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MIT's Stata Center Dedicated
AJL writes "On Friday, the long-in-coming, $280M Stata Center was dedicated at MIT. Featuring some pretty cool technology (including a row of Linux computers proclaiming 'Welcome to the William H. Gates Building' by Tux, the Linux Penguin), amazing design, and some pretty neat use of space, Stata is among the first of some high-budget, high-tech buildings being put on campuses these days. See some
Pictures
or go to the Main Stata Site for more details. Richard Stallman is now less than pleased that he has to work in the Gates Building, as well as having some other problems with his new office in general."
Richard Stallman is such a baby. Doors that have to be opened with keycards are everywhere, and usually you can't leave them open for more than 30 or 60 seconds, or an alarm will go off.
Martin
...a row of Linux computers proclaiming 'Welcome to the William H. Gates Building' by Tux
Is this supposed to be an ironical joke, or have they been brainwashing penguins? Perhaps it's time to put on our tin foil hats.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
...and working as an architect.
All joking aside, how long must it have taken to a) design that and b) build the damn thing. I can imagine it being very complex to lay out...where would you start?
Kudos to the architect and the builders, they've done a great job.
I am NaN
The man simply has no social graces. And I really don't understand why he is deified in the community. He has the social skills of a 14yr old, and is simply a leftover 60's idealistic whacko.
:)
Don't believe me? Try carrying on a conversation with him. If you happen to be female, guaranteed his eyes won't ever get above your breasts. This comes from experience folks (no, not mine
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
Take a look at that building! It looks like its half falling down. It seriously looks like something from "The Nightmare Before Christmas".
This is what happens when you give case modders the job of designing a building!
Aside giving him free office space in metro Boston... just what resources does RMS get out of being with MIT that he can't get from the FSF anyway?
I can't believe that he would complain about something like this! Oh wait, yes I can, because he's a fruit cake.
Seriously, I don't understand the privacy concerns with this. Do you need to scan in and out of the bathroom or something? Is he afraid they're going to track his bowel movements?
What I can understand is why they want this info. If there's equipment that goes missing.. it's quite usefull to know who is in the building, or who opened the door to the room.
Stallman says that MIT could have implemented a different system that protected the visitors' privacy. Instead, he says, the Institute chose only convenience, and he's ready to call it a day and take his research elsewhere. "The big sacrifice is leaving MIT," he says. "I am prepared to make that sacrifice."
I don't see any reason why the MIT wouldn't have the right, or wouldn't want to see who enters what building when. It's their premises, and if something gets stolen or damaged, RFID would help tracking down the culprit(s).
This thing is a security issue in this case. It's not the same privacy issue as tracking the general public in malls and K-Marts for no good reason. I Stallman should ease off the 1984 Orwellian paranoia a little and adapted his points of views to the environments he's in.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How fitting, the building is just as crooked as Microsoft itself!
:-/
Ha ha ha...
Now I think RMS jsut has his knickers in a twist, simply because people will listen.
Some quotes:
"There is no legitimate justification for keeping track of who opens these doors," Stallman says. "You can just leave these doors open, and the building would have the same amount of security as most of the rest of the campus." MIT says most buildings use the RFID cards.
Well, actually, there are legitimate justifications for keeping track of who opens the doors. If something gets nicked from the lab, you can find out who was in the building and from there you can start to investigate the theft (by that I mean, ask those people if theysaw anything or anyone suspicious etc). If someone props open the doors, as he also hints on, then you can see who the last person was to open those doors using the card and take matters from there.
We have a Proximity card solution at work, and its fine. Yes, you can get tracked, but then you are on private property, and tracking isnt always foolproof because you are not required to beep in if you are part of a group.
Stallman says that MIT could have implemented a different system that protected the visitors' privacy. Instead, he says, the Institute chose only convenience, and he's ready to call it a day and take his research elsewhere. "The big sacrifice is leaving MIT," he says. "I am prepared to make that sacrifice."
