast, more stable "If It Ain't Broke, Dont Fix It" constituency for Macintosh out there than a few recent quarters of sales can affect. The LC II was introduced in 1992. The ones I installed will be in service for at least two more years and possibly longer. As I write this on the fifth anniversary of the iMac, I know of two of the original Bondi Blue models that are running Mac OS X in private homes because of their stability and freedom from viruses, worms and trojans. I just retired a customer's upgraded Macintosh 7500 (equipped with a 400 MHz G4, chock full of memory and with a state-of-the-art graphics card). That machine was released eight years ago.
The tide may be turning the PC's way, but it has a long way to go before it inundates Apple in schools.
scientific users are stampeding to openMosix/Linux, not macs. Three computers? Try the power of all idle computers available to your terminal at all times. And offloading loads to in use computers with a lower load.
The only users who may be "glommed" onto macs due to OSX are those that are already mac biased.
I know one scientific company switching to openMosix/Linux. I know another talking about it, and they don't know much about computers. I've heard scientific companies talking about oM/L, contracting companies, abatement companies, consulting companies. And for non-openMosix Linux, inspection companies and others. And when I let them know about the capabilities of openMosix on Linux, they are instantly interested and want to know more.
Out of all these companies, the only ones using macs are those that need them for graphic work, which are just a couple that I can think of now.
Cost?
I haven't checked prices on G4, G5, Gwhatever, and have no interest in doing so. But virtually all of the companies mentioned above are using existing computers, in the pentium I, and pentium II range.
Any of the companies above that are looking for more powerful computers are steered to the $200-$250 range TigerDirect/Walmart Linux boxes, with insider pricing on a local affiliated company for a few of the companies. There haven't been any problems in over a year of use on some of the boxes, and they are overkill for the tasks they are being used for. openMosix is a big reason why.
Except for mac compatibility, gnu/linux does everything you mentioned above, even dos emulation. And guess what? I don't see any of the major studios contributing mac code. I do see them, as have others seen them, contributing code to gimp, filmGimp/cinepaint, and other video applications. And just as Industrial Light and Magic has moved to linux (not mac), and just as their developers are moving off unix (and some macs for some video creation/editing) and on to linux.
So, who again, are these people that are going to mac? Oh, yeah, somewhere less than the 100% of older mac users (OS9 and earlier).
Cringley always seemed half-baked to me from some of his articles (like the one where you buy out an alarm company and transform it into a dsl company by selling dsl over all those dry pairs), but the article on macs shows that he is a real idiot. Or just an overzealous mac fan.
Sound familiar?
For the same reason that PC's are called IBM-compatibles...
No, you don't have to use Intel chips to run Windows, but Windows only runs on the x86 architecture - as defined by Intel.
And there are still many people / businesses that refuse to use anything other than Intel (when running Windows), because of that very fact.
(if you aren't running Windows, then it isn't a Wintel!)
Remeber "Apple ][ Forever"?
This was the advertising slogan Apple used to boost flagging sales 'back in the day'. So, many a teacher lobbied the school district to keep buying Apple ]['s. These educators lost face.
How about the Newton eMate? It was sold to schools as a way to put low cost, hard to break, uniform computers in the schools. Many a teacher lobbied to make it part of the school district plans. Not only did these teachers loose face over the cancellation, but Apple knew this, and was willing to lie to educators. The Newton was axed on Feb 27th, but during the March national educators convention, Apple staffers gave a speech refering to the Newton as "A very important part of their product line."
Then you have Micheal Spindler (Short time CEO after Scully) who said "We are committed to enhancing shareholder value." This was the formal announcement of the continuation of the price premium on Macs - gouging of the customer.
The memory of being shafted by Apple is long in education. Why would you buy a product form a company with a history of shafting its customers?
Jobs himself does not understand the education market. His NeXT computer was to be sold to schools. Instead, due to the great engineering of the NeXTSTEP environment, the NeXT was popular in wall street and the NSA because of faster turn around time from idea to code, meaning quicker results, to give both orginizations competitive advantage. To further support the cluelessness of Jobs WRT the marketing of computers I will remind you of the 1986 Seybold speech where Jobs said "Publishing is a niche market for Apple and will be gone in 2 years." (Turns out that Education didn't move to the mac in droves, and that publishing is what kept Apple afloat.)
Way to go! You might want to take a look at the Skolelinux project too.
"For the vast majority of systems, it is, though. On those systems that the extra video card is needed, throw it in. To get to the emac's level of video display wouldn't be more than $50-$60. "
Not if I'm pricing video cards correctly...
"Or, it'll be just like windows XP, where you can turn off the new GUI eye candy and use the traditional UI with no problem. "
We aren't talking eye candy or even user experience, we are talking about whether it will even be able to support longhorn at a reasonable speed.
"Depends on the needs. Most labs could do just fine with a good 15" monitor"
This is where I roll my eyes.
You are undercutting to an almost desperate degree--anything to get a cheaper deal and saying "they can just upgrade for those handful of systems that need it".
This isn't normally how systems are purchased and, what's more, undercutting and saying "they don't need that" is not a good policy overall. I remember one high school in the area doing that in 1996--they ended up with computers that were incapable of running Windows 95. There is a limit to how far you can do that and cuts like "they don't need 17" monitors" may or may not be valid depending on the circumstances.
"Ever hear of cygwin or mingw? They're free too, ya know. And they run under XP Home. "
Yes, I know quite a few people who use them. They do not compare--even slightly--to tools like ProjectBuilder, OpenGL Shader Builder, MallocDebug, and MONster; having a unix shell with the full tools in the right locations; etc.
In the end, that MacOS X is a Unix operating system wins this.
"Or you run a Linux server, and admin it through a tool such as webmin and save yourself some money on a server. Unlimited clients there, too. "
Again, you are undercutting. If you wanted to spend your admin's time setting up a linux server, by all means. You could spend that same time on a MacOS X box.
Also, have you ever used MacOS X server? You are paying for the admin tools--things that let you configure ldap servers, or having a top-of-the-line workgroup manager.
"Depends on the IT department. I'd be willing to wager that a good IT policy, and proactive maintenance steps could bring PC and mac support costs to near equity."
Point to one study which has shown that to be the case. I've seen numerous ones which indicate the opposite. You go ahead and wager--your suppositions are irrelevant unless you can back them up.
Also, we are talking about schools, a "good IT policy" and "high school" are generally an oxymoron.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I just spoke with an admin who oversees a public school system network that runs a bunch of Windows machines. He says that despite being up to date on all the patches and having good security procedures, he feels like the network could just crumble and go down at any time.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
On one platform, you can:
Thorough study of Mac OS X can land a student a $100k+ job. Thorough study of Microsoft platforms gets a student an MCSE and $8.50/hr.
School administrators, do not cripple your students with Microsoft products.
That's what micrso~1's stance is. And it's working in Victoria, Australia, at least, where I teach. Almost all schools here run PC's with windows, simply because they're cheaper. Low end computer + free software. They don't really thing TCO or ease of use, it seems.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
Virus-vulnerable monoculture network!". "It's really quite simple you see, there is no other way to guarantee that the virus of the week, coded by some filipino script kiddy, can shutdown every single computer on our network" says J.D. Umbass, superintendent of Jefferson County School System, Pennsylvania. "Besides, if kids every growing up having an alternative perspective on computer technology, they may accidentally understand it." "And it can't be overstated, just how much we save yearly, by being able to hire idiots that only know how to say 'Reboot the computer and see if that fixes your problem'", J.D. Umbass.
"Most important to remember though, is that we don't really teach the children anything other than how to be the secretary or register monkeys of tomorrow, earning minimum wage, and never quite enough to own the likes of the beautiful machines in our computer lab. So what does it matter, if they only get to experience the most ill-designed OS ever concieved, that's what Microsoft is extorting every PC and POS manufacturer into using." said J.D. Umbass.
Well.
While I liked neither Turbo Pascal nor that weird cheapo-VM learn-Assembler-safely environment (or whatever the heck else it was) much, school did wean me off BASIC (which of course directly translated to "spaghetti code" at the time). With no money for books, no (public) internet and no way to access BBSes it was the only way that could have happened. That, I think, was a good thing, if somewhat frustrating because sprites and sound effects weren't on the syllabus.
These days, they probably teach Visual Basic.
That was on a "Gymnasium" (the type of German school that'll get you into uni). Now that the "other", more vocationally oriented types of school have computer classes as well, I suppose the main goal is to introduce students to the applications they'll be using to "earn" a "living". My mom's school has some sort of contract with Intel and MS that provides them with Excel, Powerpoint and Word and MS DTP and Imaging suites that are so clumsy I would rather go back to typewriters and cutting and pasting on the photocopier. So it's not like it really matters if it helps students learn anything or improves their "logic" or if they are interested in computers or programming in any way, it's about their future lives as office dwellers which is, uh, useful.
Maybe it does alleviate the "I don't understand computers" mindset, maybe it does help them obtain "basic computer skills", maybe actually more than the very narrow spectrum of bubblesort to binary tree stuff we covered and subsequently forgot about because we had no idea what it was good for, but "our" comp classes seemed to be aimed at people who really wanted to know something about computers. So we never composed a single spreadsheet and didn't use any "apps" whatsoever, besides the compiler, but anyone who took those classes probably didn't do so to learn anything "economically" useful.
Okay, so all of that was redundant, obvious and boring but I just got out of bed.
See sibling post.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I am posting this as Anonymous Coward because I work for a public higher education institution, and I have a budget that I manage.
I recently needed a couple of workstations for my office area. I went to the network administrator to ask for price quotes. He of course pulls quotes from a PC manufacturer. He only buys one brand of PCs for desktops, another brand of PCs for laptops for the school.
Here's what he quoted me:
2.4 GHz P4
512MB RAM
40GB HD
CD-ROM
17" Standard CRT Monitor
Price (with loyal customer discount because our institution buys so many machines from them): $1050
Now, I decided to do a price comparison on a similar equipped Mac. Here's what I was quoted from Apple:
emac, 800Mhz G4
512MB RAM (remember the prices of RAM from Apple?)
40GB HD
CD-ROM
17" Flat CRT Monitor
3-year AppleCare warranty
Price: $953.00
Despite the inflated prices Apple charges for RAM upgrades, a comparably equipped Mac was about $100 less than the PC. When you start looking at PCs with CD or DVD burners and flat-panel displays, the iMacs in comparison are an even better value at the education pricing. The 800Mhz processor? These systems would be primarily used for wordprocessing and spreadsheets, so I would think the 800Mhz processor would be adequate. Our desks are small, so the eMac's space saving design would work well in our environment. Our campus has the sitewide Microsoft licensing that INCLUDES Office for Mac OS X, so no additional charges for that. Not to mention that with the Mac I would have had the capability of creating PDF files built-in without having to go out and purchase additional software or worry with licensing issues with some of the freeware/shareware equivilants on the PC side.
To make a long story short, I COULD have got the Macs and saved the state some money and still had very capable machines for the job I was doing for years to come. But I had no choice but to go with the PCs because I WASN'T GIVEN A CHOICE. The network administrator has final say on all computer purchases. Be damned about the needs of the folks who need to do the work or the students. Need to create PDF files? "Well, we can purchase a license of Acrobat..." More of the state's money being spent that wasn't necessary. The money could have been spent on something else that was needed but will have to be put off.
Oh, and one more thing. You've gotta watch the educational price quotes from the PC manufacturers. I see their education material all the time, and you can find out some of it on their websites. They inflate the retail value of the equipment so they can say the education price is $500 lower. And despite their "lower education price", often times what they offer is last year's technology at prices that's higher that what you can purchase today's technology through the standard consumer channels. Apple's education discounts may not look great, but their pricing scheme for education is straightforward with no smoke and mirrors.
Mod this down if you want, but if you don't believe it, go do a little research and find out.
End of rant.
#1 IT is not a high priority in schools.
#2 The amount of work performed supporting dual networks is usually less because when worms like slammer, etc hit you only have to patch 1/2 the computers instead of all. Checking for the minute by minute patches comming out of MS makes administrating a Windows network exponentially more difficult than a Mac network or a partial Mac/Windows network.
I am the sysadmin for my small company (in addition to being a software engineer and dba) and we run Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris boxes. Guess which ones I have to check daily? Guess which ones have 180+ days of up time? Guess which ones have a better TCO.
Maybe next time you should do your research. Or learn to be a better admin.
In some ways, Apple sucks. If schools were to lose just one platform, it should be Microsoft. If schools were to switch to a monoculture, it should be a Linux distribution (for the felxibility that gives). However, I firmly believe that schools should teach as many systems as practical for the important lessons to be learned therein, including the Greatest PERL Lesson: TMTOWTDI. (-: Note that I say this as a near-non-PERL-programmer :-).
The Greatest PERL Lesson is a more important thing to know (not just hear occasionally) than most if not all of the entire high-school courses I can remember.
Schools really should be teaching principles, not single-obsolete-system recipes. That way when the systems they were taught on are obsolete, the students aren't left high and dry, a herd of one-trick ponies - and The Greatest PERL Lesson will continue to serve them well in area's they not yet faced, perhaps in areas that don't yet exist. The "How to produce greeting cards in MS-Publisher 101" course won't even make a dent in that.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Like, QED, man. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Things to remember to bring today:
- Brain.
