Re: Pi Forums

"I think element14 owes a lot to RasPi and its Foundation".

As a very rare contributer I also think the RasPi and it´s Foundation owes a lot to Element 14 and the excellent after sales service.  Over the last 14 months I have purchased three Raspberry Pi. a self assembly Gertboard Kit, a PiFace Digital and most recently a BBB.  Every time Element 14 have done what they said they would do with very propmpt replies to any questions.  In particular Rachel has been very efficient and helpful.

Colin Gearon.

"I think element14 owes a lot to RasPi and its Foundation".

As a very rare contributer I also think the RasPi and it´s Foundation owes a lot to Element 14 and the excellent after sales service.  Over the last 14 months I have purchased three Raspberry Pi. a self assembly Gertboard Kit, a PiFace Digital and most recently a BBB.  Every time Element 14 have done what they said they would do with very propmpt replies to any questions.  In particular Rachel has been very efficient and helpful.

Colin Gearon.

Colin,

   Thanks for reminding us of E14's other support channels.

Unfortunately, we rarely have any interaction with those channels,

and have no idea what sorts of problems they are handling, and

what sorts of advice they are giving.  We also don't know if they

are benefiting from seeing the questions and answers on this forum,

or if they are referring technical questions to this forum.

Rachel isn't a familiar name here,  There is a Rachel Wilson:

  http://www.element14.com/community/people/rach401

who is a Farnell E-Channels Associate, but her account here

shows no activity.

Colin Gearon wrote:

 

I also think the RasPi and it´s Foundation owes a lot to Element 14

Very true.  E14/Farnell hasn't really put a foot wrong throughout the whole Pi saga, not significantly.

Their site collapsed during launch for a few days, but that was caused by RPF's entirely ridiculous concept of opening the floodgates to pre-orders at a single instant of time and requiring customers to compete.  This is not just the power of hindsight.  Every web service on the planet with the exception of Google and Facebook is likely to collapse when 100k+ people hit it within a few seconds, and subsequent recovery is prevented because of the retries.  I blame the collapse squarely on RPF's faulty planning.  The fact that  RS collapsed at the same time offers proof of that.  At worst, Farnell and RS were guilty of not telling RPF that such an approach was not feasible given their server capabilities, although competition between them may have prevented either party saying "We can't do that".  It was obvious though.  Even RPF's forum sysadmin could have told them that.  It was even checkable in advance with a load test script.

Once Pi became available, my only significant criticisms of E14/Farnell are that the export site provides substandard Farnell service (compared to Farnell UK), and that they haven't been fast enough at putting Pi on a regular product footing now that it is ex-stock.  This still hasn't happened, and that's a fault because substandard service should never be considered "business as usual" for Farnell.  Also, they could have volunteered a bit more information when people were asking for it, but none of these things are epic disasters.

So on the whole, almost full marks.

And in case anyone suspects that this is just being nice to our hosts here, I think we've made our feelings quite plain and unambiguous when we've criticised the dreadful handling of knode discussions for BBB, so we don't hesitate to highlight things that are are broken when they are.  This problem is still present, but the fault was acknowledged rapidly and an update is in progress for end of Q3 so we live with it, unhappily but patiently.

Well done E14 on Pi.

Sorry, but I'm not impressed with any of it. The R-Pi and its peripherals might be capable of wonders, but without some fairly basic documentation accompanying each item they're of little use. The forums might be of value to those who already know something about modern systems and software, but I have wasted hours trying to find solutions to quite basic problems. (" .. fire-hose ... pointing the wrong way.")

At times I feel like giving up altogether, but I was asked to help write a course for Year 8 and Year 9 pupils based on the R-Pi, so I'll persevere.

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.  I haven't been following it, but with the early part of my career being in academia and knowing the importance of engineering education, I do share your pain.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.  I haven't been following it, but with the early part of my career being in academia and knowing the importance of engineering education, I do share your pain.

Personally, I would say the educational release "has yet to materialize", or to quote Robert Service "a promise made is a debt unpaid".  Converting the herd of cats that is FLOSS into robust software that's easy to use by the masses is really hard.  You can make things easier to use by limiting their capabilities (Android), but then you'll have people screaming for features that aren't supported.  From what I've read, NOOBS is going in the right direction.

