On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:51:00 +0000, Martin Brown
wrote:

It wasn't exactly magic engineering, but up until the space race and the
need for really good mechanical seals in vacuum the packed gland was how
water pumps on cars were done and they has a serious tendency to leak
and dribble their vital fluids onto the floor. The space race put an end
to all that and modern cars use mechanical seals that were a spinoff of
the space race and/or cold war (useful in submarines too).

Quite possibly parallel development, but a serious contender for that
- the Teflon seal - was first used in the uranium seperation plants of
the 40s. I'd imagine it was classified in that use and whether it was
de-classified in time for the space race, I don't know.

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:04:48 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
F1 is the Windows standard way to open the Help menu in an application,
and has been since Windows 3, if not before.

Long before. It was documented as the preferred Help key on the very
first PC (there's a list of recommended keys in the original Technical
Reference Manual, circa 1981).

But didn't something for the PC use F3? Very hazy memory there... it
wasn't Wordperfect for DOS, was it?

On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:52:48 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:04:48 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
F1 is the Windows standard way to open the Help menu in an
application, and has been since Windows 3, if not before.

Long before. It was documented as the preferred Help key on the very
first PC (there's a list of recommended keys in the original Technical
Reference Manual, circa 1981).

But didn't something for the PC use F3? Very hazy memory there... it
wasn't Wordperfect for DOS, was it?

I think it probably was. But they were a law unto themselves.



--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:51:00 +0000, Martin Brown
wrote:

On 08/03/2012 10:06, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
wrote:

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:12:00 +0000, Tim Streater
wrote:

If we all had your attitude we'd never have put foosteps on the Moon.

Putting footsteps on the moon was relatively straightforward.

Really? Why bother with NASA at all, then?

I didn't say it was easy, or cheap. It just required organisation, and,
above all, the *will* to do it. But I don't think anyone doubted that it
was possible, or that any magic new engineering was required.

It wasn't exactly magic engineering, but up until the space race and the
need for really good mechanical seals in vacuum the packed gland was how
water pumps on cars were done and they has a serious tendency to leak
and dribble their vital fluids onto the floor. The space race put an end
to all that and modern cars use mechanical seals that were a spinoff of
the space race and/or cold war (useful in submarines too).

Presumably you are referring to carbon sealing rings for the water
pumps?

Crank and gearbox seals as used today originate back in the 1930's,
albeit with slightly more advanced materials.

GB Patent 479743 filed 10th February 1938

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publi...R=479743A&KC=A


--

On 08/03/12 22:38, Bob Eager wrote:
On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:52:48 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:04:48 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
F1 is the Windows standard way to open the Help menu in an
application, and has been since Windows 3, if not before.

Long before. It was documented as the preferred Help key on the very
first PC (there's a list of recommended keys in the original Technical
Reference Manual, circa 1981).

But didn't something for the PC use F3? Very hazy memory there... it
wasn't Wordperfect for DOS, was it?

I think it probably was. But they were a law unto themselves.

It was WordPerfect. The product existed before the IBM PC and was one of
the first word-processors available for the system. It's possible that
the choice of F3 was inherited from a previous version.



--
Bernard Peek

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:45:32 +0000, Bernard Peek wrote:
It was WordPerfect. The product existed before the IBM PC and was one of
the first word-processors available for the system. It's possible that
the choice of F3 was inherited from a previous version.

Ah, I didn't realise it was that old - I remember we had Wordperfect for
Unix and I always assumed that had grown out of the PC product, but maybe
it was the other way around...

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:00:55 +0000, John Rumm wrote:

On 05/03/2012 19:17, Ghostrecon wrote:
On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:35:36 +0000, stuart noble wrote:

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


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!

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

That takes me back a bit... used to like knocking up things in FoxPro
LAN in its DOS days ;-)

I remember foxpro... I think we mainly used dbase at uni, along with a
bit of ingres.

Anyone got any figures for how many students do computer science these
days at GCSE or A Level? IIRC when I did my A level in '85/6 there were
only about 120 students in the country that took it that year.. I get
the impression there have never been big numbers doing it.

No, but I did A-level CS '91-93 and I think we had about 20 people in the
class then, so across the whole country I expect there were a fair few.