Oh, well. (-:In point of fact, the Mac will avoid teaching them how to reboot their machine when it wedges, but it will show them what a nice UI actually looks like (by 2005, I'm sure MS-Windows-YQ will look the same but Apple will have moved on), and give an even more fundamental lesson: that not everything out there has a Start button (to stop it with, no less) in the bottom left corner of the screen or gets shipped by the most cashed-up company in the world. Most students won't get far past this, but for those that do the variety of lessons beyond will be invaluable.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm in WA, if that's too far off, I'll find somewhere closer to your school that will take those babies and use them! 0409655359
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
... they need some new books.
It amazes me that educated people get all up in arms about the computers in their kids schools. These are tools people!
Reliance on computers in the classroom is turning academic programs into vocational ones. Mac? Windows? Linux? Who cares! Teach kids concepts not tasks.
Some kids are learning how to fix carburators over in auto shop (for those schools where these things still exist) while other kids are in physics class learning how the internal combustion engine works. The kids in auto shop can apply that knowledge, pretty much just to fixing carberators.
Similarly if we teach kids to accomplish specific tasks on specific hardware on specific software, that's pretty much all they'll be able to do with it.
I've worked with some people who received serveral Cisco certifications without ever having touched a simulator much less a router. They had a far better conceptual understanding of what was going on and learned new skills and tasks very quickly as a result.
School should be about learning how to learn. I know that this is increasingly no longer the case, but if it your goal is learning, rather than training, non-education market-share is completely irrelevant.
The purpose of having computers in the classroom is not to teach kids how to use computers, but instead to use computers to teach kids how to do all kinds of other things. I think it will be a sad day when the purpose of school is to prepare kids for clerical jobs.
If you stick a young child in front of a PC, they're lost. If an older child wants to do anything remotely advanced on a PC, they're thwarted and frustrated. Half the time will be spent learning to use Windows, rather than learning things like reading.
And if we do want to prepare children for the real world, using Windows they'll learn nothing about computer concepts, because everything is hidden from the user. If a kid uses some Unix variant - Linux or OSX - they're going to be a lot more prepared for doing real computing work than if they grew up using Windows.
The problem with IT admins, in my opinion, and I will probably be flamed for this, is that they're IT admins. They're not computer scientists, they're not engineers, they probably didn't go to University. As such, they don't really know much about computing in general, instead usually knowing only how to administer a certain OS, and maybe if they're lucky, a couple of OSes. Obviously someone who only knows how to use PCs is not going to go out and buy a pile of Linux or Mac boxes.
One thing I have noticed over the past number of years in forums and in chats is that very many (by no means all, but very many) school age people with English as a first language simply can't spell. I suppose I could rant on about the fact that my schooling, without computers at all, was better and that students actually learned skills that encouraged thinking, such as being able to do simple calculations on paper or in one's head, but I won't because I don't really know the answer. I do see my own ability to spell has receeded in recent years, and my ability to do quick, off the cuff calculations has dwindled but that might as well be age as well as heavy computer use.
Most if not all students these days write their essays on computers and having to write everything on paper would take far too much time. The world has changed and life without computers would be all but impossible these days, irrespective or whether they are Macs or PCs. It definitely is true that most businesses use Windows and knowledge of Office is worthwhile, but will this be true in 10 or 15 years time? There is a good chance that much of the developing world and a good portion of the developed world will be using Linux by then, which will always be cheaper than Windows, and definitely will have a much larger share of business life by then. And OSX, as a Unix like platform, is better shaped to fit in there than Windows, which hasn't had any good press for a long time.
Note that you can do Beowulfy tricks with OS X just as easily as with Linux - well, as with disk-bound Linux (nothing beats ClusterKnoppix for convenience). It just costs more to do so (like, nearly double), and sadly the schools figure that if they're going to change, it will be to one system only: and the almighty buck rules. However, I figure that a desktop loosed from MS-Windows' clutches is a desktop freed, never mind the beauty competitions. (-: PS, it tickles my funnybone that the linked OS X page - written by an afficiondo of the stylish Mac - looks ugly and says so. :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm the sysadmin at a school that uses both Macs and PCs. We have both kinds of labs, and teachers get to pick which platform they prefer. I can tell you that from an administrator point of view, the Macs are the biggest bane of my existence. Now, before parroting the "but Macs don't break" line, hear me out.
The following things are trivial on a PC and cannot be easily done on a Mac. (Most of this refers to MacOS 9, but let's compare to Windows 98 to be fair.)
1. Debugging a system failure of some kind, like a GPF. (YES, they do happen on Macs...it's called "error type 2".) It's impossible to retrieve meaningful information on a Mac.
2. Login/Logout with mapping of drives to a network share location. (this is easier in OS X, but we have old machines...not an option)
3. Installing applications remotely. In the labs, it's not such a problem; we can slam a new image down to install new apps. But on teacher PCs, I can install programs remotely with about 20 different management utilities (we use ZENworks), while nothing similar exists for the teacher Macs. (except sneakernet)
4. Replacement of basic parts. We had to have the apple store replace power supplies on two of our G3s last year at a cost of about $200 each. (parts and labor) This is a job I could have easily done if the power supply wasn't a non-standard size.
Even though they make my work more difficult, I don't hate Macs. In fact, I think OS X is wonderful, and I recommend Macs as home computers to friends regularly. But, in a network environment where you need them to play well with others, Macs fail miserably compared to PCs. Yes, yes. I know, they CAN connect to shares, they CAN do login/logout. But, on the PC, these are effortless. As for security patches and updates, I understand this is a issue for home users, or users without proper support. But for us, it's not a problem. I can easily make an update and send it out to all our PCs in an hour.
Macs are easier to maintain if you don't have anyone on your staff who knows how to manage/fix computers, it's true. But, once you have someone who can, that argument is gone because the PC allows a knowledgeable user to take care of it. The Mac may "take care of itself" more often, but when it fails to do so, there is nothing anyone can do but throw their hands up and say, "Damn that Mac!"
A command-line you can bolt on any old time. Port bash to Mac OS 8 if you dare.
Linux doen't actually need a shell (-: the cries of "stone him!" grow steadily nearer in the background :-) to work, you could run the whole box of cogs in Python or Ruby or TCL or PERL quite nicely and push all stdout/stderr into (a) logfile(s) or into a pipe to a GUI tool, no worries.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
schools going with microsoft...hmmmm this only proves that government is evil
Never underestimate the logical power of sarcasm
How much crack did you smoke before posting this? A 32MB radeon costs about $30, not $129. I don't think they even make those anymore. And let's see, I don't think a cheap eMac has a 17-inch LCD display. More like a 17-inch CRT. So, let's do the calculations with the proper figures:
Emachines PC $399.99
32MB Radeon upgrade (not sure why) $30
17" CRT $80
Total = $510, which is about $300 cheaper than the eMac. In fact, for the price of two eMacs you can 3 eMachines computers and still have money left over. Not to mention that the eMacs probably won't last very long -- when the monitor dies, the computer dies. So you would have to replace them more often. And I bet the eMachines have a faster processor than the eMac's anemic 800MHz.
The iApps are the first thing that would get deleted from the eMac. Schools neither need nor want students to be able to download MP3s, use chat, et cetera. And the video editing stuff is completely worthless since most schools don't own DV camcorders.
BTW, XP home works very well as a client. Schools usually have dedicated servers running the network. No need for xp professional.
...and shut down my computer from KDE. Does that mean KDE wins and the GNOME team can all go home now? (-: Joke, James, it was a JOKE, OK? Mr Henstridge? Please put down that reobar! What are you doing, James? Aaaaahhh...! <thud> :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It seems that Orwell was right about the principles, he just got the date wrong.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Hey, they're school administrators. (Why would you listen to a high-school guidance conselor? The man's career acumen has led him to become a high-school guidance conselor. Not a glowing recommendation.)
They don't want to have to think. And stop developping new applications too. They are still pissed off at having to teach VisiCalc (What do you mean they don't sell it anymore? Who cares anyway? Its only for school.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Dunno about you, but thinking about my public school days would make a pretty good prophylactic.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...sometimes turn up in advance of any patch for them. If all of your servers are homogeneous, they're all dead no matter how early you apply the patch. Diversity is yet another useful tool for administrators that don't suck.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I work in the fifth largest district in the US. The second largest accredited district. At the top are IBM AS400 machines keeping the data. Under that there is a mixed enviornment. The so-called network has a silly bunch of MS boxes groaning under the email load and running in circles trying to keep up with the traffic. Thank BOB for Cisco. Let me hear it!
Points:
(1) There is really no motivation to save money. Box cost is irrelevant.
(2) During the bidding, undercuts do occur to contradict this statement. (see number 6 for service contract ad ex)
(3) Most students are being taught applications because most educators are without *clue*
(4) Teaching people the right things will always be like swimming against the tide.
(5) Users can and will use anything that gets the job done.
(6) My lab was set up last week with 25 already obsolete G4 machines by a vendor who installed OS X 1.1 (Am I pissed?)
(7) I've been using OS X for two years and the official support from downtown is non-existant. Thank BOB my support people are simply wonderful and let me do what I want.
(8) The people downtown still hire Pascal programmers.
(9) School districts are 80% elementary, 15% middle, and 5% high school. Don't forget the guys at the Taj Mahal downtown. Oops, that's the county to the North. Ours live in the Crystal Tower. So how are decisions made you ask, given that distribution of personnel? School districts are as varied as any other business. Mine consists of hundreds of individual schools. Some have just a few. There is a group in North Florida that pool their IT needs. Some can and should be broken up under anti-monopoly laws. *coughnameyourfavoritecough*
Conclusion?? sadly, none. Obviously the population of the world will do what it is told to a degree. Then it will get irritated and shrug off whatever is bothering it. It is a huge mindless beast confronted by the other huge mindless beast of Education.
Enterprising companies will make money off foolish behavior. Wonderful smart and loving people will try to prepare the latest crop of geeks for eventual geekdom. They are such unruly little buggers. Should we keep them in the same classes with the rest of humanity?
Can I offend anyone else? Please email me with suggestions.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
...that I was too sarcastic. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think many people here are missing the point of computers in schoolwork these days. Back when our generation was in elementary school, the few computers the schools had were there primarily to teach kids about computers.
But times have changed, and that's no longer the focus.
Those kids in Maine didn't get an iBook each just to learn how to use an iBook. They got the laptops to use them in class, to google up facts, to write essays, to edit short video presentations.
It's not about learning to use a computer. Believe me, the 10-year-olds of today are so computer savvy that they don't need a mouse usage primer. And if they later in life encounter a system with the widgets in slightly different places, the difference is trivial enough to be completely inconsequential to them.
Marko Karppinen
Make a screen shot of the desktop then hide taskbar and delete (move) icons.
;-)
Actually this works for any gui
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
>How much crack did you smoke before posting this?
Obviously not as much as you were...
>32MB Radeon upgrade (not sure why) $30
It is a Radeon 7500 with 32 MB of RAM: we're talking between $60 and $90.
Not as much as the original poster, but 2-3 times your price.
>And let's see, I don't think a cheap eMac has a 17-inch
>LCD display. More like a 17-inch CRT.
The original poster doesn't claim that it does--he claims a flat-screen CRT. There *is* a difference, you know?
Looking at warehouse.com's prices, flat-screen 17" monitors start at around $130 and go up to $700 (and up, and up). One that supports 1280 by 960 pixels at 75Hz is also a little more pricy (about $30-50). I don't know what you were smoking wrt an $80 version.
You also *still* aren't up to parity (FireWire, et al).
"Not to mention that the eMacs probably won't last very long -- when the monitor dies, the computer dies."
You can stop trolling and post statistics any time now. I've seen a lot of people posting that the emac purchase will last longer because the monitor will outlast the machine. Which is it?
How long do emacs last in the wild? Versus emachines (which are known to burn out thanks to their power supplies)?
>And I bet the eMachines have a faster processor than the
>eMac's anemic 800MHz.
As I said, you can stop trolling any time now...
>The iApps are the first thing that would get deleted from
>the eMac.
Wrong. I can see a good deal of use in a school environment for an mp3 player (think about it) or something that generates slide shows and sets them to music (class project? leadership perhaps?)
iChat, while it has limited utility as an educational app, *would* have good potential as a way to get kids using the computers.
> And the video editing stuff is completely worthless since
>most schools don't own DV camcorders.
I know many schools that have a class which could make use of one though and it is fairly common for them to have a video camera on hand, regardless of whether it is DV. Give it time and they'll be happy to have iMove and iDVD.
>BTW, XP home works very well as a client. Schools usually
>have dedicated servers running the network. No need for
>xp professional.
Unless you have an international userbase, which in a school environment is entirely possible (albeit unlikely in HS).
As I mentioned elsewhere: many people are also going to want to use Windows 2003 Server or MacOS X Server. There the winner in price should be clear.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
My wife and I talk about this all the time, one reason we DONT have children...
Part of the problem IS federal money. There should be none... The schools must be 100% answerable to the local population, and 0% to the feds. There is a reason there is NO mention of public schools in the constitution, it should be a local matter, where you can hold them accountable, and choke the living shit out someone when necessary, such as your well stated comment implies you verbally did.
You are exactly the sorts of people who SHOULD be having children! And you know the answer to your dilemma?
