Dec 4 2004
Rich Brooks replies to the Mac user cultists
Rich Brooks, the poor little moron who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, has written a follow up to “The Mac attack: No sympathy here for teachers polishing Apples” in which he addresses the deluge of emails he has received since posting his original article.
The new article, “Revenge of the Mac user cultists (and why they missed the point)” is ironically titled since, in spite of the constructive and informative feedback he received, he still doesn’t get it. He’d rather dismiss the facts as being the cultic mantra of a group blindly faithful to Steve Jobs than consider these points as relevant.
At one point he concedes, “Macs are not as susceptible to viruses and spyware attacks. This appears to be true.” and then he ignores that fact when he states, “And it’s more cost-effective for schools to maintain one type of computer platform.” I’d agree if he was referring to Macs but he’s not. How can it be more cost effective to maintain a Windows-based system, the system most susceptible to viruses and spyware attacks, than the Mac OS, the system that is nearly immune to them?
He says, “If more than 95 percent of the students with home computers operate on a PC platform, it makes sense for the school district to use the same platform.” Sure, if the lessons learned on Macs were incompatible with the PC world, yes, that would make sense. But file compatibility and software usability is practically universal. Word processing, the internet and most other common computer functions run much the same on either platform and files from a PC version of an application will also be compatible with the Mac version of that same application.
So why not establish a low maintenance system that affords more uptime and hours available for instruction instead of a system that will become infected on a regular basis by the 95 percent of students who bring their homework in on floppy disks carrying the viruses from their Windows PCs?
To Rich Brooks I say, ‘Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. You are a Windows Fool.
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