But it was sort-of* interesting back then - there was more hardware
diversity, and it was more about programming than it was the "how to type
a letter" level which I think it all descended into not many years later.

* but easy. We used to work through stuff very quickly, to the point
where we were permitted by the teacher to skip classes and bugger off
into town rather than sit around thumb-twiddling.

cheers

Jules

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 07:36:42 +1100, Rod Speed wrote:
It isnt really feasible to teach either word processing or spreadsheets
without using specific examples of those, and it makes no sense to not
be using the most commonly used ones.

I think the core concepts are common enough that it doesn't matter. I'd
even go as far as to say that teaching a completely different product to
the most common one in current use is a good thing, because by the time
people enter the 'real world' things will likely have changed. The most
common product might no longer be so - or it may have been re-released
and re-worked to the point where the UI is different and the bells and
whistles work in subtly different ways that can catch people out.

Computing in general needs to be about teaching good logic, reasoning and
problem-solving skills, I think, *not* about how to use a specific set of
applications - and the fact that the academic world seems to have been
mostly doing the latter for the last decade or so is really holding us
back.

cheers

Jules

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:33:17 +0000, John Rumm wrote:
Its a pretty fair assessment though IMHO... For technical documents WP
is far more productive.

However there is one of the keys. If you are a techie user you will get
more done with WP. Word is probably easier to do the basics.

I don't think it's necessarily about the basics - but with the arrival of
Windows, Word beat Wordperfect when it came to making things look pretty.
Wordperfect had been all about the transferral of information, and Word
was more about style.

And now look where we are, fookin' hoooge documents stuffed to the gills
with clip-art... ;-)

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:16:12 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:31:12 +1100, Tony Bryer wrote:

I felt/feel that about Lotus WordPro. But I've just finished the 40,000
word manual for my new EuroBeam program and have produced it using Word
2010 because although WordPro runs on Win7 (after an error message) I'm
not convinced it will run on future versions of Windows and this manual
will hopefully stay in print (with revisions) for 15+ years.

And you reckon that this Word document will be readable by MS Word in 15
years time? Plain text, you know it makes sense. B-)

LaTeX will be around until the end of time. :-)

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:38:25 +0000, Mark wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:10:40 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

On 06/03/2012 20:25, Owain wrote:
On Mar 6, 4:43 pm, Bob Eager wrote:
BTw, can I have a prize for starting the fastest growing thread in
uk.d-i-y for quite a while?

The prize would be a RPi, but they're out of stock :-)

Sometime end of March the girl at CPC told me...

I was told end of April at the earliest.

I'm not expecting one until March of next year, but that's mostly based
upon an estimate of when I might order one after all the hype has died
down. :-)

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:17:44 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
Oh, there is...but I have plenty of othe rthings to play with in the
meantime...like ten Arduino nanos...

If you add another 990 of them, do they turn into a micro? (sorry, but
it is Friday...)

Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:16:12 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:31:12 +1100, Tony Bryer wrote:

I felt/feel that about Lotus WordPro. But I've just finished the 40,000
word manual for my new EuroBeam program and have produced it using Word
2010 because although WordPro runs on Win7 (after an error message) I'm
not convinced it will run on future versions of Windows and this manual
will hopefully stay in print (with revisions) for 15+ years.
And you reckon that this Word document will be readable by MS Word in 15
years time? Plain text, you know it makes sense. B-)

LaTeX will be around until the end of time. :-)


that's the end of this year isn't it?





--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.

On 09/03/2012 17:30, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:33:17 +0000, John Rumm wrote:
Its a pretty fair assessment though IMHO... For technical documents WP
is far more productive.

However there is one of the keys. If you are a techie user you will get
more done with WP. Word is probably easier to do the basics.

I don't think it's necessarily about the basics - but with the arrival of
Windows, Word beat Wordperfect when it came to making things look pretty.
Wordperfect had been all about the transferral of information, and Word
was more about style.

And now look where we are, fookin' hoooge documents stuffed to the gills
with clip-art... ;-)

A lot of it comes down to a conceptual difference in the document model
between WP and word. A WP document is a string of characters with
embedded formatting commands, a Word document is a nested set of objects
with inherited stylistic properties. Either does the job but Word is
more in keeping with current data design conventions.