HOME SCHOOLING!!!!!
It's the great American tradition: George Washington did it. Abe Lincoln did it. Thomas Edison did it. Who needs some damned government bureaucracy to shove a bunch of propaganda down our throats? For that matter, who needs a God-damned government in the first damned place?
Have children! They're the greatest thing that God ever invented; believe it or not, they're even more fun than making them was in the first place.
HAVING KIDS + HOME SCHOOLING THEM = THE MOST FUN YOU'LL EVER HAVE IN YOUR LIFE
Guaran-damn-teed. Cross my heart and hope to die.
Let's prepare our kids for the diverse internet, rather than the monocultural intranet. They will grow up in a world of diversity where communication is enabled by language, document and data standards rather than hardware/OS standards.
The internet was not created by standardization to proprietary products. Microsoft and Apple were both slow to the party because of their common dream of product lock-in, which they both continue to pursue in defiance of the principle of the internet.
Let's inform our educational administrators that their jobs will depend on preparing our kids for the real world; not some dream world in which their investment portfolios expand without limit.
ThosEM
How about "Haddad Claims 'Apple's School Days are Numbered'" It's not like the title line was running out of pixels.
At least then we'd know it's an opinion piece not a fait accompli.
We'd also factor in Haddad's cred.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Justify that presumption, I dare you!
Will Microsoft be in business when by 13yod hits the workforce in 5 years? Probably. But how about my 4yos, in 14 years? Maybe, maybe not - but the office tools will be completely different. His older sister won't have hit 30 yet, and the stuff she was taught in school will already be totally obselete.
Teaching kids to use a single toolset (and this applies outside the computing arena too) by rote is stupid, stupid, stupid. Teach them how to find out by themselves for themselves, exemplify it by teaching them with at least three different toolsets.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Or do the whole lot with Linux and save about USD$100 off each system - plus the per-seat licences and cost of Minesweeper Experts mentioned above if you're not taking the Mac route.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...try Vax school.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Damn, I wish I could save up my mod points for special occasions!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Nothing against apple's products, i even own a couple of them.
But they are in trouble.. Between poor marketing decisions by Jobs, and the ever present pressure of Microsoft, i dont think there will be an Apple in 10 years.
It will be sad to see it, as they DO actually invent things.. not just copy stuff and call it 'innovation'.
And i hope im wrong, and they continue to hang on to that tiny share of market they have left and dont totally implode...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Did you read the article? It was clear that this was a top-down action by superintendents. They have hired a bunch of dumbasses called "info-tech manager" based on their own ignorant demand for a "single platform" regardless of price or performance. They are ignoring the teacher's needs, teacher demands, studdies that say that PCs are more expensive and everyone's advice but MicroSoft's. Nuts.
If they [Apple] focus on the informed consumers and professionals, they'll survive and flourish.
That's what they did, but the purchasing decisions have been moved up the chain into know nothing land. That's what's responsible for the shift.
It's by no means permanent and this article has a load of Windoze reality distortion in it. The shift is, like you say, a hang over from Apple's dark days under the Pepsi Lord. It was then that public schools started purchasing computers like never before, and that's mostly responsible for the "loss is share". The pool has been diluted with computers that no one really needed in the first place. Wintel PCs only last about 3 years before M$ declares them obsolete. To say that the game is over is to buy into the usual M$ line, "we have already won." The high cost of running these dinky PCs that no one asked for will embarass the dummies at the top and they will soon be ousted. Like other places, they will be the first to go in budget cuts. Bullshit, like M$ PCs really does not last.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
in jr/highschool, my home computer was a Commodore Vic20/C64. in school we only used Apple IIc's. I was one of the very few who could do any "homework" for the computer class because of the fact the Commodores were BASIC. the others in class either didnt have a home computer or they were Wintel/DOS machines(yes, they had QBasic, but c'mon, that wasnt real BASIC!
:(
get to college in fall 90, and the instructor and most students waere so happy that they had a system running a GUI(Windows) as it was brand new(a horrible kludge compared to even GEOS!). he couldnt understand that I knew so much about computers...he thought they were one of the few to ever have a GUI. he didnt grasp the fact that both Commodore and Apple had GUIs YEARS before Windows.
when I explained this to him, he questioned the ability to cross platforms...he couldnt grasp that all GUIS were the same...point/click, drag/drop.
in his mind it was Windows only/allways, and if you didnt use Windows you would never succeed in the "world".
needlesss to say I was bored silly for my entire time in college with exception to the COBOL/PASCAL classes...wish I had taken those classes more to heart
nowadays at work, all I ever see is companies miserable with Windows and looking for alternatives to ease their headaches.
they dont care if they end up with a mixed network because they know the systems will integrate regardless.
in my experience, the more you know about different platforms, the farther you will go. getting stuck in a rut is the quickest way to becoming "dumb".
the history of the world
I work in a very prosperous district that 3 years ago the Tech-Coordinator took a look at costs, and decreed no more mac purchases by the district or schools, because the price of a mac vs. pc was disparate. This does not stop the teachers from purchasing them through grants. The high school has a graphic arts teacher that teaches on macs, we just moved a lab of 25 G4's of varying processors and ram to 0S X. While it took a while and we have had to overcome some minor yet time-consuming issues she will have the lab the way she wants it. Because as we all know, you can only do graphics on a mac
Could she teach the same thing on PCs? Yes
Would it cost less? Yes
Would the children be confused/bored? Yes.
Could she get more/faster computers if she bought pcs with her grant money? Yes.
Will she change? No
Same goes for the art teacher and the journalism teacher.
Fact is though the lab will be nice and secure and not have any virii to worry about, with a linux router I can block the outbound traffic and the apps are kept to what they "need" to use for class. This is not because of OS X though, it is because at it's base if FreeBSD, let us not forget that...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
As a school library information specialist, I'm working in the trenches of this issue, and I have three observations:
1.) When I started in this position, I laughed at all the Macs we had in our school (we had 3-1 mac to pc ratio). I called the Macs "toy computers". I'd only ever used Wintel machines, and was basically uncomfortable with the idea of having to fix them. I soon learned, however, that they required less fixing than the x86 machines, which allowed me to focus on my real job-- teaching students. It's the rare school that has in-house dedicated tech support. Time spent fixing PC's is time not spent teaching by librarians and computer lab instructors.
2.) Because of budget cuts (and, to be frank, a financial scandal in the district tech department), we've been unable to upgrade more than a handful of machines in the last six years. That means our students are still using LC575s and PowerMac 5400s. These are slow machines that have a hard time running today's software and browsing today's internet-- but they're still running. We don't have even a single Wintel machine left from that era. They've all died.
3.) Our principal has recently gotten a new black Dell-- and he's convinced it's better than any Apple machine. Why? Because it's so much faster than our LC575s and 5400s! Our teachers say the same thing-- they have newish Dells at home, and so they know that PCs are faster than Macs. The fact that they're comparing 7 year old Macs with new Dells doesn't seem to have occured to them! None of them have ever used a modern Mac-- we have two bondi blue iMacs, and everyone refers to them as "the new macs."
Apple makes good computers. Too good. Our legacy Macs are still running, and so are unfairly being compared against modern Dells. This is feeding the push to go all Wintel in our district.
you love your child, you want the best for him or her (let's say her) and you're still willing to hand her off to some random stranger for the entirety of her education?
It's well known that the public school system is flawed. The funny thing is that parents are increasingly detaching themselves from the education of their children. This exposes more flaws in public education and makes it appear that the system is failing. Parents must be involved for the system to work.
I'm sure there are mitigating circumstances (like money/work issues), but it seems entirely irresponsible to say that public school teachers are responsible for mental laziness. Whatever the teacher says, the word and example of the parents speaks far more loudly to a young child.
-tom
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Kids should know what computing is, what a word processor is, filesystems, programs, operating systems, interfaces, what makes your average computer, how to recognize one and perhaps its type, etc...
If they see only one computer, then they make many assumptions that will hurt them later on.
These things only become evident when more than one platform is used.
That platform could be a PC running more than one OS, so this does not exactly support Apple however.
Every kid should be equipped to understand on a basic level what computing means, not just what a particular computer happens to do. We have had these machines in our culture long enough for these bits of information to become part of the body of common knowledge. If these things do not happen during K-12 then something very clearly is wrong with the teaching.
Unless, we all want to accept the fact that Redmond Washington is the authority on computing...
I for one don't. I also don't want my kids to either.
Blogging because I can...
As a technology coordinator in a 2,200 student school district, I feel that articles like this are important as I plan out the future. We have 700 workstations, 94% of them are Macintosh. K-5 run OS 9, 6-12 are now running OS X.
Some of the reasons we stay with the Mac:
Ease of administration: Mac OS X Server and Macintosh Manager/Workgroup Manager coupled with Apple Remote Desktop makes managing this setup possible by one person. Imaging of machines is taken care of by Apple Software Restore.
Price: A $723 eMac ($699 base + $24 for an additional 128MB of RAM). No additional license costs for: server client licenses, imaging software, and virus protection. For $500 I get an unlimited OS X server license.
Years of Service: We can usually get 6-7 years out of a Mac. The 5400s in service all have at least 32MB of RAM and G3 upgrade cards.
For our PC lab I made the decision to move to K12LTSP. These machines were aging PII with 32MB of RAM. a $2,500 dual xeon machine brought this lab back to life for around $100 a machine. I use IceWM as the window manager and installed a XP theme. They run OpenOffice.org. I had one student ask if it was Linux, the rest just blindly use it. :-)
Most of the administrative office uses Windows 2000.
The best tool for the job.
What, me worry?
I have been helping a rural school in Colorado (~1000 students for a K-12). Out here, we are losing are tax base and probably looking at another couple of bad years (Colorado is beaten only by california as having the worse governor).
I have been helping the school convert over to Linux in the server space. So far, we have only converted a few items, but they are saving 10K / year. One of the things that they found very attractive was the ability of the Linux server to keep running. The MS and Novell kept requireing attention. The Linux ran flawless.They are now in the process of moving over to Linux for the entire server space.
I am now in the process of showing them diskless Linux combined with a large amount of OSS software. They are now exploring the idea of moving to linux on the desktop.
The easiest way to sell it:Do you wish to spend the money on your teachers and students or send it to MS?
You would be surprised how practical rural communities can be.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I was one of those paper MCSEs (20 years in IT but no hands on NT) who was hired by my private college to do all their Mac support.
From the support side it is cheaper to use Macs. I maintain 400 Macs and I'm rarely needed for problems. My Windows counterpart maintains about 90 PCs and is constantly flooded with work. From the tech support side its obvious that Macs are cheaper than PCs
Integration? I'm not sure on that aspect. Our IT department went to a proprietary Mirapoint LDAP solution. The Macs play with LDAP beautiful, but it's been a headache to get the Win2K server's users to authenticate correctly with Mirapoint and thus get their shares mapped on the Mac RAID.
So the Apple engineer can't get decent answers from Mirapoint and is now trying to "hack" SAMBA to make up for Mirapoint's inadequate tech support and knowledge base.
I brought up using OSX's LDAP, but no! Got to have that Mirapoint. Oh hell, I give up. Someone get me a beer!
I'm a University professor in the U.S. who is a longtime Mac user. Mac OS X has made life really great in my lab. We do research that tends to be graphics-oriented, and much of the scientific software that used to require overpriced SGI boxes (and licenses) to run, we now run either on Macs or Linux workstations. The nice part is that for the students in the lab, OS X and Linux look exactly the same, so figuring out one makes it simple to switch to the other.
Obviously, the Mac GUI is much better than KDE or Gnome, so most people want the Mac, and on things like our Beowulf cluster we use Linux (I'm not paying for 32 copies of Mac OS X). I don't think I'm alone. I've talked to other colleagues who are moving to Macs for these same reasons: easy integration of OS X and Linux.
I took a tour of campus last week as part of an orientation group. The university had just purchased hundreds of iMacs! There are G4's in almost all of the graphics labs, or anywhere that graphics demands are high.
This high school may be preparing kids better for "industry" with MS products, but it doesn't seem to me they're preparing them well for college, given the trend I see.
This isn't a problem with computers: the fault lies entirely with the American educational system, and specifically with radical minority-centric pressure groups from the left.
The past 30 years or so have been a unique time for education. Over this period, the focus of teaching in schools has not been actual facts or skills. Pressure groups from the left have modified the curriculum in many ways to make the focus of education "multiculturalism" and "critical thinking" rather than the teaching of facts and skills. There are many reasons for this; however, some are subversive and rather reminiscient of Vonnegut. I'm sure you've read the story of Harrison Bergeron in early high school. This is much like what our educational system has become. In catering to minority students in underfunded urban environments, the schooling system has cut everyone's education down to their level, because overtly stating that impoverished children are, by definition, inferior academically, is "elitist," in addition to the obviously inherent racism.