Well, MIT arent exactly making the visitors details public knowledge, now are they? From the situation with GNUs su program not supporting wheel (link), I think its clear that RMS has a dubious and somewhat iffy personal view on security, and that much alone makes me want to dismiss him out of hand when he talks about security related matters. If hes prepared to "make that sacrifice" instead of allowing MIT to implement a bit of security to protect their building and valuables inside said building, then good riddence is all I can say.
They state proximity RFIDs...just how far does this proximity go? I have no problems keeping track of who opens what doors inside a building, etc. for security reasons if they're doing classified or confidential work. However, an RFID is a little more invasive.
So, what does MIT do with the data they could collect on how many trips to the watercooler I made?
"Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" -Juvenal
Bill Gates says the freakish buildings and twisted angles will be correctly aligned by the upcoming Stata Service Pack 1.
Finally, a university has built a weirder-looking CS building than the one at my undergrad institution. MIT's new building makes good old Duncan Hall look positively conservative.
I've passed by the building a few times on my way back home from the MIT Swapfest. Not only is the architecture itself pretty ugly, but it's surrounded by typical buildings. It's incredibly annoying to be walking down a street full of brick and stone buildings, and then, out of nowhere, you come upon this thing with random chunks of metal coming out at all angles. The design may be "modern" and "chic" (or whatever you want to call it), but I wish they'd picked a design that fit in better. Hell, there are zoning restrictions on height that say you can't have a 40-story building right in the middle of 1-story ones, so why not restrictions on design? Luckily, I rarely have to pass buy it, but I'd hate to live or work right next to it. Frankly, it's the only MIT building I can think of that looks that out of place...
It does look remarkably like architecture done by the artists Hundertwasser,
here is an example of his house he did in Vienna
Hundertwasser House Vienna
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
Looking at the pictures of Stata Center building, does anyone remember leaning tower of Pisa ?
I had two disparate thoughts about this article. First, looking at the exterior made me think that the designer had made the initial sketches under the influence of something like LSD. Architecture meets Jell-O(tm). But wait, I've seen that kind of hurts-my-head-to-look-at-it design before. Sure enough, Frank Gehry strikes again with a repeat of his design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It would seem that this time he's added color to give an even more cartoon-ish appearance.
Then again, we have the petulant RMS who threatens to make "the big sacrifice" of leaving MIT because they used RFID badges for building security. Please. Grow the heck up. Don't threaten, leave or shut up.
He's one of the great modern archetects and now the Boston area is blessed with another fabtastic looking building. They have a really cool I.M. Pei building around there as well I believe and now they just need a Calatrava.
Gehry is rather unique in his designs as you can probably see. Let's see if form and function are one with this building, heh. Gehry actually paved his kitchen with asphault, to get an idea of this mans madness/greatness.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Obviously no one admires him for his social skills or lack of them. Insulting him isn't going to help anyone. I don't know you personally but you seem to have problems of your own, posting such garbage on a public forum.
I don't know about nukes, but beware of the young architects wielding crayons lurking in the basement.
I can imagine the crack parties going on at universities when their board of trustees decide that they want some hip and edgy building.
Trustee 1: "Hey, how can we waste a lot of money really fast?"
Trustee 2: "We can hire a famous postmodern architect. Their buildings always go overbudget and run into schedule delays"
Trustee 3: "A toast to postmodernism!"
All: "Huzzah!"
I've seen other pomo style buildings. MIT also has that weird dorm building that looks like a cross between a sponge and a retarded sponge. Harvard has some other dorm that looks a little more normal, but still not that appealing to me.
Postmodernism: a synonym for "We like to throw legos around and see what we can make"
www.google.com
> What fucking eye-sore! Who designed them anyway? What are they, are they supposed to induce creativity or something? And who approved the building plans? Was it Gates himself? He used to go to Harvard, maybe it's his trick of subtly saying "the dweebs go to this university."