Having been in a large organisation that made the transition from WP to
Word, there were a lot of users that never really made the mental
transition and were forever looking for the 'show codes' option, few
people ever got the notion of styles properly coming from WP.

Horses for courses really, the WP model makes tables a lot more
intuitive than Word - particularly after cells have been merged and
divided. Used properly, Word is better at enforcing corporate look and
feel (providing the stlyesheet is set up be someone who knows what they
are doing).

Chris K

Chris K :
On 09/03/2012 17:30, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:33:17 +0000, John Rumm wrote:
Its a pretty fair assessment though IMHO... For technical documents WP
is far more productive.

However there is one of the keys. If you are a techie user you will get
more done with WP. Word is probably easier to do the basics.

I don't think it's necessarily about the basics - but with the arrival of
Windows, Word beat Wordperfect when it came to making things look pretty.
Wordperfect had been all about the transferral of information, and Word
was more about style.

And now look where we are, fookin' hoooge documents stuffed to the gills
with clip-art... ;-)

A lot of it comes down to a conceptual difference in the document model
between WP and word. A WP document is a string of characters with
embedded formatting commands, a Word document is a nested set of
objects with inherited stylistic properties. Either does the job but
Word is more in keeping with current data design conventions.

Having been in a large organisation that made the transition from WP to
Word, there were a lot of users that never really made the mental
transition and were forever looking for the 'show codes' option, few
people ever got the notion of styles properly coming from WP.

Horses for courses really, the WP model makes tables a lot more
intuitive than Word - particularly after cells have been merged and
divided. Used properly, Word is better at enforcing corporate look
and feel (providing the stlyesheet is set up be someone who knows what
they are doing).

It would be great if you could examine those nested objects and their
properties. As in HTML.

--
Mike Barnes

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:59:02 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:16:12 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:31:12 +1100, Tony Bryer wrote:

I felt/feel that about Lotus WordPro. But I've just finished the
40,000 word manual for my new EuroBeam program and have produced it
using Word 2010 because although WordPro runs on Win7 (after an error
message) I'm not convinced it will run on future versions of Windows
and this manual will hopefully stay in print (with revisions) for 15+
years.
And you reckon that this Word document will be readable by MS Word in
15 years time? Plain text, you know it makes sense. B-)

LaTeX will be around until the end of time. :-)

that's the end of this year isn't it?

True. Which is coincidentally about the same amount of time it will take
to understand how to write a well-formatted document using LaTeX...

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:37:26 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:16:12 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:31:12 +1100, Tony Bryer wrote:

I felt/feel that about Lotus WordPro. But I've just finished the
40,000 word manual for my new EuroBeam program and have produced it
using Word 2010 because although WordPro runs on Win7 (after an error
message) I'm not convinced it will run on future versions of Windows
and this manual will hopefully stay in print (with revisions) for 15+
years.

And you reckon that this Word document will be readable by MS Word in
15 years time? Plain text, you know it makes sense. B-)

LaTeX will be around until the end of time. :-)

And even if it isn't, there will be programs to reformat it, as the
format is obvious.



--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:54:12 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:17:44 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
Oh, there is...but I have plenty of othe rthings to play with in the
meantime...like ten Arduino nanos...

If you add another 990 of them, do they turn into a micro? (sorry, but
it is Friday...)

Funny you should say that! .-)

The Arduino Mini is actually smaller than the nano...



--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:48:37 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:00:55 +0000, John Rumm wrote:

On 05/03/2012 19:17, Ghostrecon wrote:
On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:35:36 +0000, stuart noble wrote:

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


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!

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

That takes me back a bit... used to like knocking up things in FoxPro
LAN in its DOS days ;-)

I remember foxpro... I think we mainly used dbase at uni, along with a
bit of ingres.

Anyone got any figures for how many students do computer science these
days at GCSE or A Level? IIRC when I did my A level in '85/6 there were
only about 120 students in the country that took it that year.. I get
the impression there have never been big numbers doing it.

No, but I did A-level CS '91-93 and I think we had about 20 people in
the class then, so across the whole country I expect there were a fair
few.

But it was sort-of* interesting back then - there was more hardware
diversity, and it was more about programming than it was the "how to
type a letter" level which I think it all descended into not many years
later.

No, that's A level ICT. A level Computing is fairly rare now, as it's
hard. But we still get a fair few applying to us.