You need look no further than the selections outlined in most districts' literature curriculums to understand the depth of this issue. Whereas previously, many classical English writers would be used to populate the curriculum. A strong sampling of English writers have been dismissed by the left as "Eurocentric," and in modern times the typical literature curriculum consists nearly fifty percent or more of works by minority authors such as Maya Angelou, and most of these will have a strongly either anti-European or pro-diversity message. This is all good and well, but literature is literature, right? Guess what: this multiculturalism has found its way into every facet of American education. Some math textbooks will detail African American achievements for no reason. And history textbooks will often completely distort the truth in favor of minorities, choosing to omit facts that do not lean in their agenda's favor; how many people do you know who are fully aware that Africa actively engaged in a slave trade with the Middle East before those dastardly Europeans showed up? But knowledge is no longer a requirement either for history. Standardized tests, like the New York State Regents Examinations, rely upon "document-based questions" and graphs in which only several pieces of outside information even need to be presented (I believe 2 pieces of outside information is required for a 5/5 score). This is to stress "critical thinking" and knowledge is a bias. Harrison Bergeron indeed.
Additionally, content censorship from the left prevents exposure to any unclean ideals. Birthday cake cannot be eaten in a story about a party because cake is not nutritious. Witches cannot be mentioned because they may offend children with Christian sensibilities. Would children rather read about witches and birthday parties and cake, or ocean currents and the migration paths of sea turtles? Sensitivity and bias committees have ruined the American educational system, and when our children are too dumb to vote, there will be no turning back. The truth is that school has now become so banal, boring, and focusless that there really is no wondering why students are caring less and less.
Computers are not the problem. People are.
Go take a hard look at your school budget sometime, if they even will let you see it. When you are finished with that, ask yourself why the ratio of administrators to students is as high as it is.
Take a hard look at what they all do and you will begin to wonder why so many of them are required.
In my district, the teachers ask for bulk paper as part of the school supply list, yet the administration exists in high numbers and in offices that are as good or better than found in many corporations.
In Oregon, we have a big bit of waste called CIM / CAM. This is the state mandated standardized testing program. Not only do they spend a lot of money on custom out of state testing companies to develop their tests, they place such a high emphasis on the scores that teachers are sharply limited in what they teach.
They offer financial incentives to businesses and colleges in an attempt to buy recognition of a program that is a solution to a problem that does not exist.
This is all under the heading school reform.
Given the existance of already working standardized testing programs, this whole mess is foolish and costly.
This same district is trying to use Linux to cut computing costs, but only for the money, not because the kids might need the diverse education later in life. Home of the LTSP project which is a good thing.
Elsewhere in this same administration, (ESD) growth is out of control. Full of highly paid coordinators, directors, public relations, and other fluffy positions that consume money that could be spent directly in the classroom.
The running joke here is that if you cannot work in the schools, you go to work in the ESD.
Blogging because I can...
Please remember this for next time.
The short of it is that Mac labs were dissapearing accross Canada and the US at an incredible rate. The schools on the whole hate the Mac's. They had support issues that easily were as great as Windows labs, debunking the myth that Mac's don't need support. They were proprietary and not what the students were going to use in the real world (outside advertising / graphics). For schools and teachers that actually do want to prepare students for the outside world, this is an issue (yes some teachers really care). Hardware that could run on the mac was always more expensive, at least 10% more, typically could run up to half again as much. This is for companies selling the exact identical piece of kit.
This also doesn't take into account that appletalk is so chatty that they had to buy a dedicated router to keep them from crapflooding the rest of the network. This gets expensive very quickly. Now that apples have finally joined the realm of TCP/IP, it's not the problem it once was - but the damage was done. This problem got so bad that about the first thing I had to do was check and see if they had a mac lab, regardless of whether or not out software was running on it!
Software for the mac tends to be much more limited in selection, and often more expensive. Since most vendors don't make mac versions, the few that do feel free to charge more due to a lack of competition. The mac's themselves are also expensive. They can buy a lab of wintel systems cheaper than a lab of mac's, and they don't run into all the proprietary issues that mac forces on it's users.
It's not a case of apples school days are numbered, it's a case of a few leftover mac labs waiting for the next budget to become available to replace them with wintels. Frankly, mac labs were very rarely ever replaced with macs, and then only if their was a rabid mac lover in decision chain. For perspective, roughly 3% of replacement labs that used to be Novell were replaced by Novell, and this was far more common than a mac lab getting replaced by a mac lab.
You might be thinking I'm some kind of rabid windows evangelican at this point - I'm not. I've got and use Linux & Windows at home, and am about to start school for SUN. To be honest, I see more Linux labs surpassing mac labs in schools in the very near future if it hasn't already happened. Certainly linux is starting to penetrate into school for file servers. Remember that many of these mac labs only originally got installed in the first place because Apple sold the computers at a loss or simply gave them away to schools.
Im being serious here.. Though i really really hope I'm wrong and they survive, as i DONT want them to fade away..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The author has done a great job of describing the mindset of upper administrators. It's instructive to read about dummies who want "a single platform" regardless of price or performance. It's also good to know that they have hired people who are ignoring actual teacher needs. He's presented their reasoning as flawed and it is. Great stuff, crap begets crap, but he's missed some interveening history.
People are not chucking their Macs, the pie has grown in the last five years. Schools, like everyone else, had a spending binge over the last five years. Busineses donated all their old boxes for tax credits and many districts decided that they had to have PCs in every classroom. PC's for most of this period were cheaper and won out for the "internet access" need. I know schools that begged their students to take home old donated 486s and what not that they had no place for, but I don't know of any shcool that ever did the same for Macs. So, what you have in schools is a surpluss of PCs that no one asked for in the first place eating up resources schools no longer have. Missing this history is the author's first big mistake.
The author's next mistakes are to assume that parents have really bought into it all and that the supposed trend is irreversible. Both are wrong.
The public at large is just learning the joys of Microsoft "upgrading" for themselves and it's doubtful they will really want to spend PC money in their schools sytems that they don't want to spend at home. Sure, there are a few vocal dupes out there that did not live through the dissapointment of the win3.1 to win95 transition, and Microsoft will be sure to pay others, but that does not make a majority of parents. For every vocal M$ supporter, I can show you a free software advocate AND a Mac advocate. The vast majoryty of parents don't care about computers at all.
All real trends favor Apple and free software. Purchasing has ground to a halt. Attrition favors machines that last and have a real use. PCs, which no one asked for will simply rot in disuse. Local administrators will discover the joys of free software for the PC's they actually need before they get money to replace win9X. I expect peopole with real needs will get what works best. Microsoft's only advantage is that it talks to Microsoft and other DRM gimped junk that dissapears in 2 years. Students have no such needs, and faculty's needs extend only to reading central dirctives that make no sense anyway. When it comes to programming, science, internet access and running a network, free software rules without question. When it comes to out of the box video editing, Mac rules. I predict these M$ central planners will soon find themselves without a budget and nothing to do. Schools don't need the tools they would push.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've read some of the comments, and most people don't seem to get it. 99% of kids don't WANT to learn C, C++, terminal usage, etc... To most of the kids in school, computer = WINDOWS. They've heard of Mac, maybe Linux, but they don't care. And for the most part, windows is what will be used in whatever their future job is. The small portion of people who want to use linux will use it at home, and have no problems switching to windows at school.
At my school (high school), there are a kabillion windows machines. The newspaper area uses macs, but other than that, it's all windows. People know how to use it. Computers are almost like cars these days. You don't have to know how an engine works to drive a car. Most peole don't want to know how the engine works, they just know "there's the steering wheel, the brake's on the left, gas is on the right, and the shifter is somewhere". Like it or not, Windows is by far the most dominant operating system on desktops today, and that isn't likely to change. People don't care what OS is on their computer, and they'll take whatever the manufactor gives them.
One more comment before I leave for the day.
Platforms and programs make no difference teachers! I have a hell of a time driving this point home with them. Why are you so concerned about teaching the latest version of Office? By the time they graduate they will see a different version in the work industry. What you should understand is that you should teach them concepts, not a program.
Some bitch because I have photoshop elements in the labs and they want photoshop. Let's see, $21 per license versus $150? Guess which wins folks? I tell them once the students learn the CONCEPTS of correctly adjusting color balance and brightness/contrast it doesn't make any difference what program they use in the industry. They would do just fine using an open source Linux graphics app.
I tried to sell our IT director on moving from office to openoffice to save lots of money. His response was that people want MS office and it's not worth the bitching we'll hear. Grrrr! I could really use that money we would save on licensing to buy a new RAID and a cluster.
Mandrake probably has the same problem as Apple or AIX. With the drake wizards and mandrake control center you end up not learning how to unravel all those nasty configuration messes.
It is a Radeon 7500 with 32 MB of RAM: we're talking between $60 and $90.
Maybe at Apple stores we are. Apparently, you don't have a clue. here is a 7500 card with twice the RAM for $43 and free fedex shipping. I wasn't even able to find a 7500 with 32megs, they aren't manufactured anymore. The card is like 3 generations old.
The original poster doesn't claim that it does--he claims a flat-screen CRT. There *is* a difference, you know?
I don't think a public school with a small budget would want to buy a deluxe, flat screen monitor when any other would work equally well. With emachines, you have a choice. With apple, you don't.
Besides, Sam's club has Samsung 17" flat screen CRT monitors for $120. I'm sure they are cheaper elsewhere, especially when you buy in bulk. I think the $80 figure is reasonable for a decent flat CRT monitor.
You also *still* aren't up to parity (FireWire, et al).
Firewire? What the hell for? In a public high school?
I've seen a lot of people posting that the emac purchase will last longer because the monitor will outlast the machine.
That's purely anecdotal evidence. Any sysadmin will tell you that even quality monitors fail quite often, especially when you have hundreds of them. They won't ALL fail, but some of them will. Repairing them is usually not worth it, so the eMac becomes a throwaway item. Instead of an $80 replacement monitor, you have an $800 replacement computer.
Wrong. I can see a good deal of use in a school environment for an mp3 player (think about it) or something that generates slide shows and sets them to music (class project? leadership perhaps?)
It's good for getting the district's ass sued off, really. Those MP3s would probably be ripped from CDs and pile up on the hard drive, thus violating copyrights. Furthermore, other students would likely copy them to CDs, floppies, or Zip disks and take them home. Guess what happens when a disgruntled employee calls the RIAA?
Also, have you ever heard of powerpoint? It does roughly the same thing WRT slides.
iChat, while it has limited utility as an educational app, *would* have good potential as a way to get kids using the computers.
Ever hear of CIPA? That's another good way to get the district's ass sued off. In my school, you got suspended for a week if you used chat.
I know many schools that have a class which could make use of one though and it is fairly common for them to have a video camera on hand, regardless of whether it is DV. Give it time and they'll be happy to have iMove and iDVD.
Good luck working with video on an 800MHz emac with a puny 40 gig hard drive. You will be able to encode about 3 minutes of video in a standard class period. Besides, we are talking about general purpose computer labs. Those classes usually keep a couple of powermacs around to do their stuff.
As I mentioned elsewhere: many people are also going to want to use Windows 2003 Server or MacOS X Server. There the winner in price should be clear.
Of course, especially considering that I would trust Win2003 Server much more than MacOS X Server. Apple never had any experience whatsoever with server platforms. Microsoft's platform sucks, but it's common enough that using it is only semi-problematic. How much do OS X Server administrators cost and where can you find one? And why not use, say, Linux for servers -- it likely costs less to administer than OS X Server, and works fine with both Windows and Macs. Please don't tell me it doesn't cost anything to administer Mac hardware because it's so easy to use. That's utter bullshit -- any semi-large computer system requires dedicated admins.
I really take exception to articles that try to write off decision making as "lemming effect". It's a trash-can excuse. Let's look at the brutal facts of reality:
1) Enterprise Software Availability favors Wintel.
2) The dominant use of computers in american schools is NOT IN THE CLASSROOM. It is in the school/district office and on the teacher's desk.
3) Teachers are poorly equiped to manage technology assets. IT managers do that. Single platform lowers cost for IT managers.
4) Outside design and AV, Apple is at best on equal footing with Wintel.
5) The internet works fine on either platform. You might say it even works better on Wintel thanks to MS embrace and extend.
6) Price != TCO (total cost of ownership).
-- $G
I agree with you in principle. Here however is the other side.
In highschool they used to have a concept called "LEO" ~ Law Economics and Occupation. Essentially it was all the day to day skills you needed to function in society:
how to use a checkbook, how to cook, a basic understanding of american law... The idea was a broad overview of society.
If the schools see the computers as part of the LEO curriculum than the purpose is to get students to understand the platform and the applications that as Americans they can be expected to understand; not to understand computer science.
Conversely if they see the computers as part of a computer science type approach then obviously they can use virtually any platform.
PC's are not mono culture. PC's are extremely diverse. Just because many PC's run Windows does not mean that is all a PC can do.
I used to run a Mac Notebook. Gave it away. Why? Because it was too limited. With my PC I can run; Linux, Windows, FreeBsd, Solaris, etc. On top of each OS I can run X*X*X applications.
My Mac essentially has two choices OSX or Linux from Yellow Dog. Software apps is even worse. I once asked a company selling Linux software to do a simple recompile for OSX. No-go.... While Open Source is great not all packages will configure and build for a PPC chip. It is just oo frustrating...
Nope, it is the Mac world is that mono-culture...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Who did Haddad describe as a lemming? Let me refresh you:
Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison (Wis) school district, told the local Capital Times. He conceded that Macs outperform PCs, but he didn't care. "We want a single platform," he said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it."
Someone who does not care about price or performance for a given application but wants "a single platform" defined as single vendor, because that's what everone else has, is a lemming. The only advantage M$ has is that it acts like M$ and M$ does not play normal communication standards. That's not a real advantage and it fills no real needs, like getting real work done.
