Google Gives 15,000 Raspberry Pis To UK Schools
Grench writes "Search giant Google is providing funding to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to give 15,000 new Raspberry Pi Model B computers to schools all around the United Kingdom. Google Giving's partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a significant investment in UK IT education; it is hoped this will help turn around the decline in UK schoolkids going on to study IT in colleges or universities. The Foundation said, 'CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First and OCR will each be helping us identify those kids, and will also be helping us work with them. ... Grants like this show us that companies like Google aren’t prepared to wait for government or someone else to fix the problems we’re all discussing, but want to help tackle them themselves.' 15,000 Model B units at $35 each would run $525,000."
I like Pi
I don't see this accomplishing much though. If they're given to teachers for classroom use, most of the teachers aren't going to know what the fuck to do with them, and they'll sit forgotten at the back of desk drawers and supply cabinets for 20 years. If they're given directly to students, we'll see a flood of 14,950 of 'em hitting eBay before you can say "Hey, cool -- these are actually worth real money!" and "I don't know what happened to it, the dog must've dragged it off and buried it!"
They get amazing PR from the geek press for contributing spare change in Larry and Sergei's coin jar, and they don't even have to open source their code except for some stray "neat hacks" that have zero business relevance. "Summer of Code" was another example.
Google, where are the Raspberry Pi for the kids in the United States???
plenty of raspberry's in my time, they gave me caning's. No you can't see the scars: pervert!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
I guess its cheaper than paying taxes, if G paid their taxes the gov could give every kid a brand new laptop.
$500K is a lot cheaper than Google's tax liability, methinks.
How cynical. I prefer money being spent this way as opposed to it going to taxes that gets spent on god knows what.
Wasn't there just a story about Google giving out pi million dollars? Maybe they should give pi million Pis to schools next? Or e million Pis? Or...
They wanted Blueberry Pie.
Except the high school kids, they wanted Apple Pie for some reason.
all you fairies would be whining all day.
if anybody actually wanted one of those raspberry turds they could just buy one...
I have one question: why?
They could have easily invested in a dozen existing programs, or made their own. They could have gotten everyone a wicked deal on second-generation laptops or something. Hell, Google could have setup a giant VM farm on their end ("in the cloud") and given everyone free access to their own tiny private networks running whatever it is you're studying about (Exchange, Active Directory, etc). They've certainly got the hardware and the resources to do something like that if they wanted to.
No, no, let's not do anything useful like that.
Let's send them a giant shipment of FIFTEEN THOUSAND antiquated ARM based boards that require even more additional hardware to do anything with (monitor, keyboard, mouse, SD card, GPIO breakout board, etc). Yes, yes, I'm sure after the kiddies have dealt with the horrors of trying to configure their own distribution of Linux on the Pi and trying to get X.org to operate in a semi-accelerated way- they'll totally want to get into Information Technologies even more then before.
I don't get it. Once again, I see the Raspberry Pi being physically shoehorned into a situation that doesn't call for them, or a situation where a problem was created specifically so the Pi could fix it. I don't understand the obsession with this device. The hardware is crap, the software required to drive the hardware is crap. Why does anyone want these and why are people doing their damnedest to push them on everyone?
IMHO; a laptop (even a second or third or forth generation unit- anything like a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo) would be infinitely more useful to these kinds of kids then a friggin' Pi. Give the Pi to the kid in electrical engineering who might actually know what to do with the GPIOs and turn it into a semi-useful project.
delay for anybody wanting to purchase a Raspberry Pi for personal use.
"If they're given directly to students, we'll see a flood of 14,950 of 'em hitting eBay", Just Brew It!
...
I don't know about where you went to school, but most kids are desperately curious about the insides of electronic gizmos. And the teachers are going to get fucking professional help with the fucking devices
"To help ensure teachers and children get the best out of the devices, Google and Raspberry Pi are working with six educational partners, including Code Club, Computing at School, Generating Genius and Coderdojo. They will distribute the devices to schools around the UK".