--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:19:27 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 07:36:42 +1100, Rod Speed wrote:
It isnt really feasible to teach either word processing or spreadsheets
without using specific examples of those, and it makes no sense to not
be using the most commonly used ones.

I think the core concepts are common enough that it doesn't matter. I'd
even go as far as to say that teaching a completely different product to
the most common one in current use is a good thing, because by the time
people enter the 'real world' things will likely have changed. The most
common product might no longer be so - or it may have been re-released
and re-worked to the point where the UI is different and the bells and
whistles work in subtly different ways that can catch people out.

Computing in general needs to be about teaching good logic, reasoning
and problem-solving skills, I think, *not* about how to use a specific
set of applications - and the fact that the academic world seems to have
been mostly doing the latter for the last decade or so is really holding
us back.

Exactly. I say this most weeks during our applicants' Q&A session. The
languages don't matter - it's the principles.

We still get people asking if we include Cisco qualifications - but
that's traing, not education [1]. However, some students do get the Cisco
stuff as a bonus - when they do their Year in Industry in San Jose!

[1] Ask yourself if you would rather your daughter did sex education at
school - or sex training!

--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:42:14 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
Computing in general needs to be about teaching good logic, reasoning
and problem-solving skills, I think, *not* about how to use a specific
set of applications - and the fact that the academic world seems to
have been mostly doing the latter for the last decade or so is really
holding us back.

Exactly. I say this most weeks during our applicants' Q&A session. The
languages don't matter - it's the principles.

Indeed, although there are languages best suited to different tasks, and
some languages are perhaps easier to teach and/or better at instilling
good programming practices than others - so it seems logical to teach a
reasonable range* and in a certain order according to complexity (in
other words, perhaps a bit different to an example such as
wordprocessing, where you can probably just use a single application to
lay the groundwork).

* I'm trying to remember what we covered when I was at UKC now. C, C++,
Miranda, Occam, Eiffel, Fortran and m68k assembly all spring to mind, but
I have a feeling there were a few others, too (along with 'fringe' things
such as shell scripts and makefiles).

cheers

Jules

Jules Richardson wrote
Rod Speed wrote

It isnt really feasible to teach either word processing or
spreadsheets without using specific examples of those, and it
makes no sense to not be using the most commonly used ones.

I think the core concepts are common enough that it doesn't matter.

Yes, but you cant teach core concepts to kids without
teaching them the actual apps with stuff like that.

I'd even go as far as to say that teaching a completely different
product to the most common one in current use is a good thing,

Thats mad.

because by the time people enter the 'real world' things will likely have changed.

Nope, there has been much change on the basics
with Excel and Excel ever since it first showed up.

And it makes absolutely no sense whatever to be teaching
Word Pervert and 123 now when they are going to be used
Word and Excel now, or Open Office etc.

And in the very unlikely event indeed that the entire
world decides to abandon Office and use something
else that replaces it, someone who was taught using
Office would be able to move to the new fad just as
easily as those who are already using Office at work.

The most common product might no longer be so

Very very unlikely with something like Office. There is such an
immense inertia in the system that we arent going to see much of
the market head off to something completely different any time soon.

Different with something like publishing, but we arent discussing that with kids.

- or it may have been re-released and re-worked to the
point where the UI is different and the bells and whistles
work in subtly different ways that can catch people out.

That is in fact what happened with Office and the system handled it fine.

And handled it a lot better than if the kids had
been taught say Word Pervert and 123 instead.

Computing in general needs to be about teaching good
logic, reasoning and problem-solving skills, I think,

Not with something like Office.

*not* about how to use a specific set of applications

It is with the sort of apps being discussed.

Even with programming, you still have to teach a particular language, its
just not possible to teach just concepts and no specific language as well.

- and the fact that the academic world seems to have been mostly
doing the latter for the last decade or so is really holding us back.

Nope, not as far as getting kids fluent with what they will be using
during their studys and once the start working is concerned.

Jules Richardson wrote
John Rumm wrote

Its a pretty fair assessment though IMHO... For
technical documents WP is far more productive.

However there is one of the keys. If you are a techie user you will
get more done with WP. Word is probably easier to do the basics.

I don't think it's necessarily about the basics

It is with the kids being discussed. They wont be doing the complex
technical documents that WP can do more productively than Word.

