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jema
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Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28111
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Mon Feb 02, 15 9:07 pm Post subject:
This is what I wish it had been all along, brilliant as the original was, the cpu and memory was suitable for applications from ten years or more ago. That was just too great a gulf to bridge really Memory in particular just did not get close to what was needed. 1gb on the other hand is a serious amount to use.

oldish chris

Joined: 14 Jun 2006
Posts: 4148
Location: Comfortably Wet Southport

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 8:10 am Post subject:

jema wrote:

This is what I wish it had been all along, brilliant as the original was, the cpu and memory was suitable for applications from ten years or more ago.
That was just too great a gulf to bridge really

Memory in particular just did not get close to what was needed.
1gb on the other hand is a serious amount to use.

Doesn't this just make it a dead cheap PC? I thought that it was an entry into robotics. Suddenly, no more clever than when I cobbled together a tower system with bits recovered from another one plus some discarded peripherals. But way less clever than the first microcomputer I used, which we programmed an Assembler to emulate a particular mainframe communication protocol. The printer socket was re-purposed to connect to a string of ten remote terminals.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28111
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 9:00 am Post subject:
Well it hasn't lost anything, in fact it has gained more hardware pins.

oldish chris

Joined: 14 Jun 2006
Posts: 4148
Location: Comfortably Wet Southport

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 10:08 am Post subject:

jema wrote:

Well it hasn't lost anything, in fact it has gained more hardware pins.

You're right. What informs my prejudices is noticing that a lot of "IT Skills" are in fact, lessons in how to use Microsoft products, skirting round design methodologies. They think that being able to cobble together a few tables using Access and then telling us how its done using a Powerpoint presentation is the acme of computing. With the Pi you get, at the top level, experience of more than one OS, and when you get coding in a real programming language, you actually get to know how a computer works.

vegplot

Joined: 19 Apr 2007
Posts: 21301
Location: Bethesda, Gwynedd

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 10:16 am Post subject:

oldish chris wrote:

jema wrote:

Well it hasn't lost anything, in fact it has gained more hardware pins.

There are so many layers to IT skills from the very cursory 'how to use this computer to do what you want ' to low level peripheral I/O programming in assembler. One does not trump the other. They are all skills and to be actively encouraged.

Go on treat yourself.

oldish chris

Joined: 14 Jun 2006
Posts: 4148
Location: Comfortably Wet Southport

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 11:09 am Post subject:

vegplot wrote:

Go on treat yourself.

That looks fun, although these days I tend to avoid learning technical stuff (I know it shows). I'm very happy with Linux, 'cos I come from the era when Unix was the usual operating system. Doesn't make me an expert, its just that I don't get phased/frustrated with the architecture and command line.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28111
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 5:48 pm Post subject:

A lot of IT teaching is the height of absurdity, I recall Amipest being told off at school for entering HTML rather than let a HTML editor do it

As such I quite liked the idea of a lower specced cheap machine encouraging people to get back to getting down and dirty with things.

But sadly this is not the 1980's where you did build from scratch, the wealth of Linux bits and bobs are there to play with and the basic raspberry pi wasn't really capable of playing.

oldish chris

Joined: 14 Jun 2006
Posts: 4148
Location: Comfortably Wet Southport

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 6:03 pm Post subject:

jema wrote:

I recall Amipest being told off at school for entering HTML rather than let a HTML editor do it

I'm stunned, seriously, I'm stunned. In my case the headmaster would have got a stonking letter two days later!