Haddad has noticed a national trend where dumb central planners in public education are ignoring their teacher's needs and requestes in order to make sure everyone uses Microsoft shit. It's a good article with only a few minor flaws eminating from M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If your friends judge your sexuality by what hardware and operating system you use, I think it's time to get some new friends.
I have blog like everyone else
That is our educational discount on Superdrive equipped eMacs (1Ghz/256/80). I just bought an iBook 12"/900/128/40 for $1099 with an Airport card and got an iPod for $69 more ($200 rebate). Our price on the 867Mhz TiBook is $1799 with Airport and an extended warranty. That is a $629 discount.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
As a kid in school, the trend was to "just pass the test". I never got answers to many hard questions, unless I went digging for the information myself.
I remember clearly the day I learned to think for myself:
Third grade, about the middle of the year. At home, I had been getting interested in magnets and electronics. Took apart some of electronic toys wondered about all the little bits inside. I asked about these things, but did not get many answers. (Not the teachers fault, they really did not know either!)
One day during a trip to the library, I wandered into the "big kids" section. Just was not in the mood for another "Space Cat" story. Saw lots of good books and was interested. During this time, I happened to stumble upon a book titled "The Boys First Book of Electronics". "Man, this was the book for me", I thought on the way to checkout.
I was told, I was too young for that book. Could not possibly read it, so I can't have it. I was told I needed to check out one of the same sort of books the other kids were. They fsking knew I was interested in these things because I got into trouble many times for having them in class. (Batteries, motors and such.)
We were all shown the dictionary and how to use it. New words were not a problem, you just looked them up. Keep doing that and the text will become clear. Isn't that what we are supposed to be doing? I explained some of this, thought about the rest and was in general confused and very angry. I remember thinking these people really don't give a shit as long as you get what they need you to get done.
Fuck that. I stole that book and read it cover to cover. I still have it. Sometimes I see it and remember why I took it. --It still pisses me off.
I spent many hours reading and re-reading that book, but it was worth it. The following year, I fixed several fans, and other simple electronics I found broken around the house. Things went pretty well from there. Had a HAM license, learned to program computers, and even helped develop classroom plans and deliver instruction to my peers in computer classes using LOGO and Pascal.
My High School experience was good however. They let me do all sorts of things I found important provided I tow the line on responsibility, citizenship and ethics. Things are not all bad, just spotty.
Our computer teacher found us programming and messing with the machines instead of using the programmed instruction disks. (He let us see the manuals.) Instead of slapping us down, he told us to let him know what we were trying to do, then made us get it done if we could. Our grade was an "A" provided we were learning something. Given the newness of computers at the time, this was an interesting approach.
Did us a lot of good too. Learned to program in assembly (6502 Apple II). Before I left school, I knew that machine inside and out.
I feel the damage happens when people are young. Strained budgets, mandated instruction, and the schools inability to deal with problem kids due to potential lawsuits all combine to produce an environment of such boring conformity, most kids die inside before they reach age 10... I see signs of it in mine. My math experiences are similar to yours. (Why do they show that goofy stuff when the tried and true methods will always work just fine?)
I was one of those problem kids. Just stubborn enough to make my own way. All the trouble was worth it for me. Funny, all the "problems" went away when the environment changed enough to allow creative learning to happen.
I always wanted to be a teacher because I want to help young people learn without the hassle I got.
What stops me?
The sorry state of our schools today. (Not the teachers --most of them are good people trying to do their best.) Better to get kids involved after school when they have a chance to get some real learning done.
I am not sure you could pay me enough to deal with that mess. It is highly likely that same mess is why your classes are the way they are.
Blogging because I can...
Umm.. I did. Of course, I didn't have OSX to learn on, but I had Slackware. and FreeBSD, and the Solaris copy I got for the cost of the media. I learned enough about *NIXes, and their imitators, that I was able to consult right out of high school, doing system admin type work for a few local companies... (tuning, maintenance, a few bash scripts here and there).. I can honestly say that my first year out of high school, I pulled six figures, and I owe it to the availability of free (or reduced-cost) UNIXes, and variants thereof. Kudos to apple for spreading the *nix-lovin... More power to 'em.
----- Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious. - Paul Valery
I did RTFA, and my point is that there's nothing behind his assertions that Apple is losing market share in education. Aside from a whiny "long live Apple" slant, the article really doesn't say much.
I guess my criticism was more of the lack of any basis in real data as opposed to a vague reference to "market researcher Quality Education Data" and a few anecdotal comments by people in the educational field.
Show me some data to back it up, along with taking other facts into account, like the fact that there are probably more computers in schools now than there ever have been before - and I'll be satisfied with the article.
My big question right now is: so what?
I don't think anybody is thinking about this the right way at all... Teaching students how to use a computer (or a computer program) should not be a goal, in and of itself.
Teachers should be teaching their students how to create a spreadsheet, the fact that they are doing it with Excel should just be a footnote, and even the fact that they are using a computer to do it should not be a primary factor at all.
A better example: The goal of teaching students how to use iMovie should be to teach them how to edit movies... The software that they use to do it matters very little, the operating system matters very little, and even the fact that it is being done with a computer shouldn't matter much at all...
With that said, if teaching students how to edit video, create a spreadsheet, etc., is easier on a Mac than a PC, then why should a PC even be considered? Should I be forced to write with a #2 pencil just because everyone else does?
Learning Excel for the sake of learning Excel is the equivalent of high-tech masturbation. It's as if your only goal in life, is to have a goal in life... There is no sense to it at all in public schools.
The public school system is not a 13-year-long trade-school. The goal is education of an individual, not marketable corporate skills. Maybe that's one of the primary reasons the U.S. education system is FAILING. Instead of actually educating kids, they teach them to memorize and recite facts. The education system is in a poor state, and this idea of computer monoculture is a great example of the symptoms experienced by a school with a serious problem. It is likely a school where the administrators don't undertand what their jobs are, and students aren't actually being educated at all.
Even if we are to believe that schools legitimately wanted to provide students with experience on the systems used in corporations, and suspend logic to believe that it was a laudable goal, then we still run into the question of why are schools using Windows 98 instead of 2000? Win 98 certainly isn't popular in companies at all, so what's the point? Also, why are they locking down computers so tightly that students can't actually get any experience on computer, if that is really the goal? And why aren't they teaching any useful and valuable skills, instead of crap like Word and Excel?
I think uniformity, and "using what's used in corporations" is a red herring, and much of this comes down to simple payola, and other Microsoft lobbying efforts that convice educators that is might be reasonable.
Disclaimer: Much of this content comes from some of my replies to other comments. I thought the content was important enough that I should give it it's own thread, and more exposure on the main thread, rather than less-trafficed areas. Please moderate/reply to this one, and ignore the others.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I've been out of high school for six or seven years now, but one thing I remember from back then was that students and definitely some teachers did not like using the Mac lab. During my three years at the high school, I spent maybe a total of two hours in that lab. Each time a group would visit the lab, they would spend the first several minutes trying to figure out how to do simple things like locate the web browser. We never had enough exposure to those machines to develop any skills with them and our lack of skills tainted the usefulness of the time we had with them. At least in my mind, it would be impossible to construe that lab, which contained the only new computers on campus, as a success.
On the other hand, we did have some more successful computer labs. For instance, the intro programming courses (basic and pascal) were taught in a lab full of old 486's. Since we spent an entire semester working with these machines, they became extremely useful. Incidentally, I went on to major in computer science, spend two years working in industry, and am just now returning to grad school.
Another semi-successful lab we had was a writing lab populated by old 386's and 486's with word perfect installed. Like the Mac lab, we didn't go here very often. There were maybe one or two class trips there and a lot of before class printing out of essays and papers. Word Perfect was what I had used at home for several years so for me, it was a breeze to go in and get out quickly. Other classmates without wp experience might not have shared my enthusiasm for this lab but surely you can see the utility of familiar software.
I guess what I am trying to say is, there is a place and time in school systems where it makes sense to have particular operating systems. If computers are incidental to the course, then they should run systems the students will be familiar with (cough windows). If computers are central to the course, then perhaps they should run whatever operating system would be best for the courses they are used for. I would recommend linux for programming and maybe macs for graphic classes.
Note, I think if you work on a campus where students constantly use computers, it would be ok to standardize on a non windows platform for general purpose computing needs just so long as the amount of time spent familiarizing oneself to the system is trivial compared to the time spent using the system. Of course, with the improvements in usability over the past six or seven years, maybe these things aren't that big of a deal anymore.
The problem I find most techs have with Macs are the same thing I see they have with Linux and other 'minor' OSes...they are dumbasses that have only ever had to deal with one OS their entire life discarding every other machine out there. Instead of learning how to use an operating system, they learn how to use Windows by rote. Well you ALWAYS do blah by blahing it. No sense of learning how to do something or figuring it out on their own. Problem solving is not something that most PC / Windows users are good at.
That's true of most people in most professions. Understanding why to do X is much more difficult than how to do X so most things are learned on a "how to do" not a "why to do" basis. IT techs are not system administrators. So his questions is not unreasonable at all.
zOS doesn't market itself as an easy to use operating system. Mac does.
Computer usage in classrooms is very different from computer usage in offices. It's nice from a management point of view to have one set of maintenance skills, but consolidating functions doesn't always make sense to do that. You have facilities people who work on heating systems and you have facilities people who work on landscaping. You might be able to find people to do both things, but you don't manipulate the heating system or the landscaping just to make that possible.
Or maybe a better example would be that school district HR departments don't handle student discipline and tardiness problems, even though they do handle those problems with employees.
I would recommend reading Sheldon Richman's book "Separating School and State" as a primer on the issues affecting education.
It discusses the idea that the model of our public school system is Prussian, a model specficially designed to make children uninterested, fatigued dopes, with a small percentage of them who can thrive in that terribly unnatural environment.
One of my favorite quotes from it is "The overwhelming evidence shows that American schools have never achieved more than they currently achieve." (Gerald Bracey)
The book obviuosly has a strong Libertarian bent, you may not like all of it, but the history makes for great reading.
And every time an article comes up, someone says they are cheaper, they aren't cheaper.
Apple computers are a better buy, only in the collective LSD flashback universe that Jobs and all of his minions live in.
Macs and OS X *NOW* are cool, neat, fun, etc.. But the price point will never ever ever beat the Wintel world. Apple simply cannot afford it.
It has an 800 Mhz G4, which is pretty respectable for a mac.
Yeah, its pretty resepectable for a PC too. Three years ago. Go Apple!
This is actually a more general problem and not specific to teaching. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) classified people based on 4 variables. People hire people whose personalities are similar to their's. In America the most common female personality is ESFJ and most common male is ESTJ. Unless for some other reason an institution creates bias in hiring within a few generations the institutional personality will always be ESXJ. ESXJs believe in structure, rules, conformity....
Now what is specific to teaching is that teaching especially in lower grades is biased and attracts SJs so the problem is even worse in schools.
You gave me bestbuy prices I gave you best buy prices. Go to Bestbuy.com and look at the prices your self all the prices I gave are from bestbuy.com. schools won;'t go to 10 different locations to get components, they want one vendor.
/P4 based pc (I have one in my room and it is LOUD) you have 5 fans minimum (cpu,chipset,gpu, power supply, 1-2 case). Now put 12-24 of these PCs in a room.
You fail to also look at other factors favoring the emac.
1. One single piece means space saving. A biggie when real estate is scarce. Like in school lab where you need to put many computers in a room.
2. Power consumption and heat decipation. The emac is going to consume much less power than the emachines destop tower + monitor. Since the G4s run really cool you have less heat, less cooling costs (Air conditioning). Incase of the emachines you have the monitor generating heat as well as the tower. The emac has only one major heat source the CRT part. A biggie for school districts, whose budgets are already pretty restrictive, saving on thier electric bill is a good thing.
3. Less noise, quieter labs. AFAIK the emacs and the imacs have no fans. Have you ever heard and Athlon XP
AS for iApps. Schools give home work, like papers, presentations and such. Students can get creative with thier work if those tools are present. And the schools save money buy not having to buy licenses for 3rd party apps for XP.
Add to XP antivirus software licenses. The cost of the hardware is often offest by the software licenses when you go for a windows solution.
One more thing, the education market never pays retail. Apple offers good discounts. The emac with 384 megs of RAM can be had for $789 with educational pricing. Emachines is already on very low margins I am not sure discounting thier products more will still keep them profitable.
Good points.
I guess what is missing is K-12 basic computer science. We are showing kids how to get other things done with the computer, but are not showing them anything about the nature of the computer itself.
Many of the educators today are not really capable of this and they should be.
In that, I agree with you.
However, working with a couple different platforms just from a user perspective is a good thing and can be done today. The kids will get the idea of computing by inference, not the details mind you, but the basic idea of differences. It will affect their learning process in a good way.
Instead of asking where is the start bar, for example, they might just ask how to navigate to the applications. By inference they will understand at some level that applications are different than computing systems...
Every last one of them should be shown the command line. Again, by inference, they will learn about parts of the computer that will help them in later more specialized learning.
At the college level, they better damn well be able to show these things, otherwise why pay? (seriously)
Blogging because I can...
