How schools are tricked into using PCs--when Macs are better

Zdnet ^ | 2/11/02 | Bob Shier

[KEVLAR]

Hey now, leave us Amiga users out of this! :)

[B Knotts]

I have to agree with you. I don't even use a Mac, but I still get irritated with all the uninformed mouthing-off that goes on regarding Macs.

[boris]

I am suspicious of "computer" classes that basically teach how to use Excel and Word.

If the schools are not teaching programming then they are not teaching anything useful. Kids will pick up Excel and Word as they need them. By college, they'll be proficient. But programming is not being taught--as far as I can tell. Teach them Visual Basic, or "C" (if you insist). I prefer Fortran and assembly language but I am a dinosaur.

Oh, and BTW, there seem to be many more choices for programming languages and implimentations on the PC side than on the Mac side.

--Boris

[brianl703]

Not surprising that a C64 or a C128 would last 20 years, especially since they have no moving parts (not even a power supply fan). Solid-state electronics are extremely reliable. That said, I'm sure there are IBM PCs out there that are still running. It's not worth my effort to plug one in and turn it on, though.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Oh, and BTW, there seem to be many more choices for programming languages and implimentations on the PC side than on the Mac side.

Maybe, maybe not.  There were a lot of choices before Mac OS X, but now, you have the entire GNU toolset as well as any FSF and GPLed software available to you through the aqua interface.  So basically, you now have all the old Mac tools, the Next tools and Linux tools available to you.  Not to mention the fact that you can also have *all* of the windows tools available to you if you so desire (I don't know why you would, after all Visual Basic and Visual C as development environments stink to high heaven.  The Borland and CodeWarrior products have far more elegant IDEs).

[Asclepius]

Why ask me? I don't care. Ask Frumious Bandersnatch. He seems to be the Mac fan.

Yeah. But you actually know what you're talking about. So to make things fair I think you should help the Mac partisans a little bit.

[Asclepius]

Oracle 8 and MySQL. You can also use FileMaker and 4D. I use MySQL everyday on my MacOS X machine.

As an enterprise server? I think not.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

People use what works best for them. Period. Apple wants people to belief that capitalism does NOT work - ie. the "better mousetrap"

Not necessarily.  More often, they work with what they know.  If they worked with what was best for them, Oracle wouldn't be around, and MS would be struggling for a 5% market share.  The point is that quite often, marketing wins out over technical superiority.  Beta over VHS, Oracle over about any other RDBMS, Windows over Mac, etc.  Mind, I'm not against Windows per se, because I feel that it has kept Apple on its toes and continue to develop and deliver a superior product.

But just because something has the largest market share, does not mean that it is technically the best.  If that were the case, then socialism, not capitalism would be the superior system today.

[toupsie]

As an enterprise server? I think not.

Yep. Run in on a MacOS X Server, SCSI RAID array, PowerMac G4/Dual 1GHz server. More than enough power for a medium sized business. If you need to scale you can always cluster MacOS X Server (builtin). You can save tons of money by moving to MySQL from ORacle if you don't need the super high end functions of Oracle.

Mac OS X is UNIX just like DEC Tru64 and Sun Solaris. Do some reading. Learn a little bit.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Why ask me? I don't care. Ask Frumious Bandersnatch. He seems to be the Mac fan.

Sure I am.  Also a Linux and VMS fan.  I use Windows at work (as well as Linux 2.4) and I can tell you that it is not nearly as fun to use as either Mac or Linux.

But anyway, any software that you can run on a Windows machine can be configured to run on a Mac.  In a less-broad sense, I believe that Oracle and MySQL run natively on a Mac.  With the new MacOS X out, I see no reason why Ingres (as well as others) can't be easily ported to it (if it doesn't already run on it out of the box).  Certainly University Ingres should have no problems with it, since it was a BSD-base product from the very beginning.

[Asclepius]

... if you don't need the super high end functions of Oracle ...

Precisely.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

"Hello?!?!?! MacOS X is UNIX! "

Thanks. I honestly didn't know that.
Be that as it may, what these kids are going to be seeing in a network environtment is NT, Win2K, HP-UX, Solaris, Novell and a host of others. Not Mac OS. That was my point.

[Ptaz]

How schools are tricked into using PCs--when Macs are better

Having taught macs, pcs and having been a teacher for many years, I feel qualified to comment.

1. The majority of teachers in most public schools have minimal skills on the PC and very little time or motivation to learn.

2. Public school budgets are very limited and having on-hand a wide variety of software isn't going to happen.

3. In-service training of teachers does not generally concentrate on effective methods of using the computer in the classroom. Many times it's used "to keep someone busy" while something else is occurring.

4. Software for the Mac (even if you get the budget money) is more limited than it is for the PC/Windows format.

5. I worked in a company that used Macs....they quickly phased them out as did many companies using them in the mid 90s because networking was limited and database support wasn't there.

6. Most businesses use PCs....if you want your kids to be employable in the mainstream, they need to use what the market users.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

"But you actually know what you're talking about. "

Whoa! Oh no you don't! You say that and everyone will think I know what I'm talking about.   =;^)
I was just tossing my 2 cents in. The last thing I want is to get dragged into a Win/Mac turf war. I've got work to do today.

[Stuck in Arkansas]

Gay guys tend to like Mac's as well.

You say that as if it were a bad thing. Are you a homophobe or something?
Face it. Mac users are simply more enlightened and progressive than the typical Windoze user.

[Dawgsquat]

Weasel Alert! ;)

[dighton]

Yeah right, lure me into a religious war.

[Bush2000]

It's simple: If you're going to teach a kid to use a computer, you might as well teach him on a computer that the rest of the business world uses. Macs aren't a business tool. Case closed.

[Noumenon]

Stop whining and trying to convert us. You are like a bunch of Jehovah's Witnesses, only not as polite.

Coming to the door naked is usually a good ploy to use on the door-to-door religious solicitors. Alternatively, one of my old neighbors in San Francisco used to come to the door in a Viking outfit (complete with horned helmet and a sledge hammer) and yell Odin! at the top of his lungs.

I don't think that either of these techniques would work with Tali-Macers.

[Noumenon]

You can't even buy a CAD package for a Mac; they don't have the processor power to run them, so the developers don't port their software to them.

Yep - back in 1991, as a consultant to LifeScan, I had to persuade one engineering group to dump their Mac setup in favor of an SGI server and four workstations (Running Irix, SGI's flavor of unix). Reason: The Macs were incapable of running the finite stress analysis package the department needed to do its work. The company was dominated by a Mac-centric IT dept. But every single one of he science and lab people used the PCs of the day - shitty as they were - simply because they played better with their lab instruments. In the course of supporting several hundred Mac users, I got to see that little bomb icon quite a lot.