To be precise, Google gave 15,708 Raspberry Pi. That's ten thousands pi / 2. Yes Google likes pi!.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Google, where are the Raspberry Pi for the kids in the United States???
Maybe because the Raspberry Pi is...an UK project started at the University of Cambridge to solve a UK problem. Computing becoming less about computer science...and more about web design and office.
Its not a bias thing. The UK is not getting Google Fiber. ;)
I don't see this accomplishing much though. If they're given to teachers for classroom use, most of the teachers aren't going to know what the fuck to do with them
The pi was invented to solve the problem of students leaving without computer science skills [only office skills], part of the problem is solved by the raspberry pi, cheap hackable equipment....if the teachers are not capable of teaching as you claim...that is a different problem.
It's good to see big companies like google donating all these resources to kids. It's great the kids are getting more support but I don't think their fundamental education should be changed/catered to align with google's view/vision of the future (or just, Microsoft/Oracle/Cisco.... any tech giant). It's good to have CS and Math background but it's also important for kids to not just follow the market demand but also pursue what really interest them
all you fairies would be whining all day.
if anybody actually wanted one of those raspberry turds they could just buy one...
Ignoring your anger issues, They have given *cheap* *open* *hackable* devices, to build platform independent computer *science* skills, which can only be considered wonderful. If they had given out [locked] Chromebooks [or Google Docs] to lock children into their ecosystem, I'd be looking at this the same as the whole Discounted *cough* Apple/Microsoft products for schools we have seen for years, like crack.
running whatever it is you're studying about (Exchange, Active Directory, etc).
RTFA. The point of the thing is that the young generation knows how to RUN software, but who is going to design quantum CPUs in 2030, or invent the next revolution like the Internet? You don't learn to build new technologies by practicing being an MS cubicle drone running Exchange.
Hell, with the prodicts you mentioned you're not even ALLOWED to try to figure out how they work. That's called reverse engineering and it's against the license. The whole point of the Pi is to first learn how things work, then use that knowledge to build entirely new and better things.
maybe if Google woud pay their f***ing taxes as they should, the schools could afford the Pi's for themselves....
if G paid their taxes the gov
The fact that you post it in a belief that your supporting your favourite mega corporation is a little sad, I assume you are posting AC because Apple and Microsoft are equally good [if not better] at avoiding paying tax.
The reality all companies over 100 employees avoid paying any tax, pretending that its *unique* to Google or *new* f**king sickens me, as the problem is the system needs to be fixed.
They killed Youtube. No amount of PR campaigns will win me back after killing the last free voice people like us had.
Their is still a website where you can look up all the gems of yesteryear :) http://stupid-youtube-comments.blogspot.co.uk/
I leave this quote from the The Guardian in 2009 described users' comments on YouTube as:
"Juvenile, aggressive, misspelled, sexist, homophobic, swinging from raging at the contents of a video to providing a pointlessly detailed description followed by a LOL, YouTube comments are a hotbed of infantile debate and unashamed ignorance – with the occasional burst of wit shining through" ...ironically though your posting this AC :)
maybe if Google woud pay their f***ing taxes as they should, the schools could afford the Pi's for themselves....
They would be better catching up with Apple or Microsoft for Tax avoidence as they have more money squirreled offshore http://www.businessinsider.com/tax-loophole-congress-google-apple-microsoft-2012-12 four times as much as Google.
I suspect your being a little disingenuous. :)
I have my own business and I pay nothing close to this 63% tax rate that you mention and I cannot imagine how you can even get there. If you're paying anywhere near that, then you need a new fucking accountant because your current one is stealing from you. FYI...in the US, over half of all companies pay no taxes (other than their payroll tax).
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
I quick two second search on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_3?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=raspberry+pi&sprefix=ras%2Caps%2C366 shows they have them in stock.
How is plugging a bunch of peripherals into an antiquated ARM board "about computer science"? If that's computer science then your average sweatshop peon must be Alan Turing.
From the About us on the raspberry pi website. http://www.raspberrypi.org/about
"The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, including Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.
Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on."
And in one swoop all other manufacturers of hobby board was put out of buissness. "Free" can really hurt the economy and "ecosystem" quite a lot if it is done wrong...
The USB problem is not intrinsic to the chip, it's intrinsic to the board design with a loopback on the power rail. Because of this it wasn't possible to do high speed USB because you couldn't raise the voltage out of the PMU with the other rail effectively holding it to the lower voltage.
You can ECN it yourself, if you have a microscope soldering station and know how to manually solder BGA devices, or you can just damn well by the new revision of the board instead, it's not like they cost that much. I know this because I ECN'ed mine with a microscope soldering station.
Either way, this has been discussed in pretty deep detail in the Raspberry Pi forums, along with the fact that weren't going to change the board design during the production run where the board problem was first root-caused.
I was wondering why there was such a wait for deliveries. Now we know, Google bought tens of thousands of them and distributed them to people who'll use them as door jams.
Which mens that there are no additional import/export issues, if they are sold and distributed in the UK.
If you are in some other location in the world, design your own damn board, or just manufacture the Raspberry Pi boards locally from the UK circuit diagrams and get your local equivalent of UL and FCC certifications, and money might materialize for your local schools as well ... or not. This happened in the UK because some UK Googlers were excited enough about it to push up their management chain. You;d also need to get Googlers in your country interested to the same degree, or find some other company you can convince to fund it.
And in one swoop all other manufacturers of hobby board was put out of buissness. "Free" can really hurt the economy and "ecosystem" quite a lot if it is done wrong...
...or start a trend, devices like the raspberry pi, are nothing new, but right now, because [not in spite of] the success of the raspberry pi there is a whole host of new boards out there, and in reality like every other market companies have to compete on there own merits, personally the raspberry pi does not interest me. It does not have enough memory or processing power or sata, and I am far from being the only one.
Hell, with the prodicts you mentioned you're not even ALLOWED to try to figure out how they work. That's called reverse engineering and it's against the license.
Here in the UK, the right to reverse engineer is legally mandated by statute, so they can't take it away with license terms.
and
are both parts of our statutes.
I'm in the process of shutting down my businesses. That's what the current 63% total tax rate gets you - businesses shut down, people out of work.
Plenty of businesses are doing fine, so I suspect the problem is not with the taxes, but rather with you. For some reason, you have failed where others have succeeded. Don't worry, you're in good company. Lots of business owners fail.
I am also a small business owner, and I have no problems with the taxes I pay. It would be difficult for me to run my business without a functioning government. I appreciate that the government provides me with a pool of educated and healthy employees, provides a transportation network that allows me and my goods to travel efficiently and safely, protects me and my money from criminals, and generally provides me with a clean, safe place to live and do business. They even provide me with a safety net so that if my business does fail, I won't die of starvation.
yeah, right 'obama is making poor businesses pay for health care of its employees'.
you know, the things our grandfathers fought for (unions in the midst of horrible working conditions) have been forgotton.
business has gotton nearly a free ride for DECADES. now, we are trying to do what's right for people and you assholes complain about money. the business SHOULD take care of its people. we are not animals! at least we strive not to be.
consider this a payment on a bill that went unpaid for a very long time. it 'hurts' but it hurts more when you are put out on the street if/when you get badly sick and the insurance co's cancel you.
business == freeloaders. and now, the bill is overdue. PAY UP and shut the fuck up.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
They killed Youtube. No amount of PR campaigns will win me back after killing the last free voice people like us had.
Look on the bright side, you can still troll /.