- but with the arrival of Windows, Word beat
Wordperfect when it came to making things look pretty.

Its not just pretty, just making things look good.

Wordperfect had been all about the transferral
of information, and Word was more about style.

And very few do complex technical documents.

Those that do should taught how to do them, but makes
absolutely no sense to be teaching all kids how to do
stuff like that that very few will ever do in real life.

And now look where we are, fookin' hoooge
documents stuffed to the gills with clip-art... ;-)

That can be appropriate for some things.

There's a reason you dont see magazines
and newpapers just text and nothing else.

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:16:12 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:31:12 +1100, Tony Bryer wrote:

I felt/feel that about Lotus WordPro. But I've just finished the 40,000
word manual for my new EuroBeam program and have produced it using Word
2010 because although WordPro runs on Win7 (after an error message) I'm
not convinced it will run on future versions of Windows and this manual
will hopefully stay in print (with revisions) for 15+ years.
And you reckon that this Word document will be readable by MS Word in 15
years time? Plain text, you know it makes sense. B-)

LaTeX will be around until the end of time. :-)


that's the end of this year isn't it?

I thought we had 'till 2034 before unix time expires.

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:07:33 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:42:14 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
Computing in general needs to be about teaching good logic, reasoning
and problem-solving skills, I think, *not* about how to use a specific
set of applications - and the fact that the academic world seems to
have been mostly doing the latter for the last decade or so is really
holding us back.

Exactly. I say this most weeks during our applicants' Q&A session. The
languages don't matter - it's the principles.

Indeed, although there are languages best suited to different tasks, and
some languages are perhaps easier to teach and/or better at instilling
good programming practices than others - so it seems logical to teach a
reasonable range* and in a certain order according to complexity (in
other words, perhaps a bit different to an example such as
wordprocessing, where you can probably just use a single application to
lay the groundwork).

Of course. We start off with OOP, for which Java is the vehicle. Parallel
programming (occam-pi). Procedural programming (C). Constraint
programming (Prolog). Functional programming (Haskell/Erlang). Basically,
the major kinds of problems and suitable languages.

Then other ones that people pick up along the way..!

* I'm trying to remember what we covered when I was at UKC now. C, C++,
Miranda, Occam, Eiffel, Fortran and m68k assembly all spring to mind,
but I have a feeling there were a few others, too (along with 'fringe'
things such as shell scripts and makefiles).

We don't do assembly any more, but that may return soon (probably ARM).
No C++, as we do Java. Miranda replaced by Haskell and now Erlang. No
Eiffel or Fortran though.



--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

On 09/03/2012 10:45, Bernard Peek wrote:
On 08/03/12 22:38, Bob Eager wrote:
On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:52:48 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:04:48 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
F1 is the Windows standard way to open the Help menu in an
application, and has been since Windows 3, if not before.

Long before. It was documented as the preferred Help key on the very
first PC (there's a list of recommended keys in the original Technical
Reference Manual, circa 1981).

But didn't something for the PC use F3? Very hazy memory there... it
wasn't Wordperfect for DOS, was it?

I think it probably was. But they were a law unto themselves.

It was WordPerfect. The product existed before the IBM PC and was one of
the first word-processors available for the system. It's possible that
the choice of F3 was inherited from a previous version.

It was available on a number of platforms, and indeed did predate PCs
and their tradition of F1 for help. Later versions did let you rotate
assignments to put escape back on escape (default F1), repeat on F3
(default escape) and help on F1 (default F3)




--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 9 Mar 2012 19:39:37 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:48:37 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:00:55 +0000, John Rumm wrote:

On 05/03/2012 19:17, Ghostrecon wrote:
On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:35:36 +0000, stuart noble wrote:

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


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!

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

That takes me back a bit... used to like knocking up things in FoxPro
LAN in its DOS days ;-)

I remember foxpro... I think we mainly used dbase at uni, along with a
bit of ingres.

Anyone got any figures for how many students do computer science these
days at GCSE or A Level? IIRC when I did my A level in '85/6 there were
only about 120 students in the country that took it that year.. I get
the impression there have never been big numbers doing it.

No, but I did A-level CS '91-93 and I think we had about 20 people in
the class then, so across the whole country I expect there were a fair
few.

