Archive for: June 2005
§ ¶Vouchers in Milwaukee
Kevin Drum points to the start of a seven day series on Milwaukee’s 15-year experience with vouchers for low income students. Here’s the background:
Fifteen years ago, state government created in Milwaukee the biggest lab in the United States for one of the nation’s most provocative education ideas: giving low-income parents the chance to send their children to private schools using “vouchers” to pay school costs. Eight years later, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program expanded dramatically, and religious schools of every kind were made available to those parents.
It will be interesting to follow this series over the next several days.
§ ¶Apple and Intel
Lots of discussion on the net today about Apple’s announcement that it is transitioning to Intel-based processors in future Macs. This is big news in the computer industry, but shouldn’t make too big a ruckus in the education community. Most end users don’t care about what brand of CPU is running under the hood. This transition does not mean that your existing Dell will one day be able to run Mac OS X. It just means that the future Mac you might buy will have an Intel CPU inside.
The major headaches will be for developers, who will need to create a version of their application that can run on Intel-based Macs and PowerPC-based Macs. Developers who support the new universal binary format will be able to provide a single app that will run on either platform; developers who support separate Intel and PowerPC flavors of their applications will transfer some of their headaches to their customers.
In the end, it comes down to the same choices: buy a Macintosh, buy a Windows-based PC, or buy a Linux-based PC. The fact that Intel chips play a role in all three choices shouldn’t really change the nature of the decision.