About a year ago the strategy was to let the developer community come up with educational stuff, but of course with FLOSS people will work on what's interesting for them and not work towards anything cohesive unless you have a foul-mouthed benevolent dictator.  So we have various packages that run on RasPi and some address various educational applications, but at this time it does require educators to climb a steep learning curve to deploy them.

As I understand it, RasPi was inspired by Eben's disappointment with the amount of programming knowledge shown by candidates for jobs at Broadcom nowadays compared to the 1980s.  Well, a lot of people have learned a lot of lore to get their RasPis to do useful things, so RasPi's been pretty successful towards that goal.  I don't know how much of that lore is programming -- a lot of it is system admin skills, but unfortunately you do need a lot of those skills nowadays.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.

It looks like this could end up being it http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4247

I thought it was just me, but there seem to be a fair few people pointing out problems in the comments.

John Beetem wrote:

 

As I understand it, RasPi was inspired by Eben's disappointment with the amount of programming knowledge shown by candidates for jobs [...] nowadays compared to the 1980s.

I'm always perplexed about that side of things given the high value that seems to be placed on scratch & python.  From what I see in the outside world, Java, C++, C#, PHP would likely be better long-term choices even if much more difficult to start with.

From what we know of Eben, he's not old enough to know what skills job candidates in the 80's had anyway. 

The 80's were very different from today, the instant gratification thing we see today didn't exist, and the kids were gaining their programming knowledge by teaching themselves assembly language programming on whaterer home computer they had access to. Instead of googling for a bit of code they didn't understand to cut&paste they were learning things the hard way.

I don't necessarily think we should go back to the 80's, but I don't believe the conditions that inspired that generation exist anymore, or that you can instill the interest in the upcoming generations with a GCSE course or a cheap bit of hardware.

So I'm not surprised by the lack of programming knowledge seen today, I see it as part of the continual change and evolution in computing. When you start reducing 'programming' to drag&drop, and I could be talking about scratch or VisualStudio here, you can't expect the skills to remain the same as they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. Things change.

Frank Lane wrote:

 

but I have wasted hours trying to find solutions to quite basic problems. (" .. fire-hose ... pointing the wrong way.")

Frank, can we help ?  

There's a good bunch of people here with some diverse experience and we're generally happy to discuss stuff.   As long as you're not too bothered about us wandering off topic a bit now and then

Frank,

The forums might be of value to those who already know something about modern systems and software, but I have wasted hours trying to find solutions to quite basic problems. (" .. fire-hose ... pointing the wrong way.")

At times I feel like giving up altogether, but I was asked to help write a course for Year 8 and Year 9 pupils based on the R-Pi, so I'll persevere.

Can you tell us more about what you plan to teach in this course?

For example, are you trying to teach programming?  Or are you trying

to teach electronics?   Are you trying to make the course specific to

the RPi, or general enough to teach on other platforms as well?

I have made some suggestions here:

http://www.element14.com/community/thread/23494?start=2&tstart=0

which you might find helpful if you're teaching programming.

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.

I would go farther than that.  Not only has the educational release not materialized,

after a considerable length of time, but it doesn't seem to be the primary focus of the RPF.  

If you look at where they put their effort, they are putting a lot of effort into features that

appeal more to hobbyists than education, such as the camera module.  And they are

putting a lot of effort into visual effects such as window transition fading, of interest for

non-educational use cases such as advanced multimedia playback, complex digital

signage, or set-top boxes, as noted here:

http://www.element14.com/community/message/81876#81876/l/rpi-use-cases-explained

If computer science education based on low-cost, credit-card sized, linux-based ARM

computers were their primary goal, then they could save a lot of effort trying to fix what

appear to be nearly impossible-to-fix USB and other hardware/firmware/kernel issues,

and focus on bringing their planned linux-based educational materials to market on BBB

and similar platforms expected to come in the near future that RPF may not have the

resources to compete with while developing educational materials at the same time.