But it was sort-of* interesting back then - there was more hardware
diversity, and it was more about programming than it was the "how to
type a letter" level which I think it all descended into not many years
later.

No, that's A level ICT. A level Computing is fairly rare now, as it's
hard. But we still get a fair few applying to us.

yes ... Computer studies as opposed to ICT, Information technology btec etc
was and still is technical, programmig, systems analysis computer
archichecture
--
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On 9 Mar 2012 22:09:19 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:07:33 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:42:14 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
Computing in general needs to be about teaching good logic, reasoning
and problem-solving skills, I think, *not* about how to use a specific
set of applications - and the fact that the academic world seems to
have been mostly doing the latter for the last decade or so is really
holding us back.

Exactly. I say this most weeks during our applicants' Q&A session. The
languages don't matter - it's the principles.

Indeed, although there are languages best suited to different tasks, and
some languages are perhaps easier to teach and/or better at instilling
good programming practices than others - so it seems logical to teach a
reasonable range* and in a certain order according to complexity (in
other words, perhaps a bit different to an example such as
wordprocessing, where you can probably just use a single application to
lay the groundwork).

Of course. We start off with OOP, for which Java is the vehicle. Parallel
programming (occam-pi). Procedural programming (C). Constraint
programming (Prolog). Functional programming (Haskell/Erlang). Basically,
the major kinds of problems and suitable languages.

Then other ones that people pick up along the way..!

* I'm trying to remember what we covered when I was at UKC now. C, C++,
Miranda, Occam, Eiffel, Fortran and m68k assembly all spring to mind,
but I have a feeling there were a few others, too (along with 'fringe'
things such as shell scripts and makefiles).

We don't do assembly any more, but that may return soon (probably ARM).
No C++, as we do Java. Miranda replaced by Haskell and now Erlang. No
Eiffel or Fortran though.

what no modula 2 (or 3) boohoo
--
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On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 08:42:56 +1100, Rod Speed wrote:



Even with programming, you still have to teach a particular language, its
just not possible to teach just concepts and no specific language as well.

you can teach interupts and algorithms though .. see my earlier post on
sorting


--
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.€¢Â°€¢. Nik .€¢Â°€¢.
(¸.€¢Âº(¸.€¢Â¨* *¨€¢.¸)º€¢.¸)

On 09/03/2012 22:30, Ghostrecon wrote:

No, that's A level ICT. A level Computing is fairly rare now, as it's
hard. But we still get a fair few applying to us.

yes ... Computer studies as opposed to ICT, Information technology btec etc
was and still is technical, programmig, systems analysis computer
archichecture

Mine in 1982 was called A level Computer "Science", not studies. It was
pretty dry content as above, just around the time games consoles and
home computers became big and were a world apart from paper tape and
learning about random and sequential file access...

Lessons were spent in the first half hour yawning our heads off, and
later in the second half slaying the aliens ;-)

--
Adrian C

On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:08:05 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

On 07/03/2012 23:16, The Other Mike wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:10:40 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

On 06/03/2012 20:25, Owain wrote:
On Mar 6, 4:43 pm, Bob Eager wrote:
BTw, can I have a prize for starting the fastest growing thread in
uk.d-i-y for quite a while?

The prize would be a RPi, but they're out of stock :-)

Sometime end of March the girl at CPC told me...

Well there's your problem. You can't buy them from CPC.

I think that is what we just said... ;-)

http://planet.farnell.com/email/cpc/...sRedirect=true

So does that mean CPC had listed them at some stage? I thought it was
*only* RS and Farnell, the latter, like CPC being a part of the
Premier Farnell Group.


--

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:14:28 +0000, Chris K
wrote:

Having been in a large organisation that made the transition from WP to
Word, there were a lot of users that never really made the mental
transition and were forever looking for the 'show codes' option

No wonder when a simple one word delete in 'Word' can suddenly alter
the format in the rest of a document to nothing like it was
milliseconds before and without any indication on how to fix it other
than by bodging.

Word, in every iteration performs like a word processor written by
someone who has never programmed before, very amateurish, churned out
by someone stoned out of their mind and who never wrote any body of
text longer than a very short SMS.