One year I actually sat on the academic standards board for a nearby university, (I was the only bloke the Principal lecturer knew who was familiar with the design methods being taught and worked for a FTSE 100 company

) that would have been given a prominent position in the letterified rant.

tahir

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 45425
Location: Essex

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 6:06 pm Post subject:

jema wrote:

A lot of IT teaching is the height of absurdity

I'm constantly amazed at my kids lack of IT skills despite having "ICT" since the age of 5.

vegplot

Joined: 19 Apr 2007
Posts: 21301
Location: Bethesda, Gwynedd

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 6:58 pm Post subject:

jema wrote:

A lot of IT teaching is the height of absurdity, I recall Amipest being told off at school for entering HTML rather than let a HTML editor do it

I would assume that by then she knew more than the teacher.

oldish chris

Joined: 14 Jun 2006
Posts: 4148
Location: Comfortably Wet Southport

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 7:28 pm Post subject:

vegplot wrote:

jema wrote:

A lot of IT teaching is the height of absurdity, I recall Amipest being told off at school for entering HTML rather than let a HTML editor do it

I would assume that by then she knew more than the teacher.

Which surely makes it even worse? Just checked with web designing son, if a school pupil were to ask him how to create a website, he'd say "Get a book on HTML!". BTW he always works in "Code View".

vegplot

Joined: 19 Apr 2007
Posts: 21301
Location: Bethesda, Gwynedd

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 7:58 pm Post subject:

oldish chris wrote:

vegplot wrote:

jema wrote:

A lot of IT teaching is the height of absurdity, I recall Amipest being told off at school for entering HTML rather than let a HTML editor do it

I would assume that by then she knew more than the teacher.

Which surely makes it even worse? Just checked with web designing son, if a school pupil were to ask him how to create a website, he'd say "Get a book on HTML!". BTW he always works in "Code View".

This is the way I build websites.

oldish chris

Joined: 14 Jun 2006
Posts: 4148
Location: Comfortably Wet Southport

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 9:20 pm Post subject:

I see, interesting. A little while back the word on every politician's lips was "Coding".

I wasn't quite sure what "Coding" meant, so I assumed that they didn't have much of a clue. (To me, it is the penultimate stage of writing a program - followed by testing.)

However, at the high level, there is "structure", lower down "logic", both of which (to me) are clearly visible in Vegplot's snapshot.

Getting some sort of a computer and just coding, might be a taster, but quite a few hours of theory are needed. Faffing about with a code generator (IMHO) isn't going to do it.

That's why I dismiss a Windows 10 version of the Raspberry Pi. (Unless the Pi version comes with a couple of programming languages and a decent text editor.) It's a cheap way of getting on Facebook. (Said the cynic

)

vegplot

Joined: 19 Apr 2007
Posts: 21301
Location: Bethesda, Gwynedd

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 15 9:55 pm Post subject:

oldish chris wrote:

That's why I dismiss a Windows 10 version of the Raspberry Pi. (Unless the Pi version comes with a couple of programming languages and a decent text editor.) It's a cheap way of getting on Facebook. (Said the cynic

)

and it is that as well. It also opens a whole range of opportunities for programmers and code creatives. What you see in the snapshot is a website. It's a highly evolved one in that uses the MVC model (ASP.NET MVC to be precise which is open source) using a Visual Studio 2103 Community Editions (which is free) running on IIS Express (again free) on Windows 8.1 (which isn't). However Windows 10 for PI will be free (so I believe).

With this same IDE I could also develop SQL systems, console applications, cloud apps, mobile apps, using VB, C#, F#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, and Python should I chose.

I think that's reasonably decent if only a subset is made available and I haven't even mentioned .NET Micro for resource-constrained devices with at least 256 KBytes of flash and 64 KBytes of RAM.

Last edited by vegplot on Wed Feb 04, 15 9:18 am; edited 1 time in total

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 45472
Location: yes

Posted: Wed Feb 04, 15 1:54 am Post subject:

i got left behind at the hex stage and have never caught up

i did write bbc basic to run an auto sample glc and auto titration kit but as far as coding goes i would be lost with modern stuff

i might manage to write a protocol for a simple system but even simple modern stuff is too complex to get into details afaic

im hoping that the pi will be the tool to teach the folk who do the next stuff

a generation of kids who can polish a box we sold you seems a bit wasteful

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