DIY ideas for Raspberry Pi?

[Bernard Peek]

That's probably your loss. Some people use it very badly for jobs that it's not suited for. But for the jobs it does well there is nothing else.

It's good for rapid prototyping without needing a single line of code. It includes a database engine, interfaces to back-end systems, import-export tools, a visual forms designer and a very powerful report generator. You can get some of those features in separate products but they won't integrate as well. There have been various attempts at doing the same thing under Linux but none that I would trust my data to.

[Adrian C]

What should be taught is bare naked SQL, stored procedures, triggers and connection strings...

Access is a front end forms and VB thing that should have been killed off a long time ago or absorbed into something else. Excel I think.

Mis-spent 10 years of my life on that junk.

Meanwhile, my niece has been exposed to Microsoft Publisher at school :-(

Before the Software For Students deals, Publisher was a stupefyingly expensive package to buy for home practice use, and hence was pirated about widely.

[Tim Streater]

I've no idea what F1 is supposed to be for, but I can tell you that my OS has no equivalent to Start or CTRL-Alt-Del.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I once spent several days trying to get access to do something beyond give me a default view of a flat table.

I had MySQL doing useful stuff in under a day, and couple into a php html form in less than a week.

And isn't a patch on Quark anwyay.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I discovered when playing a little RPG, that insert and delete make my character shuffle around in a circle, and F7 lights a bonfire.

I love these intuitive GUIS.

[Tim Streater]

RPG?

[John Williamson]

F1 is the Windows standard way to open the Help menu in an application, and has been since Windows 3, if not before.

CTRL-Alt-Del works on Windows, DOS and used to work on Linux until they started trapping it and ignoring it in the GUI. The last time I tried it, it still worked in a text terminal under X. I assume there's an equivalent on Apple machines.

[Adrian C]

F1 on most PC applications brings up the Help information for an application. You have a 'help' key?

Ctrl-Alt-Del on a PC with Windows is a short cut for starting task manager, locking, logging out or rebooting the machine.

I'm sure you have other equivalent basic key command combinations that a Mac user is expected to know, to get on with things. And a funky out of the box introduction video for users to watch to learn these things.

New Window / Linux users don't have that luxury.

[Tim Streater]

Nope.

Not on this keybaord. SWMBO's has one, but generally you look in the app's Help menu.

Not here. And you've forgotten Start.

That may be but you're just confirming what I said, that these other things are OS-specific.

[stuart noble]

In Access tables are only ever tables. Forms and reports based on the table present the data any way you please. I had a lot of fun learning the basics of Access. I never got beyond macros though, and I suspect most people don't need to either. It's the "relational" aspect that should be taught, something that IME programmers don't necessarily understand too well!

[stuart noble]

Yes, interesting that. Kids seem to learn by attacking things, picking up random scraps of information, and joining the dots up later on. Drag and drop appears to come naturally. The trick is they don't forget things like grown ups.

Especially in Win 7 :-)

[Tim]

Rocket propelled grenade. ;-)

Alternatively, "role playing game" at a guess.

Tim

[Adrian C]

That's your Apple menu. Apple logo top left of your screen (sensible place). And then there's the dock....

Forget the specifics, the underlying is the same. There are buttons that do this, there are mouse movements that do that. There are controls in a car that once someone has learn't driving can adjust to using be it a BMW or a Trabant.

For someone who is just introduced to computers and needs to start work with an appplication, the rudiments of working with an operating system is the first hurdle to overcome. There will need to be initial specific training to suit a particular computer system, granted, but Mac's aren't so different once ye have picked up on using one of the others.

Now explain to someone how to click, drag and release. OS specific?

[Mathew Newton]

It might be ideal to control my Internet cat feeder:

current incarnation with a Linksys WRT54GL is a tad overkill, and arguably a waste of a fairly decent router!

When the dust has settled I might take a look.

Mathew

[Ghostrecon]

I've taught relational databases at A level (computer science) - but not with ACCESS IIRC I used VFP8 at the time

There are 2 areas here ICT - word processing, spreadsheets, files folders etc whichh all will still do and the computer science aspect (what the RPi is targeted on) how cmputing machines work etc

[dennis]

VisualStudio and M$ SQL server, both free.

[Tim Streater]

That's my point - provided it's not taught in an OS-specific way.

[dennis]

Its far worse when you are used to a multitouch screen and suddenly find you only have a touchpad and keyboard.

[dennis]

I used to have a dock like that on my win95 machine. I can't remember who wrote it but they obviously didn't patent it before Apple reinvented it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Role Playing Game. Dungeons and Dragons? also a MUD - multiuser dungeon?

Your character walks around killing things and making things and trading..

It runs on Linux and its free, which is why I tried it.