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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Schools Switching from Macs to “Personal Computers”

File this under the “bull­shit” cat­e­gory: Schools in Pinel­las County, Florida will be switch­ing from Macs to “Per­sonal Com­put­ers” for stu­pid rea­sons (aside from the fact that they appar­ently do not real­ize that Macs are per­sonal com­put­ers too).

One teacher is quoted stat­ing “With PCs, the kids should get more com­puter time” and “I usu­ally like to work with PCs, with Win­dow [sic] because you’re not lim­ited as much.” To quote fur­ther from the arti­cle, “Teacher Ten­ishela Bar­ganier says she remem­bers being ner­vous about the switch at first, but thinks per­sonal com­put­ers are a bet­ter tool for teach­ing students.”

And this from the District’s IT man­ager: “…the only sig­nif­i­cant cost fac­tor will be pay­ing two dif­fer­ent staffs to main­tain the two systems.”

I under­stand the basic con­cept behind the switch, but I don’t agree with giv­ing a false impres­sion that Macs are some­how infe­rior, when it’s more likely that the School District’s IT staff is sim­ply incompetent.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, October 7th, 2003.

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11 comments on “Schools Switching from Macs to “Personal Computers””

  1. Posted by ak on Tuesday, October 7th, 2003.

    how else do you expect IT peo­ple to main­tain there jobs.

    only by com­pli­cat­ing it all do they have job security..

  2. Posted by Mike on Tuesday, October 7th, 2003.

    Do they even bother to edit their arti­cles before they post them to the web? How ridicu­lous is it to have TYPOS in a pub­lished work, espe­cially with a word (trade­marked word at that) so com­mon as Windows?

    And the worst thing is that some stu­pid PC sites are going to pick up this arti­cle, then write their own arti­cle doc­u­ment­ing the side-effects of work­ing with Macs in edu­ca­tion, how­ever made-up those may be.

    Hey, when’s webgraph.com gonna be rockin’?

  3. Posted by Adam Polselli on Tuesday, October 7th, 2003.

    Yea, my school recently switched from Apples to “per­sonal com­put­ers” too. Dells, to be exact. It is quite ridicu­lous, see­ing that the dis­trict has been using Apples since the per­sonal com­puter (not to be con­fused with “per­sonal com­puter”) was introduced.

  4. Posted by Dan on Tuesday, October 7th, 2003.

    ak: Agreed. John Gru­ber sums up that mind­set in this arti­cle.

    Mike: The typos cracked me up too. I think it’s fair to say that the research behind this arti­cle was about as thor­ough as the proof reading…

    webgraph.com has under­gone another redesign (it’s ter­ri­ble when so many iter­a­tions never see the light of day…) and is at a point where I’m happy with it. We’re actu­ally look­ing for a good copy­writer to help flesh out the text (since I abhor writ­ing pro­mo­tional copy, though I can edit to beat the band…) and a few case stud­ies, and we’ll be ready.

  5. Posted by Emilio Vanni on Wednesday, October 8th, 2003.

    They wrote: Mac­In­tosh with the cap­i­tal “I”…

  6. Posted by Dan on Thursday, October 9th, 2003.

    Emilio: That’s what clinched it for me. Either very poor report­ing is to blame, or an edi­tor who should be fired.

  7. Posted by Emilio Vanni on Thursday, October 9th, 2003.

    Dan: And you are not read­ing the ital­ian press: online, mag­a­zines, newspapers.

    “Arti­cles” like this are “standards”.

    :(

  8. Posted by vlad on Friday, October 10th, 2003.

    http://daringfireball.net/2003/08/good_times.html

    i sub­scribe to the point of view that macs are eas­ier to main­tain than pcs, but by buy­ing pcs the it staff assures their own job security.

  9. Posted by HD on Friday, October 10th, 2003.

    Guys, big deal. Enough about the typos… It’s stu­pid… Stu­pid like the fact that most geeks think that the path to enlight­ened geek­dom requires you to hate on Microsoft and Billy here… Whereis, every com­pany makes mis­takes, and you need to be an agres­sive player in this world mar­ket… BIG DEAL!

    But to the point… Yea most ‘kidz think that Macs “suck” … I quote… From about fifty teenagers… Bil­lion… Teenagers… And I’m still the only guy in my school who knows how to han­dle, love, enjoy, and USE a Mac…

    Hey, I agree that Mac OS 9 and below weren’t as … Hmm, sim­ple enough for those idi­otic teenagers to use… But then again, when I ask them if they’ve even got­ten a glimpse of Mac OS X, and they say ‚“NO! MACS SUCK!” … And I reply,

    “Yea, I’ve seen Mac OS X… Don’t go see it for your­self… Macs suck… A lot!” and they say “Yea, your cool now” …

    LOL… My sar­casm can fool the idi­otic of idi­otic teenagers… Gee wiz… How our world turns…

    OH YEA… And MACS ARE EASIER TO MAINTAIN… The newest ones are… Even when com­pared to XP… But then again, the point still winds down to the fact that most schools have Mac OS 9 and old, out­dated sys­tems… Cheers.

  10. Posted by Andrew Bytes on Tuesday, October 14th, 2003.

    Why not Imper­sonal Com­put­ers… you know… they never call, don’t even know your name… they refer to you as HUMAN 1 HUMAN 2 etc… ya know how about this Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence stuff… why isn’t there MORE research on arti­fi­cial STUPIDITY!! And another thing, why do I need to stick disks INTO my com­puter, why not have the darn thing cre­ate a death grip suc­tion action, and PULL THE DAMN THING IN ITSELF!!! IT’S ALL AN OUTRAGE!!! WHY IS up UP! Couldn’t that be DOWN all along, and we’re just call­ing it by the WRONG NAME, but the guy that NAMED it — well — he’s all COOL about it, and all that crap!!

  11. Posted by Fidel on Sunday, October 19th, 2003.

    “because you’re not lim­ited as much”

    As “igno­rant” as she may be she’s right. Just because you say your com­puter never breaks doesn’t mean it can do as much. Macs are com­put­ing appli­ances. Built for peo­ple that can’t fix thier com­puter when some­thing goes wrong. My com­puter may break but at least I can fix mine. I can also make it bet­ter and 100% cus­tomized to me and MY needs.