(Note: I do know that many of things below are capable on other platforms)
I am a consultant that supports numerous K-12 schools and one of my clients, a High School, is very happy they standardized on Mac OS X. The school had used cheap PC's in the past running Windows 98 and were looking to upgrade. They were getting no support from the district and the machines barely ran and were constantly infected by virus and students P2P software. The teachers pushed to have Apple systems purchased and the district finally obliged. They received 250 new machines and hired me to get everything functioning.
There are 1800+ students and 65 faculty that I support by myself using a combination of Mac OS X Server and open source tools. On the server side I use Apple's Admin Tools, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Radmind, (a suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machine), Moodle, Carbon Copy Cloner, NetRestore and PHP iCal. All of these items are free or ship with OS X Server which saves the district a lot of money. Their are four OS X Servers that are all administered remotely which helps save them money by not having to have me at school all day long. They have a problem, they e-mail me, I fix it.
All of the client machines are running 10.2.6 and a variety of proprietary, shareware, freeware, and open source software. The school really likes the amount of free and or shareware software I have installed. Here is a brief list of some of the freeware apps I install, Aquatomic, Franklin, EdenGraph, Physics 101, Trade Strategist, Stop Motion Studio and there are so many more but I won't bore you. (they also utilize all of Apple's free apps including iCal, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto) I manage all log-ins, downloads, apps that can and can not be used, who can use which machines, and mount home directories all from the OS X Servers. This set-up saves the schools bandwidth by not allowing students to download, install, and run their P2P software.
I am not going to tell you this is a perfect set-up, or that everything works the way it should, but I can tell you that using OS X in a large school setting is a cost saver in terms of IT support when done properly. The district cannot believe how easily I manage all of these machines and is now considering implementing similar set-ups in other schools.
I agree that one of the main problems with the eMac is expense. The integrated monitor is also a major problem for most IT departments, they already have an investment in a bunch of monitors, why can't they use those? And contrary to most people's statements here, there are two things that everyone is going to do with these machines that matter: word-process and surf the web. Yes, schools teach photoshop and maya and whatever else. However, it is easier for Apple to sell them specialized hardware in fields where they are strong. Apple gets screwed by not having all of those cheap word-processing machines. Once cheap Windows boxes start taking over that field the administrators start thinking how to get them to do everything.
Did you ever ask why the hard way was tought first? In calculis Derivitives are taught as limit problems for the first week, even though that is the hard way, because it is much easier to understand derivities in application as a limit problem, than by using the short cut. (If all you knew was the derivitive of x^2 is x, you know nothing even though everyone does it that way)
Third grade has the same problems, just on a diiferent level. Sometimes you need to know the hardway first before you can go to the easy way.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The author lambastes Apple for putting too much emphasis on the education market, and misunderstanding that the opportunity cost of dominating that market was too high.
Ironic, innit?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
See I as have my other techs, have always felt Apple was the absolute BEST platform for elementary school students. The abuse those machines get (three CD's in one drive, Juice box gunk in the keyboard) and yet on adverage we lose maybe 2 or 3 iMacs a year (all bondi blues surprisingly, I have only lost one slot load to an actual motherboard getting fried, although I have had to replace 5 or 10 cd-rom drives, my favorite, no you cant put your ham in the CD-Rom, no I do not kid!!!)
For a long time we we where a tri-platform school, Windows in the high school and with the secretaries, macs in the middle school and elemetary school (with a few in the highschool for video and graphics courses.) and two machines running linux for a management software called SAMS.
In comes our new tech adviser to help us expand everything, what does he do, tries to get rid of all 2500 iMacs we have and buy computers from Dell, to supliment our 250 PC's. Yes thats right trash BRAND NEW computers in some cases just to make everything two platform (he tried to trash the linux boxes but was hit with a block when we showed him SAMS only works good on linux)
Its not IT people who make these desicions, its administators, some of whom have never taught in a classroom (this guy doesnt even have a degree in education) who make stupid decision without asking "why are you running things like that?"
After seeing that we only had one part time IT member for the Mac's though and 3 full time and 3 part time staff members for the PC's( in all fareness we all do all three platforms but we have specializations I the mac guy, and everyone else specialized in some perticular way with a part of the OS or network admin), the board of education made him back down or risk getting his contracts ripped up, and as it is after its up he is probably not comming back, but still this is the situation you run into, and IT staff sometimes gets little more say than yes sir no sir.
Heck even when I suggested getting eMacs cause they where cheaper (we could buy more software or equipment for the teachers, or dare I say TRAINNING since they where using OS X instead of 9) I was turned down cause they wanted the fancy iMacs that my assistant super. had. Forget I ever try to save them money again!!!
Itrs annoying, but you just have to play the system.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I spent about two weeks trying to help a small private high school (about 200 students) near Memphis, TN get their systems online because the school year had already begun and they couldn't get their new infrastructure to work.
The school was tech-heavy. Every student was issued an IBM Thinkpad with WinXP, much to the chagrin of the school's IT director, who was an Apple "distinguished educator" (she had requested iBooks but the Board of Directors had vetoed her, citing numerous parental complaints).
But here's the curious part. When it came to servers, she decided to go with 3 OSX Server machines, to the tune of almost $5000 each. They were to run file shares, email servers, a web server, and some library database software the school already had.
To make a long story short, it was a mess. She and her assistant had no clue how to administer the Windows laptops. They had no idea what a domain was. Their experience setting up Appleshare networks with AtEase for authentication just didn't prepare them for administering a real heterogenous network.
The file sharing was the real problem. The IT director eventually broke down and bought a Win2k domain controller for the Windows machines for authentication and print services. But the OSX file server could not seem to use the Windows domain controller for authentication. The students not only needed a domain account, but also needed separate OSX accounts just to get to their file shares. The problem lay in Apple's LDAP authentication implementation, which did not integrate with Samba very well. Authenticating the OSX users over LDAP worked, but it refused to authenticate the WinXP users. And this was a problem because the students needed to access the file shares from their laptops. Apple did not have a nice, GUI way to configure such a situation.
The whole time this was happening, I just kept thinking how her $15,000 could have been much better spent buying a few PCs and a few copies of Win2k Server. They probably would have had a few $thousand leftover to send her assistant to some Windows administration classes. Her decision to buy Apple OSX Servers was more like a stubborn attempt to get back at the Board of Directors. At each problem that came up, she always blamed the Windows machines because "she'd never run into such problems in her old Apple lab." Nevermind that her old Apple lab was trivial...
Back when I started college (im going onto my 5th year thanks to NJ's education schooling laws, I can have a 2.0 in general education to be a doctor but have to have almost a 3.0 in general ed to be a teacher, despite having a 4.0 in your respective field AS a teacher. btw I actually have a 3.4 in gen ed, but it was more cause I had to take my classes spread out among the 132 credits NJ requires)
anyway, when we started out, my school had 5 OS's!!! Windows was number 1 ovbiously, with Mac OS 8/9 (they really didnt keep up admin on them) with Solaris, Red Hat, and one other *nix I cant remeber (think it might have been IBM's)
Well to use your email, which you really had to do, you NEEDED to learn unix, cause guess what everything was done in telnet/terminal on PINE!!!! Wanted to use a graphic freindly program??? FUCK YOU IT said we aint helping you you need to lear PINE.
Well things have changed and I think for the worse, we have a webmail server now, and a lot of our nix's have well been nixed, and you know how the student population is now? DUMB SHITS!!!! they have trouble logging into a computer when before they were forced to learn they dont even care.
Trust me your going to be a goddsend when you come to college (if you do) if you learn Mac, Win, and at least two good *nix's, you will never want for a job cause your friends and teachers will PAY YOU to help them (I make 200 a week easy thanks to friends refuring me to help them cause IT is so swamped)
So dont buy into the one platform phil, get good at a few, trust me you will be happy you did!!!
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Yes, yes, of course people are doing the Linux thing when they need a compute cluster, render farm, or whatever. (Well, maybe not the render farm, since OS support for the Mac's 128-bit vector processing unit might sway things a bit in that case.)
But... people, be they K-12 students or scientists, generally don't have cyberpunk neural implants directly linked to those compute clusters, render farms, or whatever, just yet. That means they use one of those things we quaintly call a (fanfare) desktop computer.
Unlike a compute cluster node, that so-called desktop computer typically does all sorts of silly things that would make it a lousy compute cluster node. Like running one or more displays, handling a GUI, spending lots of time waiting for user input, and so on.
And, be they students or scientists, odds are those users want to do various and sundry things with those desktop computers. They probably receive documents, or have to create documents, in a format that Microsoft Office likes (whether they want to or not), so being able to handle that is important. And they probably either know, or should learn, how to use Windows. But they probably also know, or should learn, how to use a Mac, and to some extent, UNIX. And their best bet for doing all those things on a single box is, currently, a Mac.
And you probably stuff every freeware piece of crap known to man into them... which is likely -causing- the problem. Same for games. Load old games on a Mac OR a PC and you're in for a ride from hell.
Yeah, that's what I'm doing with our production systems here. I didn't think the kids had enough Flash web games, so I thought I'd load up some more. Actually, the apps that give us the most grief are MS Office, especially Equation Editor, and Inspiration.
I'd move to Australia, but you guys would probably evict me within the year. How much could trans-continental shipping of 30 computers cost?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
An unnatural act with a PEZ dispenser.
"Form should follow function...unless it's just plain ugly."
One word Skully.
During the mid and late 1990s I worked for a fairly big Apple authorized dealer. In fact, before Skully this particular business made several million dollars worth of Apple sales per year.
Back in the day, before Skully, schools made their purchases from Apple authorized dealers. Apple deeply discounted the hardware to the dealers who were making educational sales so that they made a profit margin on the equipment. Schools got better prices than the soccer mom who was going to the same dealer.
Skully thought that if they eliminated the middle man, Apple could sell equipment for the same price and keep the profits that had been going to the dealers.
His plan backfired. Schools had already developed relationships with the dealers. Though it is true that Apple was keeping more of the profits from each sale, the total number of sales fell through the floor. When a school had come to establish a relationship with a dealer that they trusted and that dealer could no longer sell them Apples the schools were interested to know what hardware the dealer could sell them.
Instead of Apple, Apple, Apple. Dealers (like the one I worked for) started to push Compaq, HP, and whitebox solutions. Not because they didn't think Apple was good anymore, but because they couldn't make any money unless they were selling something else. When I was trying hard to get a sale from a school, what I would do is emphasize the cost savings of purchasing 200 Compaq Deskpros over 200 PowerMac 7300s. I'd tell the school how they'd save so many thousands of dollars up front, and many more over the life of the equipment. When the change took place, Apple was still using SCSI exclusively on their 'professional' level machines. So that was another areas where I could illustrate a cost savings by going with Compaq or HP. SCSI vs IDE. 10 HP printers vs the cost of 10 Apple Laserwriters was a losing proposition for Apple as well.
Apple lost the educational market ~10 years ago when they tried to screw the dealers who were generating sales on their equipment. Pure and simple.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The writer of this article should take notice of the schools handing out Apple laptops to all the teachers and all of the students:
"The 240 students and 40 teachers each will get an Apple iBook laptop computer for class- related use at home and school. Virtual, paperless education, when students are able to access text books online, may not be too far in the future", said Edward Bernetich, principal of the new school.
http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index
Also, Apple's Mac OS X District License Program has been extended through September 27, 2003. This adoption solution for K-12 school districts "takes the hassle out of upgrading, includes Mac OS X software, training, technical support, and applications, and -- most important -- cuts more than 60 percent off Apple's already lower education licensing price." (But, only districts with 1,000 or more Mac OS X-capable systems are eligible for the offer. )
I am a teacher. I've taught in two districts, both interested in technology and I've seen Apple's sad attempted at continuing to play to schools. Some thoughts: 1.) OSX was a killer for some districts. Often, district have restrictive license agreements for application software that allow install of a certain version of software. Sure, you can run pre-OSX software on OSX with compatibility mode, but it's a dog and prone to crash. 2.) Ignorance has scared away districts. I'm not sure why, but none of the happy promos for OSX were directed towards districts. The high memory requirements for OSX definately scared schools. 3.) The Business Week article implies that the EMacs are as inexpensive as PC's. Dell and Gateway are practically giving PC's away, especially in the past 12 months. Why switch to Macs (with their more limited software availabiltiy) when you can continue with PC's? I like OSX, I have it install on my PowerBook. But I use PC's everywhere else. Until Mac starts giving it away (Linux!) or starts selling bargain (under $500) PC's, they will continue to be a dog.
I am a Mac user too but I cannot defend the above poster's blatant ignorance. I mean, who pays $130 for a 32MB radeon card and $210 for a 17" CRT! A quick search on Pricewatch shows $30 for a Radeon 32MB card and a 17" monitor is easily $70 and under. Even if we were to factor in a 100% premium for extended warranty, installation, brand-name factor, falt CRT, etc, at $200 the price would still be less than the $340 quoted by the above poster who is clearly a zealot.
It's not at all news that Apple is on the decline in education. They've been in that position since 1995 when Win95 made the big splash all over mass media and it became cool to get Windows even if (and maybe especially if) you didn't know computers particularly well. The news is that Apple has kept as much marketshare in schools as they have considering it took 3 years to get a response together (after Steve Jobs return) and 6 years to make the hardware (iMacs, eMacs & iBooks) and software (OS X & Powerschool).