--

"The Other Mike" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:08:05 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

On 07/03/2012 23:16, The Other Mike wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:10:40 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

On 06/03/2012 20:25, Owain wrote:
On Mar 6, 4:43 pm, Bob Eager wrote:
BTw, can I have a prize for starting the fastest growing thread in
uk.d-i-y for quite a while?

The prize would be a RPi, but they're out of stock :-)

Sometime end of March the girl at CPC told me...

Well there's your problem. You can't buy them from CPC.

I think that is what we just said... ;-)

http://planet.farnell.com/email/cpc/...sRedirect=true

So does that mean CPC had listed them at some stage? I thought it was
*only* RS and Farnell, the latter, like CPC being a part of the
Premier Farnell Group.

I've had a projected delivery date of 14/05/12 from Farnell.
Ordered 29/02/12

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:05:32 +0000, dennis@home wrote:

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:16:12 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:31:12 +1100, Tony Bryer wrote:

I felt/feel that about Lotus WordPro. But I've just finished the
40,000 word manual for my new EuroBeam program and have produced it
using Word 2010 because although WordPro runs on Win7 (after an
error message) I'm not convinced it will run on future versions of
Windows and this manual will hopefully stay in print (with
revisions) for 15+ years.
And you reckon that this Word document will be readable by MS Word in
15 years time? Plain text, you know it makes sense. B-)

LaTeX will be around until the end of time. :-)


that's the end of this year isn't it?

I thought we had 'till 2034 before unix time expires.

2038



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On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:35:09 +0000, Ghostrecon wrote:

On 9 Mar 2012 22:09:19 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:07:33 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:42:14 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
Computing in general needs to be about teaching good logic,
reasoning and problem-solving skills, I think, *not* about how to
use a specific set of applications - and the fact that the academic
world seems to have been mostly doing the latter for the last decade
or so is really holding us back.

Exactly. I say this most weeks during our applicants' Q&A session.
The languages don't matter - it's the principles.

Indeed, although there are languages best suited to different tasks,
and some languages are perhaps easier to teach and/or better at
instilling good programming practices than others - so it seems
logical to teach a reasonable range* and in a certain order according
to complexity (in other words, perhaps a bit different to an example
such as wordprocessing, where you can probably just use a single
application to lay the groundwork).

Of course. We start off with OOP, for which Java is the vehicle.
Parallel programming (occam-pi). Procedural programming (C). Constraint
programming (Prolog). Functional programming (Haskell/Erlang).
Basically, the major kinds of problems and suitable languages.

Then other ones that people pick up along the way..!

* I'm trying to remember what we covered when I was at UKC now. C,
C++, Miranda, Occam, Eiffel, Fortran and m68k assembly all spring to
mind, but I have a feeling there were a few others, too (along with
'fringe' things such as shell scripts and makefiles).

We don't do assembly any more, but that may return soon (probably ARM).
No C++, as we do Java. Miranda replaced by Haskell and now Erlang. No
Eiffel or Fortran though.

what no modula 2 (or 3) boohoo

We did Modula 3 for quite a few years...sad lack of compilers at the time.



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On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:30:21 +0000, Ghostrecon wrote:

On 9 Mar 2012 19:39:37 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:48:37 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:00:55 +0000, John Rumm wrote:

On 05/03/2012 19:17, Ghostrecon wrote:
On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:35:36 +0000, stuart noble wrote:

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


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!

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

That takes me back a bit... used to like knocking up things in FoxPro
LAN in its DOS days ;-)

I remember foxpro... I think we mainly used dbase at uni, along with a
bit of ingres.

Anyone got any figures for how many students do computer science
these days at GCSE or A Level? IIRC when I did my A level in '85/6
there were only about 120 students in the country that took it that
year.. I get the impression there have never been big numbers doing
it.

No, but I did A-level CS '91-93 and I think we had about 20 people in
the class then, so across the whole country I expect there were a fair
few.

But it was sort-of* interesting back then - there was more hardware
diversity, and it was more about programming than it was the "how to
type a letter" level which I think it all descended into not many
years later.

No, that's A level ICT. A level Computing is fairly rare now, as it's
hard. But we still get a fair few applying to us.

yes ... Computer studies as opposed to ICT, Information technology btec
etc was and still is technical, programmig, systems analysis computer
archichecture

I know. In fact I spent some time today advising a student to sign up for
the BTEC instead of A levels.



