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."

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!"

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:Mmm .... Pi

[Anonymous Coward]

Google pays assloads of taxes, they just pay them to the place they're incorporated in. Either change the laws or STFU, you wouldn't pay more taxes than you're required to, so why should they?

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

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).

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

[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.