Apple may have learned a few things about their market. Maybe their's a lesson or two for Linux proponents to see as well.
Price is the top consideration. If you're not in the 15%-20% price ballpark, you won't be considered no matter how many arguments of ease of use / less maintenance / more durable / you can make. Apple has back room sales pitches that are well developed for large markets. While Linux has an unbeatable hardware and software price point, they don't have anyone who can make a persuasive, simple, and aggressive sale.
Ease of use is very important. A labful of systems should be maintainable by a person with little interest in running a lab. Apple and Windows help are available in computer section of your bookstore, in online help (not man pages), and easily found among like-minded groups of people to ask for free advice. I've even heard of Apple offering special training to secure large contracts; it's pretty cheap for them to do so. In the case of Linux, training and support are often where the money is made so making self-supporting communities will make people uncomfortable.
Be able to offer a killer app. Apple has PowerSchool software for managing schools. It's the mass market equivalent of grade book / roster management / school admin software that schools used to pay to develop in the past. They will sell it to a school for many thousands of dollars, but because it's software that's already developed they can offer a huge discount as a deal clincher. And once you get a school district's data, they will have a hard time moving off your platform later on.
Diversity costs more because people aren't exposed to diversity. I know my lack of diversity in OSes has slowed my migration down to another platform.
I used to think like you until someone said they tried to learn one new programming language a year. Why? Because different programming languages have different concepts, strengths, and weaknesses. It's like a toolchest, a hammer, a saw, a screwdriver. The more you know what tool to use for what job, the better off you are.
As for training students to use it, the first thing schools need to train kids in (before they ever sit in front of a computer) is logic. Logic is useful outside the computer lab.
Personally, I feel kid shouldn't be in front of a computer at school unless they are learning computer concepts, and in that case there should be as many different operating systems available as possible (multiple flavors of linux, multiple flavors of bsd, windows, mac, maybe even Plan9, BeOS, and some RTOS). The only other place computers may have a place in school would be in the library for research (for the kids who don't have internet connection at home).
Still, it is more important to teach kids logic than "computers" and alot the kids I know don't even have that - even if they do know how to use a mouse. Teach kids to think for themselves and when you do teach them computers, give them a diverse set to evaluate and come up with their own opinions (instead of forcing down their throat the "one true way").
Ok, rant mode off. hehe
The problem that I see with home schooling is that done wrongly, it doesn't prepare the kids to deal with different people.
I mean I did go to public school and I had to deal with smart kids, stupid kids, social kids, anti-social and outright aggressive kids, kids from rich families and kids from welfare families. Exactly like it will be in the real world.
As a homeschooling parent I have to disagree on two counts. 1) While there is a lot of diversity among the students in a public school classroom I never saw much evidence that the kids learned to deal *in a healthy way* with those that were different from them. Just go into (or think back to) a junior high classroom, all the bullying, cliques, hostility between different groups. Sure some kids learned to bridge the gaps or to accept those that were different but it is the exception rather than the rule and often being friendly to the "wrong" kid could put your own position with you peers at risk. I hesitate to say it but I suspect those kids most able to trancend the petty differences that divide school kids were those that had the kind of healthy relationships with their parents that homeschoolers tend to have. I hate to say it but rather than a nirvana of healthy diversity public schools often seem to have more in common with Lord of the Flies
2) Another aspect of public school classrooms is the extreme degree of segregation by age. All your friends (and enemies, and those to whom you are merely indifferent) are ALL your age. All your interaction is with kids the same age, your teachers are generally distant authority figures, even kids relationships with their parents becomes increasingly alienated. These kids are intensely peer dependant. Who cares what my parents or teachers think? Who cares what *I* think? What really matters is what my little clique thinks, to loose their approval is to suffer tragedy. (all of which is feeding into my first point)
Homeschooled kids tend to be dealing with siblings of different ages and friends of different ages as well as dealing with adults (their parents and friends parents). And the parents (who presumably are more mature in their own socialization) are more actively guiding the childrens socialization in healthy ways. I don't know any homeschooling parent that would tolerate the kind of nastiness that is wearily tolerated or not even noticed by the teachers in your typical Jr. High. Even when it reaches a level or is done in plain sight where a teacher must act since the children are so peer dependant the poor opinion and disciplinary actions of the teacher for beating up the funny looking kid is insignificant next to the approval of your peers egging you on.
In my experience homeschooled kids are far better socialized & capable of dealing with peoples differences than their public school peers. As an adult I have never experienced the kind of sullen or insecure silence from a teenager that I commonly experience from public school kids. The homeschooled kids are perfectly comfortable interacting with an adult. Most public school kids are completely out of their element having to deal with someone like myself that is 15 years older. Sure there are homeschooled kids and families that really do poorly interacting with others but I doubt those same kids would do any better in a public school and I suspect they would do a great deal worse since their initial social failings would be compounded by the harrassment of their immature peers.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
There isn't a better place on the face of this earth to raise kids: Get yourself a farmhouse out in the country, with maybe 10 acres of fields, and forests, and streams, and kiss those big city screwed up influences and problems goodbye.
/. regular, both you and your wife have college degrees. Who do you think would do a better job of raising your children: You and she, or some rigidly idiotic career bureaucrat from the government schools?
;D
We live out in the country on 3.5 acres now. Most of my neighbors are just as weird as the people in Greensboro. Although I love and prefer the country, its not much safer or different. I just have more space between me and the nuts around me.
I assume that if you're a
I am a regular from way back, but neither of us have degrees, even tho both of us are educated. I have always had problems learning in a structured environment, yet I am self taught, and run a marketing dept for a manufacturer, and a fairly good IT man. I have spent a great deal of time furthering my own education. My wife runs a pawnshop we own, and is quite bright. I agree we would do a better job than public schools could do, just as I don't want someone working for $7 an hour at a daycare having the responsibility of instilling moral values in my kids.
I agree that I would not want my kids to be in the schools here near northwest of Greensboro (which is considered the nicer part of this area by a large margin). I just don't know that I can overcome all the influences here. Its not low selfconfidence, its the reality of what parents are up against here.
I'm a hardheaded conservative about some things, such as one of us staying at home with the kid until the child starts school. I would consider home schooling, but that is a sacrifice that would come back to haunt us later when it became time for the child to go to college. I don't believe in "hoping for a scholarship", I believe in saving and preparing. If the child received a scholarship, all the better, but don't bank on it. So, having half the income (or even 2/3rds) does make it harder to save for college. I guess I would probably consider private school first because either of us can more than earn enough to pay for it. We live on half of what we make now, save the rest, we would just save less if paying for private school. Also, the value of interacting with others kids is real, as long as it is in a good environment, like a private school can provide (ie: no drug dealing at school, less violence, etc)
Also, I don't think I would make a good teacher, to be honest. I have respect for those than are good teachers. I would be involved with the child's studies but that doesn't mean I would be a good teacher. I have no problem with home schools, and support your right as a parent, 100%, and I KNOW home schooled children do well later in life, often because of the motivation of their parents to provide a firm foundation.
But I'm still not gonna have kids
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
So you say your high school is almost all Windows because "People know how to use [Windows]."
You then go on to say that computers are like cars-- cars have the brake, gas, shifter, and steering wheel. You assert that if someone can drive one car, they can drive practically any car because they have a grasp of the concepts of its operation.
So by your own argument, anyone who knows how to use Windows should be able to effectively use a Mac or Linux (with GUI) system with a minimum of effort, because it's just a GUI with applications, operated by a mouse and keyboard-- just like Windows. Yet your position appears to be just the opposite, that Windows is what should be used/taught in schools because that's "the dominant operating system on desktops today" and that "is what will be used in whatever their future job is" (I guess none of your classmates are heading for careers in the media, then).
An education is about teaching concepts and reasoning, so the accumulated knowledge can be applied in many situations. Teaching a kid how to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office instead of teaching them how to operate a computer and basic productivity applications is to do that kid a disservice.
Example: Someone who graduated high school 10 years ago was probably taught DOS and/or Windows 3.x. By the time the class of 1993 made it out of college, however, those had been supplanted by 95 and NT, which were *completely* different-- any Windows 3.x-specific knowledge was almost completely wasted. But the basic knowledge of using a GUI and applications was still viable.
~Philly
at home but school taught me how to "program" and to strangle DOS, do partitions, format floppies and use those weird wordprocessors (wordstar and stuff).
I've applied for a public highschool exam to try and gain one year, and the day of my computer exams I had to program a database on incredibly quaint pc's. I told the guy I couldn't do it since he didn't have filemaker installed. He started asking me about the dbase projects I had done in a company as student-job (was clueless when I started out, but did get some nice -flat as a pancake- dbases going that have been used for more than 10 years).
Based on that conversation he gave me 60%.
I have read the point being made kids shouldn't learn about an OS, but about computers and stuff in general. If that's the case, give them Apple's.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
If they use Virtual PC, do they not then need to buy not only a copy of OS 9 for every Mac they have, but also some kind of Windows licence?
That'll cost quite a lot, and that's before they've even got any applications to run on either.
All of the relationships I had with other children in my early life was a result of the public school system. What were your experiences with regards to meeting and forming relationships with other children your age while you were being home-schooled? Did you find it harder or easier to maintain relationships with your peers in the home-school environment versus the school environment?
let me start off by saying that i have just recently graduated from high school. having that said I don't think that the os that you learn on has anything to do with how computer savy you become. I remember the days when my dad showed me some dos commands to run my favorite games and I used packard bell navigator over windows 3.1. today I would consider my computer skills very much above average (well guess that is obvious considering what site this is) and almost all of them being self taught. while I would consider myself best with windows I can work all computers in general. I have installed linux and comped my own drivers with only help from help files. at school I used os x on apples to edit movies for class. I even teach my great aunt how to us os 8 on her old mac to send email even though I have never used that app myself. apparently having learned on windows has not affected my ability to pick up new systems. on another note, my high school had a mixed pc / mac network. the video editing la
SIGFAULT
as a recent highschool graduate, a lot of my friends are getting ready to buy new comps for college. early on i told everyone to get a mac, having just purchased a 17" imac. like most folks, they refused citing classic arguments. one button mouse, ugly ui (mac os 9), no office apps, and so on. this led me to believe that most people are comfortable with what they have used all their lives. unfortunatly at school most graduates these days have only used macs with mac os 8. apple's penetration into the education market could be enhanced if only they could get the fozen bondi imac images out of everyone's head. i know the reception i got as a mac user was not always fond. luckily my old school just bought a boat load of emacs and ibooks.
Where have you been buddy? 1991? Mac's have had and used TCP/IP since System 7.5.x over 7 years ago. Apple posted the whole damned operating system to their FTP site 4 years ago. If the schools didn't upgrade, it isn't Apple's fault. Your whole post is FUD flamebait. Your assertions about support costs go against every credible study ever done on the subject. Your 'hardware costs more' line is a blatent lie. Your tired arguement about software availabilty is just that.
The reason Apple is losing ground in schools is the same reason your post got modded 4 Interesting. Too many people who don't know any better just nod and accept the total BS that someone like you spews in their general direction. Go ahead Wintel drones, Mod me to -1.
We need diversity! Get Beta in the schools now! Down with the VHS hegemony!
"Sig free in '03!"
...your Mum's job involves dealing almost exclusively with problem children, because my experience has been completely different. I have seen (Western Australia) countless children screwed up by their State schooling - unquestionably by their school environment - and at least 19/20 of the homeschooled children I've seen are happier, more outgoing, more inquisitive, more inclined to do and figure things out for themselves than their State-schooled counterparts. This is completely aside from issues like the absolutely hopeless basic literacy in many (not all) State schools. If the HS kids have a fault, it's that they're too precocious (a flaw also found in their privately schooled peers, who seem to fall about halfway between the two camps) and self-important. I personally know a handful of families who homeschool in self defence, because the State schools - despite having a budget for such things - were completely failing to do anything constructive with their learning-disabled (and in some cases physically disabled) children.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I just don't get it. All of the homeschooled children that I know personally are exposed to a much wider variety of social interaction than sitting in rows (or bunches) of their peers in front of one or a few instructors every day. They are typically much better prepared to deal with strangers than a random child of similar demography is, and make such interactions rewarding for the other party and enriching for themselves. Do you guys have a particular problem with people "home schooling" when all they're really doing is isolating them? WHat's the missing ingredient?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Macintosh sales, in absolute terms, have declined since the peak under Michael Spindler. Apple was selling 4 million units a year in 1994/1995/1996; since then it's been selling roughly 3 million units a year, with one outlier in the maximum year of the Internet bubble (2000).
Don't forget to add ipod sales, close to 4 million units in 2002. It's the thing that has Apple revenues higher than anytime in the last 4 years or so.. If sales units are down and revenue is up, great. Me oh my, revenue up in a stagnant IT market more than it was in the "buble" market? Yep, this is the Apple rebound.
Expect it to eat M$'s lunch. Between free software for routine office work and xterminals, Apple for digital media and xterm work, where is Microsoft's nitch? The M$ damb was breached years ago, there's little to hold it up besides DRM and no one wants that. Where you going to go when the levee breaks? Flush goes M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I see you've found a use for all of those otherwise wasted hours between midnight and dawn.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
When I questioned the way a new "technology levy" was going to be spent, I got this gem in an email reply from the superintendent...
