Afternoon tech news:: A St. Petersburg Times column talks about the recent decision by a Florida school district to eliminate Macs and will run at 3.2GHz and come with 2MB of level-three cache.
Comments
"I totally endorse the decision of Howard Hinesley, the school chief in Pinellas County, to eliminate Apple computers from the public schools and switch to Windows-based computers.
ERROR: THE FILE "WHATSIS.DLL' HAS UNEXPECTEDLY DISAPPEARED FROM THE HARD DRIVE.
After all, the entire point of public education is to prepare children for the real world, and the real world is dominated by Windows.
There is no sense in letting kids get accustomed to easier-to-use, more reliable machines that are less prone to viruses when they will have to grow up and survive in the modern workplace."
I couldn't have said it better, it doesn't matter if the mac is easier, kids need to be able to deal with the computer that has major marketshare, whether good or bad isn't the point, and being the mac is so easy, then why have kids learn about that in school when they could do it at home themselves, the wintel world needs more articles like this!
Dude, his article supporting using wintel in schools was a joke. He was making fun of the technology in his article with his constant references to windows crashing and the terrible frightening user experience that Windows offers. He is actually making fun of windows and promoting the Mac OS.
That St. Petersburg Times article was hilarious! Great to see a journalist willing to stand up and poke fun at the status quo.
Andy
Hello, can you say sarcasm (I was talking about the poster, not the article, which is sarcasm in of itself).
Now I can finally play all my games "to the extreme!" (or is that Xtreme)!!! This is great!! What we all need!!! More buzzwordy products. Guess Intel was tired of Apple putting fancy and hype-heavy names on lame technology.
Actually, it's the other way around. Intel started the Extreme goofy naming convention way back with Intel Extreme Graphics for their laptop chipsets. Then Apple followed much later with Quartz/Airport Extreme.
Schools don't prepare kids for the computers of the present, but the computers of the working world in several years (you know, when they actually graduate). At that time, the systems being used are likely to be more like OS X than Windows because of the reasons it works better and because, in all honesty, in 10 years Linux will be the majority of the computer world.
Look at history: which would prepare you better for computing in the 90s? A DOS-based PC from the mid-80s or a Mac from the mid-80s?
Intel always knew that 2mb level 3 cash improves performance but never offered that to their customers because, hey, they will still buy the chips even if they are missing the important cache. Now that the Athlon64 is about to hit the shelves and will actually smoke the cache-choked P4, Intel has decided to add L3 cache to the P4 so as to remain just a smidge faster than the nearest competitor. They did it for themselves and not the consumer. Just look at the price: $3300 per chip wholesale if you buy them in blocks of 1000 chips. No consumer is going to own this chip, so it is merely bragging rights for Intel. At least Apple has offered systems with large L3 cache in the past and the entire cost of the system was less than the chip only cost of the P4X.
I epect that most people miss the point about using MACs in school. Why the F*&k should a kid have to learn how to battle with a PC to make it work??????????
It's not the fickin' operating system that's impotant. It's the applications possible on a computer which are important.
The reason why the Mac is better for education is because its easier to get past the operating system to learn and explore.
OR
Network Headlines
Most Popular
MacNN Sponsor
Recent Reviews
MaxUpgrades MaxConnect for 2006-2008 Mac Pro
Nobody outside of Cupertino's privileged bunch knows the future of the Mac Pro line for sure. Despite Apple's reluctance to tell us wh ...
Brother HL-3170CDW LED Printer
We've mentioned before that we are far from a paperless society. For now, at least, there are tasks that require a piece of paper for ...
HTC One
It is hard to overstate just how critically important the HTC One is to the Taiwanese company’s fortunes. Despite its alarming decline ...
Most Commented
Popular News
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jul 2001
mmmm....
2mb cache...