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."

Comments

Re:Mmm .... Pi

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Kudos to Google for their geeky naivete

[Just Brew It!]

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!"

Re:Kudos to Google for their geeky naivete

[Charliemopps]

When I was in highschool, schools were filled with Macs. Worthless in the realworld, in the buisness world... you know, where you could actually get a job. My senior year physics teacher brought the first PC into the school. Then, those of us that knew PCs came out of the woodwork. The entire school was converted to PC's in less than 2 years.

If even 5% of these make it into the hands of students that give a shit, it's going to make a world of difference in their lives. In my graduating class of 400, I'd guess than 3 or 4 of us knew shit about a computer. That's less than 1% and my generation created what we now call the internet. All of us with our own small parts. That's was going on here... giving people the opportunity to be a small part of something much bigger. What will come after the internet? I don't know... but it wont get created by people with iPhones and Windows Metro. You've got to give them the tools, and let them loose.

I gave my teachers

[ozduo]

plenty of raspberry's in my time, they gave me caning's. No you can't see the scars: pervert!

Re:I gave my teachers

[wonkey_monkey]

plenty of raspberry ' s in my time, they gave me caning ' s.

I'm assuming it was mainly English teachers.

Raspberry or Pork? Raspberry

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Raspberry or Pork? Raspberry

[nadaou]

> How cynical. I prefer money being spent this way as opposed to
> it going to taxes that gets spent on god knows what.

irony of the week award here -- we have a winner!

Re:Raspberry or Pork? Raspberry

[tlambert]

We could have bought 35 cluster bombs at $13,941 each, if this weren't being wasted on education this way.

Honestly, this was initiated by a group at Google UK, and had nothing to do with taxes.

Re:Raspberry or Pork? Raspberry

[QuantumBeep]

The idea that all corporate money eventually winds up being spent by a tax-paying consumer somewhere breaks down under these circumstances:

- The corporation just sits on the cash
- The corporation sends the money overseas to a tax haven somewhere
- The corporation outsources jobs.

It seems fair - if a corporation wants to have free speech like a person, have rights like a person, and own assets like a person, it should pay taxes like a person. Otherwise, people would be forming communal corporations ("financial guilds", if you will), and running all of their income through them in order to reduce their tax rate to zero.

Google gives 15,000 Raspberry Pi to schools

[hcs_$reboot]

To be precise, Google gave 15,708 Raspberry Pi. That's ten thousands pi / 2. Yes Google likes pi!.

Re:Mmm .... Pi

[Viceice]

You're looking at it the wrong way. The device works, but like most things man made, it has shortcomings. Imagine the learning experience the kids will have in overcoming these limitations.

What if the next version of the R-Pi contains a fix to these problems developed by a bunch of kids in one of those schools? Wouldn't that be cool?

Maybe if it was a US initiative.

[tuppe666]

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. ;)

Re:Why?

[DeathElk]

Why the fuck would anybody be "studying" about Exchange or Active Directory? This is intended to lay the groundwork for interest in REAL computing.

RTFA that's whole point, not more cubicle drones

[raymorris]

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.

Off-topic

[tuppe666]

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.

Re:Off-topic

[TheGratefulNet]

the diff is: MS and apple never EVER claimed to 'do no evil'.

one could argue that avoiding social responsibility (and making huge profits on the backs of others) *is* being evil.

we all know that corps are whores. they'll do anything for a buck and not think twice. fine. but when you cry 'we are not evil!' you had better mean it.

and they clearly are just paying lip service.

apple and MS are not dishonest in this regard. they are not ashamed of their profit-based mentality. but google tries to have it both ways. that's their fail.

Re:$4,100,000,000 taxes paid last year, 50% of pro

[ahabswhale]

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).

Lets buy a Pi

[tuppe666]

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.

You keep posting this, but you're wrong

[tlambert]

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.

The boards are built in the UK

[tlambert]

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.

Re:Mmm .... Pi

[julesh]

I was thinking along the same lines. Kudos and attaboys to Google for doing this, but what this gift unintentionally did was cause the schools to need to buy I/O devices for those machines. Why not 15000 OLPCs, which are 'complete'?

Because OLPCs have a different focus. OLPC is intended as a general purpose learning tool, while RPi is intended specifically to teach electronics & computer science. Presumably goolgle wanted the latter outcome rather than the former.

Re:RTFA that's whole point, not more cubicle drone

[julesh]

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.

It is not an infringement of copyright for a lawful user of a copy of a computer program to observe, study or test the functioning of the program in order to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any element of the program if he does so while performing any of the acts of loading, displaying, running, transmitting or storing the program which he is entitled to do.

and

Article 6
Decompilation
1. The authorisation of the rightholder shall not be required
where reproduction of the code and translation of its form
within the meaning of points (a) and (b) of Article 4(1) are
indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve
the interoperability of an independently created computer
program with other programs, provided that the following
conditions are met:
(a) those acts are performed by the licensee or by another
person having a right to use a copy of a program, or on
their behalf by a person authorised to do so;
(b) the information necessary to achieve interoperability has not
previously been readily available to the persons referred to
in point (a); and
(c) those acts are confined to the parts of the original program
which are necessary in order to achieve interoperability.

are both parts of our statutes.

Re:$4,100,000,000 taxes paid last year, 50% of pro

[TheGratefulNet]

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.

Re:I hate google. They killed youtube.

[OhANameWhatName]

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 /.

No user serviceable parts inside--NOT!

[dido]

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.

Re:$4,100,000,000 taxes paid last year, 50% of pro

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

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.

Re:Mmm .... Pi

[joss]

yes weebl, we know ... http://www.weebls-stuff.com/wab/pie/

Not an excuse

[tuppe666]

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.

Re:RTFA that's whole point, not more cubicle drone

[MrNemesis]

AH, but if you break the license, are you still a "a lawful user"?

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.

Re:Donations never replace real funding.

[backwardMechanic]

I think Eton might disagree with you. Maybe you're a geologist or something, but it's been running since 1440 - that's quite a long run. I'm not saying I like it, but it clearly works.

Re:$4,100,000,000 taxes paid last year, 50% of pro

[rich_hudds]

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.

Re:OFFS!

[halfkoreanamerican]

In my high school we had to make powerpoint presentations in a shop class about ______ subject, which was completely worthless. If you give a class a few raspberry pis, some breadboards, a manual, and minimal instruction, you can bet you'll see creativity at its best. Show an example of how its used, and some practical tools and by the end of a course some kid will have programmed lights for the theater class' play. It could be a failure, but it could be a lot of fun. Kids like to have some creative time and so do I, even at nearly 30 years of age. Which would you rather have: a) read this article over and over until our 40 minutes have expired; b) find out how to install program x, and give me a 'hello world' program?

Re:Mmm .... Pi

[rephlex]

While there have been quality control problems recently which the Raspberry Pi Foundation has downplayed the USB issues are inherently a result of the notorious USB controller in the BCM2835 SoC that the Pi uses. They've actually just hired a Broadcom employee full-time now to address these problems after many months of complaints, see this thread: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=30764&p=270951

They are long overdue in taking this issue seriously but better late than never. Hopefully they'll have some success but I would be extremely surprised if the isochronous transfer problems are ever solved.