"I have never believed that Apple products were appropriate purchases, but many
school districts continue to purchase them."
-- Dr. Dennis Peterson, Superintendent of Minnetonka Schools
The company is beleaguered, you know.
One thing that has always amazed me is how much the elementary school teachers have integrated their Macintosh computers into their curriculum. Those 1995 Apple Macs are still in use in their classrooms today and are still play a key role in the students' coursework. High school teachers in the same district that have had new computers every 2-3 years rarely touch their computers. Computers are what they tell their students to go use when they want to right a paper. Their computers play no role whatsoever in the classroom even when they have a much newer, much more powerful computer than their primary education counterparts. It baffles me sometimes. Strike that. It baffles me all the time. If the elementary school had only half the IT budget the high school gets, the elementary students would graduate from 6th grade with an even richer technology experience. Of course they would be sorely disappointed once they reached junior high at the other school. Still I think it would benefit them in the long run.
I can understand how an administrator can initially believe Macs are sub-par. What I don't understand is how a person like that who obviously doesn't have an open mind can stay in a key position such as that over an educational institution. Don't get me wrong. I do think PCs have an intrigal part of a child's education. I also think that Macs have just as equal a part in their education and I don't see how administrators in education can be so short-sighted that they can't see that.
You fail to mention that the computer or system you use in school will most likely be nothing even close to what you'll be using 10 years or more later in your working place (unless you're lucky enough to have chosen UNIX).
I learned computers on a Schneider CPC (an Armstrad clone). Nobody even knows this computer nowadays, or even 13 years ago, when I got my first job. Your post is pointless.
When learning a Mac running OS X, people at least have a chance to learn some UNIX basics, which might actually be worth something even in the future.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
I can't imagine why this would be plus 4 interesting. -1 Troll is more like it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I volunteer at a state school, which has mostly Mac for the students, but the current state policy is for new computers to be Windows PC's. There are several problems at the school. Some Macs still in daily use are more than 5 years old, pre iMac, which is not good from a PR point of view "Macs are old and slow". The tech guy they employ does not know much about how they work. And they run only classic OS from System 7 to Mac OS 9.1, which is not good from a tech point of view remembering how each OS connect to the network. Any PC they have for the students run Win 98 making it easier to administer. They will be replacing the older beige with PC's which will reduce the number of Mac's for the students.
I think its far to late in the game for Apple to be opening up their hardware. Intel/AMD are way cheaper. If you are running Linux, why run it on expensive, non-standard hardware?
The only reason to buy Apple is if you like running OS X
The unofficial
My first contact with a computer was with an apple 2 at my primary school. They were easy to use and stable. Now we will be spoon feeding our children straight into the borg machine. I'm sure most of the kids have pcs at home so its good for them to use another os and realise there is more out there.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Seriously, I left college because I'm a learner. I got absolutely shunned for participating in class, everyone thought I was trying to make them look bad. I just felt that if the professor ASKS the class for a response we should offer one. Often in my economics class of 75 students there was NOBODY willing to raise their hand and give an answer. It had the dual-effect of totally disheartening the professor (whom I often chatted with after class) and making me look like some sort of smart-aleck.
I went to a small private school for most of my school-career (because I was nothing but trouble in public schools), and I was raised to believe that education is an interactive full-duplex operation. I was so depressed when I finally got to college and found out that it was just a big version of high-school with beer and laundry added, I thought there's be more to it.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
First off...the machine of 1993 is remarkably similar to the machine of 2003. At one of my employers, we ran software on our Windows 98/2000 machines that was developed in 1983. In my opinion, things will change...but it's also nice to prepare kids for what they will encounter in the short-term, and that is Windows. Anyway, if things will change in 10 years, why not let them learn on open source Linux distros instead of expensive closed-source Macs? The point of everything people have said to me is to give an "excuse" for retaining the Macs. But I have heard nothing good yet. I am listening, but hearing nothing but the same rhetoric that the Mac zealot teachers give me. "When learning a Mac running OSX, people at least have a chance to learn some UNIX basics, which might actually be worth something even in the future." I don't allow them to have access to the command line...and none of them could figure it out anyway. People (teachers and students) want pointy-and-clicky interfaces, not typie-and-typie. Maybe two or three kids would peck around for awhile, get some error messages, and then go back to their Flash games. You say my post is pointless. Why? I am telling you that I am buying computers that kids have at home for them to use at school. I am saying that when they graduate, they can then move onto the same machines at their employer. What is wrong with that? Perhaps we should be teaching them Esperanto in school, since language is likely to change in the next 10 years! No matter that they speak English at home, and will speak English at work...boy we should really teach them Esperanto. Anyway, by teaching them Esperanto, it will make it easier for them to learn Spanish and other languages in the future. I reject the fallacy that buying them Macs is expanding their horizons in any way...just as teaching them Esperanto would be useless.
just shows you haven't the foggiest how to try to refute what I'm saying. I happen to have extensive exposure to this situation, and my statement stands. If you think something is factually innacurate, than spell it out. I'm not just some windows fanatic, I have and use Linux, Windows, and have even owned one of Apples' less than lusterful computers.
Ok, so I probably shouldn't respond to AC but you called me a troll. I believe the original parent was talking about replacement hardware. Like drives, RAM, etc. To say this stuff costs more for a Mac is patently false. My mac uses the same stuff the PC uses. On the actual system prices, Apple is not out of line. In many cases they beat a comparable system from PC manufacturers by thousands. Look at the XServe vs. Dell's offering. Or go spec out a dual Xeon vs. a dual G5. In a few cases Apple comes out a little more expensive, by a couple hundred dollars at most. But usually you get a lot more for your money. Take the 17" Powerbook for instance. A 'comparable' PC notebook might cost a couple hundred less, but does it come with GigE or the obvious 17" screen? Nope. And my guess is that if you looked at hardware failure rates, the expensive Apple comes out smelling like roses.
This is just one school and less than 300 machines, but a few days ago the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Beachwood Middle School has equipped all of its students and faculty with iBooks.
MacCentral: Beachwood, Ohio school getting iBooks
Cleveland Plain Dealer: New Beachwood school virtually equipped
Administrators tend not to like Apple because they look at dollars, and Apples appear to be expensive. I know that when I worked at Northwestern University, we had to continually fight for Apple against that attitude. However, I also know that in NU's public computing labs, one Mac administrator could manage at least three times as many machines as one PC administrator.
Virtual PC costs about $200-$240, depending on which flavor of Windows you want to run on it. Not particularly cheap, but probably cheaper than a PC running anything other than Lindows. And since it includes Windows, it includes the things Windows includes, like IE and media player. It doesn't include extra apps that might be bundled with a new PC, though.
If you want to do this with a Mac old enough that it didn't come with OS 9 or OS X, and you haven't already upgraded to OS 9 or OS X (almost every Mac capable of running Virtual PC is capable of running OS X) then yes, I suppose you'd need to get OS 9 or OS X as well. I can't really comment on what version of MacOS schools are using, these days.
From a school's position, an eMac with a reasonable amount of RAM and Virtual PC with whatever Windows OS they like should be under $1K. Given educational discounts and bulk discounts, I'd say significantly under, probably closer to $500 than to $1K, but I'm really guessing. And for that, they get a Mac that runs most or all of their existing Mac apps (hey, if they've got System 5 stuff, all bets are off ;) and Windows, and DOS, and various things from the UNIX/Linux world, yadda yadda.
(Oh, and of course, once you've got VirtualPC installed, I'm pretty sure you can take whatever OS install CD's you've got lying around for PC's, and set those other OSes up under it, too. I think I've got some Linux CD's somewhere here, maybe I'll put that hypothesis to the test right now.)
Sorry to hear that, but your views are in the minority.
Inabliity to wrap text? you mean on the zoomed in screenshots of apps ive made? If you want to see the full thing, click on the links to view the app.
Most of my test users figured that out.
Im glad
At first part students must understand very deep details of OS design and they have to understand that by practicing: kernel configuration, disk partioning, filesystem choice, init scripts.
If you will promise your students that OS has a kernel with drivers they won't understand it. If you will shouw the control panel of some driver configuration in Windows they will remember it as a control panel. But if they will configure the kernel in Linux and build it to see the difference between configurations - that will give them a much better picture of the kernel design.
As for Gentoo, it will be a great step for a student after a lot of manual work with LFS to learn how to automate some aspects of system installation, what are system and application packages. and what is their life cicle. Gentoo's Portage demostrates the most fine-grained control of package dependencies. Making own ebuilds for existing open source applications will teach various application building techniques.
After playing with many application packages on both LFS and Gentoo a student will have a very deep understandig of what is networking, document processing, databasing, graphics, music etc. A student will remember it in concepts rather than in screenshot images of control panels, like that would be after close-source OSes like Windows or OSX.
Less is more !
OSX as Unix is very-very different from Linux. Different FS layout, different libraries, lots of compatibility problems. You can gradually shift to the common Linux distro having unified really many things on both. Just install Gentoo/PPC on Macs and Gentoo/x86 on PCs. Oh, and by the way, you'll get a very good tool to combine your proprietary updates with the mainstream from the distro vendor: Portage it's called.
Less is more !
As for Apple's educational problems being caused by Apple... I doubt it. I think it's more a reflection of the computer environment where 95% of the users just assume that everyone wants to use Microsoft... and the IT professionals try to coax, bully, and engineer the remaining 5% into being absorbed into the Microsoft environment.
All I can say for my own computing preferences: thank god for Apple and Linux...
philcrissman.com.
We should be teaching Linux because Linux will have over 20% desktop marketshare by 2008 on Desktops http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4287
Linux also will be standard for servers, I mean after MSblaster, Sobig, Code Red, etc.
Who will be using Windows in 2008? No one who is serious about security would choose to use Windows, and even if they did use Windows it would not be the current Windows.
I think you'd be better of teaching them Linux because unlike Windows, the Linux commands dont change much, Windows was based on Dos, now its not, it keeps changing from 3.1 to 95 to NT and XP, they keep releasing "new" standards, they keep changing formats, the price keeps going up on Windows software which confirms that the majority of the world wont be able to afford Windows.
So why arent schools teaching Linux, the cheaper more stable alternative to Windows? Well Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, he pays schools to use his software via donations, if someone is offering to donate millions of dollars worth of free hardware if you agree to use their software and only their software on it, it doesnt matter if the mac is better or if linux is cheaper, using Linux wont get you hundreds of free PCs, Microsoft is donating(paying) schools to run their software.
So theres nothing to debate or choose here, you can run Windows and get hundreds of free state of the art PCs, or you can use Linux on your 486s. Mac isnt even an option because Apple even if they give away macs, wont give away as many as Microsoft can afford to give PC/Windows, and Linux is also taking away Apples core market, people who want higher quality and who want the state of the art multimedia computer to render graphics are choosing Linux now over Macs because Linux allows them to do rendering better and on slower computers.
I just dont see a market for Apple besides their Ibook series of laptops which I plan to buy. Their Imacs arent as good as the PC spec for spec, their G5 is good but its also $2000, it doesnt support games so anyone who wants the 64bit CPU wont have anything to run on it because most of the games come out for Windows, Linux supports more games than the Mac believe it or not, theres alot of issues.
If I could give advice to Apple I'd tell them to release OSX for the x86, to stop focusing on hardware and focus on what they do best, the software, and to compete directly with Windows.
I should be able to go into a store to buy the new Itanium or Clawhammer based PC, and see it running OSX, next to it I should see WindowsXP, and Linux. There is no way that I'd walk out with XP or Linux because OSX is easier to use than Linux while its more secure than Windows.
So yes there is a market for Apple, just not the education market, their market would be college students and the enterprise where people value security, stability, and polish/quality.
In school I dont see demand for Mac, people are asking for better games, or more power/speed, I dont see anyone complaining that Windows is too hard to use, at least not the people who are in school today.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Thanks for that link, it's currently off doing the rounds. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Now, I may be more than a bit biased in this regard (my girlfriend is homeschooled), but I have to take exception to your comment. While the homeschoolers I know are more introverted than many of my friends (blame it on the lack of "socialization" if you want, but most of them are geeks and geeks are not generally outgoing), they are certainly not screwed up either academically or socially. Most of them are extremely smart, both in the amount of information they know and in their skills in applying it.
I'm sure that I'm not typical in my experiences with homeschoolers. Some go to my church, and some former homeschoolers went to my high school. The others I met through math competitions (USA Math Olympiad), or through my girlfriend (whom I also met through math stuff; we both scored in the top 12 nationally on the USAMO). While this is clearly a biased slice, you might notice that homeschooled children have disproportionately high representation in all sorts of academic competitions (national spelling bee, math competitions, etc).
And yes, many of them have teachers for parents. But I would guess this is true of a large proportion of homeschoolers, as teachers are often critical of public schools and can't afford private ones.
I googled briefly for numbers, and here's what I found:
"The average SAT scores of home-schooled students were 568 Verbal and 532 Math, above the national averages of 505 Verbal and 514 Math."
Unfortunately, SAT scores are a really lousy metric. I wasn't able to find any info on other standardized tests, such as those given in elementary school; these would probably be better indicators. Students who homeschool all the way through high school probably have a better time than those who just homeschool for a year or two.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.