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On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:28:15 +0000, Tim Streater wrote:

In article ,
Bob Eager wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:07:33 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:42:14 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
Computing in general needs to be about teaching good logic,
reasoning and problem-solving skills, I think, *not* about how to
use a specific set of applications - and the fact that the academic
world seems to have been mostly doing the latter for the last
decade or so is really holding us back.

Exactly. I say this most weeks during our applicants' Q&A session.
The languages don't matter - it's the principles.

Indeed, although there are languages best suited to different tasks,
and some languages are perhaps easier to teach and/or better at
instilling good programming practices than others - so it seems
logical to teach a reasonable range* and in a certain order according
to complexity (in other words, perhaps a bit different to an example
such as wordprocessing, where you can probably just use a single
application to lay the groundwork).

Of course. We start off with OOP, for which Java is the vehicle.
Parallel programming (occam-pi). Procedural programming (C). Constraint
programming (Prolog). Functional programming (Haskell/Erlang).
Basically, the major kinds of problems and suitable languages.

Then other ones that people pick up along the way..!

* I'm trying to remember what we covered when I was at UKC now. C,
C++, Miranda, Occam, Eiffel, Fortran and m68k assembly all spring to
mind, but I have a feeling there were a few others, too (along with
'fringe' things such as shell scripts and makefiles).

We don't do assembly any more, but that may return soon (probably ARM).
No C++, as we do Java. Miranda replaced by Haskell and now Erlang. No
Eiffel or Fortran though.

Any algebraic language theory? Our postgrad CS course had that, which
left me and other engineers and physicists in the dust as we didn't have
maths degrees.

Just some formal logic, although I think we have a final year option. We
take people with just maths GCSE and bring them up to A level standard in
relevant areas, and add in discrete maths, etc.



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On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 23:02:24 +0000, Adrian C wrote:

On 09/03/2012 22:30, Ghostrecon wrote:

No, that's A level ICT. A level Computing is fairly rare now, as it's
hard. But we still get a fair few applying to us.

yes ... Computer studies as opposed to ICT, Information technology btec etc
was and still is technical, programmig, systems analysis computer
archichecture

Mine in 1982 was called A level Computer "Science", not studies. It was
pretty dry content as above, just around the time games consoles and
home computers became big and were a world apart from paper tape and
learning about random and sequential file access...

Lessons were spent in the first half hour yawning our heads off, and
later in the second half slaying the aliens ;-)

studies or science .. I'm sure I could personally dessicate the subject
even more :-(
--
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.€¢Â°€¢. Nik .€¢Â°€¢.
(¸.€¢Âº(¸.€¢Â¨* *¨€¢.¸)º€¢.¸)

"Ghostrecon" wrote in message
.. .
On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 08:42:56 +1100, Rod Speed wrote:



Even with programming, you still have to teach a particular language, its
just not possible to teach just concepts and no specific language as
well.

you can teach interupts and algorithms though .. see my earlier post on
sorting

Interrupts brings back memories from ~1990. I built a system for switching
~10 devices with a resolution of 1mS. 10 sequences stored with keypad and
LCD. 8039 assembler, I forget the rock-speed. I actually had to count
machine cycles to ensure I had enough time to process the damn thing
T'was fairly close as I remember.
Happy daze.

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 23:30:17 +0000, brass monkey wrote:

"The Other Mike" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:08:05 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

On 07/03/2012 23:16, The Other Mike wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:10:40 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

On 06/03/2012 20:25, Owain wrote:
On Mar 6, 4:43 pm, Bob Eager wrote:
BTw, can I have a prize for starting the fastest growing thread in
uk.d-i-y for quite a while?

The prize would be a RPi, but they're out of stock :-)

Sometime end of March the girl at CPC told me...

Well there's your problem. You can't buy them from CPC.

I think that is what we just said... ;-)

http://planet.farnell.com/email/cpc/...ryPi_form.htm?
isRedirect=true

So does that mean CPC had listed them at some stage? I thought it was
*only* RS and Farnell, the latter, like CPC being a part of the Premier
Farnell Group.

I've had a projected delivery date of 14/05/12 from Farnell. Ordered
29/02/12

Did you get an earlier one of 16/4/12? If so, that's the correct one and
the later date is a mistake.

Also note that both dates are actually 'week commencing'...!



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