I'm currently reading Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, and one of the chapters is entitled "No User Serviceable Parts Inside." That's something that you see a lot in today's electronics (and even software), and it is extremely frustrating for a would-be tinkerer who wants to learn how things work, the way I was when I was a kid. About thirty years ago an aunt of mine got me a C-64, and it was on such a platform that I first learned how to program, first in BASIC, and then later 6502 machine language (by peeks and pokes off a photocopied reference manual and manual relative branch offset calculations, lots of fun!). Until the Raspberry Pi, there existed no cheap system where hacking even close to like what I used to do as a kid was possible. That's what the vision of the Pi is supposed to be about as I understand it. It is intended not to hold the user's hand so much, but to teach them how things work. This is something for those kids that, were they kids 30 years ago, would have taught themselves 6502 machine language from photocopied references and soldered together some TTL circuitry and plugged that into a printer port.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Keep your hardware. If they paid the amount of tax it'd benefit the schools a lot more.
I'm in the process of shutting down my businesses. That's what the current 63% total tax rate gets you
Umm, corporation tax only applies to *profits*. That is, money your business couldn't find a way to spend. Excess cash. Surplus.
If you are really in the position of paying 63% corporation tax then CONGRATULATIONS you are running a profitable business. Next year, try ploughing additional funds into R&D or more staff so that you don't have so much net revenue.
AH, but if you break the license, are you still a "a lawful user"? Also the right to reverse engineer is ONLY applicable to devices you own. If you have a device the is tied in with a license that states that the device is the property of the issuer of the license while the license is active (as with some cable boxes) you are not the legal owner and as such can NOT legally reverse engineer the device. As always, there are law to make sure you comply with almost anything ppl with resources wants.
No amount of PR campaigns will win me back after killing the last free voice people like us had.
Well you could run your own website...
Apple and Microsoft do not get a free pass, and have four times the money off-shore, simply because Google has irrelevant informal corporate motto does not justify your bile.
*All* Corporations should pay tax, and that includes Google, your post is a reflection on yourself not Google.
Teaching and maintenance is more labour intensive and expensive
I'm sorry, your wishy washy excuses may work in some circles, but for everyone else in the computing industry [every industry] constant retraining, and reactions to current trends is essential. I cannot remember the last time in my life I wasn't in some form of retaining or other.
As for popularity being a factor. I'm sorry, cutting your nose of to spite your children is a disgrace. As I say everywhere corporations need to pay tax, scapegoating a few corporations, especially when worse offenders like Microsoft and Apple is morally questionable.
Yes. The whole point of statute, and the ensuing statutory rights, is that the rights they confer upon you can't be negated by a license, EULA, or even a contract signed in blood. The UK has a fairly good history of customer-friendly policies in this regard, frequently to the annoyance of foreign companies.
http://whatconsumer.co.uk/what-are-my-statutory-rights/
It gets a bit more nebulous as you describe the "rented device and service" scenario, but I don't believe that's been tested in the UK courts yet. There's certainly a lot of people who've hardhacked things like their Sky+ boxes to do things like add extra storage and migrating recordings off the box are common, and so far there's been no legal repercussions TTBOMK.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Yeah. You actually have to sign an NDA just to look at the datasheet from Broadcom! This is about as open as the CIA's budget.
The Olimexino is similar, almost as cheap and truly open:
https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/
woosh, as the point goes straight past you. You appear to have done all your calculations in dollars. The problem with Google's tax affairs is that they do lots of business in the UK in pounds and pay very very little corporation tax because they use a double irish arrangement to wriggle out of tax on profit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
Great. 500000$ are maybe 20 teachers (without infrastructure) for 1 year. It is indeed great that Google donates money to schools and I do not want to belittle that fact. However phrases like these leave me baffled:
Google aren't prepared to wait for government or someone else to fix the problems...
Not Google, nor any other private company or entity is going to fix the education system. That is the whole point of having public schools. Without the state committing to education you are screwed. There is not a single example in history where a private education system succeeded in the long run.
What's that, Google running out of money? This sum is so low for the search giant that is comes close to being an insult.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
there will be 14,000 in the rubbish bin within a week. Sorry, I just can't imagine 15,000 kids interested in a device that requires serious interaction. I know it sound like trolling, but they will be used in some contrived 'computer hardware and programming' course which will actually appeal to 1% of the people that participate.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Thank you for demonstrating what we already knew: American is a country full of selfish, insular people with a massive sense of entitlement.
Did you ever stop to think that, since Google UK is paying for these things, Google UK gets to decide where to send them?
Fucking Americans.
In England we have free healthcare for everyone.
It's very popular.
The media in the US says that we have death panels.
We don't have death panels. They were lying to you.
So your solution to not paying 63% tax is to not make money? Just one little problem - if I don't make money, I don't eat.
You're missing the fact that we provided comprehensive insurance for fifteen years. 15 years. It was only when Obama said the insurance has to cover crap like aromatherapy that it became too expensive to afford, so now our (former) employees have no coverage. Good job, libs.
Last time I checked, it was similar for the Italian law. As long as you own a usage license (be it temporary or not), you can do whatever you want with a program. And you are explicitly allowed to reverse-engineer/modify it as long as it's done to "improve its functionalities", not only for interoperability reasons.
PARAGRAPHS MOTHERFUCKER!
I have my own business and I pay nothing close to this 63% tax rate that you mention and I cannot imagine how you can even get there.
If you don't know how you end up paying AT LEAST 63% in taxes, this should be educational for you. I guess the numbers in my original post were hard to read because they were mixed with the prose. Maybe better formatting will help you. But first, let's agee on some averge rates to use in our example:
The first tax we'll consider, corporate income tax, ranges from about 24% to 44% in different places. For example, in California, USA, a medium sized business pays 35% federal, 8.84% state, plus local. In the UK, it's 24% income tax, but then also 20% VAT which compounds to about 35% total VAT.
We'll use a mid-range number - 30% corporate income tax.
Then that same money goes to you, the owner, and you pay tax on the same money again. 28% is the UK rate, and it's about the average of the several US rates.
Then when you spend that same money, you pay tax on it again. 12% if you spend it on gas/petrol, 27% if you use it to pay your mortgage. We'll use 18% as an average.
For every 100 dollars/euros/punds you earn:
100 earned
70 after corporate income tax
50 remains after owner's income tax
41 of goods can be purchased after paying "spending that income" tax. (Gas, property, or sales tax)
So you earned 100, and can buy 41 worth of stuff after taxes. You paid 59% taxes in this example. That doesn't even count the taxes you paid before calculating profit, like business personal property tax, etc.
We don't have death panels. They were lying to you.
However, we'd be very keen on death panels if they were considering the fates of politicians.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Care to cite the US media outlet that claims that you have death panels? And I do mean a real cite, not just some off the cuff snap at some news outlet you've probably never visited before.
Plenty of businesses are doing fine, so I suspect the problem is not with the taxes, but rather with you.
ROTFL. The private sector is doing fine, right? Even you President Kardashian couldn't say that with a straight face. When he tried to say it, he had to come back out and retract that statement, saying "It is absolutely clear that the economy is NOT doing fine."
I've been in business twenty years. (or 25 if you count part time businesses). I've launched four completely different companies. Our business, and thousands of others, was taken down when Obama launched his attack on business. We were fine under Reagan. We hired people under Bush I. We did fine with the fast and loose economy of Clinton. No problems under Bush II. (Though the last year of Bush II wasn't awesome.) If it was us, we wouldn't have been around that long. In the two years following Obama's election, business failures increased by 40%. 40% man. If you like Obama, fine. Maybe you like his smile. Maybe you think he smells nice, whatever. But don't lie to yourself - he's radically anti-business.
There's no bigger supporter of Obama than liberal journalist Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria is honest with himself, though, saying Obama is "at his core, anti-business."
Did Google also give all the right cables, power supplies, SD cards? Or just the units?
To maintain that massive database created by all the cameras scattered around the country - welcome to the future, Citizen...
Just a few related links here... not sure how credible these news outlets are however!
one "news source"
another
and another
I think the whole "Death Panel" thing was just a Republican thing to scare people about Obamacare, as opposed to the sensible policy of only providing good health care to those who can afford it.
;)
Also, just for the record, there are no Death Panels in the UK. No, it's called the Ministry of Death!
Apologies for not adding this link to my previous post: Daily Mail article about UK "Death Panels", which is made all the more amusing because in the first picture it looks like President Obama is trying to strangle Stephen Hawking!
Now the teachers in elementary and high schools' expertise is in education, not computer science. This is a massively different field for most people.
Sorry your talking from an uninformed perspective, most teachers take an *extended* degree, which covers a teaching practice, and a specialist subject. An alternative route into teaching is the teach first which are meant to be *on the job* training for *people exemplary in their field. I'm sorry these are the highest paid *worldwide*, and they are teaching children.
You are so very ignorant. No wonder you are online arguing against socialised health care. You poor fool.
Not much of a drop in the ocean with all that tax flowing through Bermuda.:)
The first tax we'll consider, corporate income tax, ranges from about 24% to 44% in different places. For example, in California, USA, a medium sized business pays 35% federal, 8.84% state, plus local. In the UK, it's 24% income tax, but then also 20% VAT which compounds to about 35% total VAT.
We'll use a mid-range number - 30% corporate income tax.
Then that same money goes to you, the owner, and you pay tax on the same money again. 28% is the UK rate, and it's about the average of the several US rates.
In the US corporations don't pay tax on salaries. They don't pay taxes on revenue. The pay taxes on profit. Salaries, including payroll taxes and benefits, are deducted as expenses before the tax calculation. Along with depreciation, office supplies, utilities, lease payments, etc. A company could have a billion a year in revenue and pay no taxes if they earned no profit.
As a 'business owner', how you file is determined on how your business is structured. Partnerships and sole proprietorships are handled differently than corporations. But again, if you are being double-taxed in the manner you imply, you need a better tax accountant. And some of the places you do get double taxed (some sales tax is an example) can be used as a deduction, but is simply too tedious to document.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
It could have been a good troll. Some *facts* might have helped. Maybe you are referring to some kind of employer sponsored health care (where they pay for most of it, and you pay for a little of it). Or, maybe you are referring to being on some public plan because you could not make enough money, Or maybe, you are so wealthy that you don't really need insurance and feel put out that you might have to help out someone else. Please illuminate us on the incredible health care you had. Who was it, how was it paid for, why did you really lose it?
Just asking...
What do you mean by "business failures"?
In economics, "business failures" is defined as discontinuation of operations resulting in losses to creditors. In other words, companies that went out of business AND couldn't pay their outstanding bills when they did. That's easier to measure than just "companies that stopped doing business" because the creditors report the loss, whereas a company that just stops may not report anything.
Which Obama's policy led to your loss?
I'd say it was 70% indirect, but I'll give a few examples of direct effects of his policies. We'll limit it to just health insurance policies to keep this from going on for 20 pages.
We've long had pretty good health insurance, which we were happy with. We paid 100% of the cost even for part time employees. In two years, as Obamacare is being phased in, the base premium increased by more than 50%. Total cost close to doubled, as I'll explain.
Also, half of our employees have a profit share, they each own a few percent of the company. Under Obama, the law was changed so that we had to report their insurance cost as taxable income on their W-2 AND the company could no longer deduct health insurance cost. (Under Obama everyone's insurance cost is deductible EXCEPT business owners', including 2% owners like our employees. Did I mention he's anti-business.) That penalty for making our employees owners increased cost another 30%, on top of the 50% premium increase. So that's one example, Obamacare nearly doubled our insurance cost.
Of course his policies were doing the same thing to our customers, doubling THEIR costs, leaving them with less money to by our products. Less sales + higher costs = we're out of business and te employees are jobless. That's the result of making policy based on feelings rather than actually thinking through the results.
The 1.8V track routing fault has nothing to do with the USB controller fault. The latter is part of the silicon in the BCM2835, and can never be fixed, short of replacing the SoC by another one.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation explained the mechanism behind this hard USB fault on the forums, and they accept that there is no solution available at this time, and probably never will be. It results in USB events being lost periodically, and a total collapse of the USB chain under common conditions.