More likely it was an architect trying to get even for his operating system falling down all the time.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If the RFID chips they used could be easily read from a distance, then this might be more of a problem -- we joked about professors having real-time blips representing their students walking around, a la Harry Potter's Maurader's map :) However, the chips they installed are pretty short-range, so I don't see this as a viable problem: they won't even read from your pocket when you're standing in front of the reader; you have to wave it in front of the scanner.
Near as I can tell, there's nothing "magical" about using the new readers as opposed to the old ones; any privacy issues you might perceive are exactly the same as they've been on campus for years now.
I don't think they qualify as sheep. He may have made some significant impacts in the computing world, but that doesn't make his opinions infallible and correct for the rest of his life. He, as anyone else, has the right to be opinionated and be criticized for that opinionation.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
"The Stata Center will house many clients from the MIT community. The center is composed of The William H. Gates Building and the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Building. In addition to the client spaces, the Center houses an auditorium, four classrooms, a child-care facility, a food services facility, a fitness center, outdoor gathering spaces, two levels of below grade parking and a service facility.
Child care facility? Does each kid get a complete line of apparel from thinkgeek.com? I can see it now a room full of I TCP/IP but mostly IP and "newbie" T-shirts. The babies are teething on old mice and the toddlers are learning the standard QWERTY layout.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
RMS isn't in the Gates Building. He's in the "warehouse" section. I've a friend who works on His Majesty's floor. The place might be dramatic to look at, but it's a pain to work in. When I visited it there were way more bizarre problems than any other half-constructed building I've ever seen. And it's really, really easy to get lost in it. I haven't gotten really lost at MIT for over 20 years until I set foot on the main floor of the Stata Center. The building's denizens are hiring architects to help fix it. I think that's part of Gehry's plan for participatory design. Leave it so unfinished that the inhabitants have to make their own nests!
Apparently they're competing with the EMP in Seattle for most hideous building in the States.
Art at MIT has been seriously corrupt for at least 35 years. Grotesque, ugly welded "sculptures" and "stabiles", now buildings. The playground observation is particularly apt.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
It's like they had built an awesome model of this really funky building and on the way over to show it off to the people at MIT one of them sat on it...
The architect is Frank Gehry. He's probably best known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. You can see some of his other work at www.frank-gehry.com
Seriously, would RMS be bitching so much if, instead of RFID cards they use magstripe readers instead?
I'm sure if you asked him, he'd say they're no different, but let's be honest here. RFID is the current hot topic to bitch and complain about.
Fact: There are legitimate reasons for tracking who goes in and out of a building with a hell of a lot of expensive equipment in it.
Fact: How they track this information is largely immaterial, it's a "privacy invasion" just as much with a magstripe card as it is with a RFID card as it is with a hidden camera recording everybody going in the damn door.
Fact: I don't hear anybody bitching about magstripe card entry systems, and they've been around for 50+ years, no?
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
And for the architecturally challenged he is probably the most famous and respected architects in the world. Not everyone likes his style, but no one doubts his influence and every architects desire to be as talented and lucky as him. He's also designed some of the most famous buildings in the world like the Guggeinheim and the Der Neue Zollhoff in Germany. He is highly respected in his field, but like any artist not everyone will appreciate your art. Considering he is highly stylistic where most in his field are far too compromising on creativity and go for an unfortunate embellished utilitarianism.
Something intelligent here.
he just needs to get to preachingthe goodness of propped open doors or duct taped-over latches (this keeps alarms from going off becuase the doors will be closed but not secure, just like the null passwords) and the same thing will happen...
RMS will be against it, but in the near future, everyone else will use it
e to the pi i plus one equals zero
He doesn't work on the Hurd, he answers email.
The only software project he continues to work on is Emacs, but mostly his days are spent giving talks, talking to journalists, talking to lawyers about how to create freedom from the set of laws we have, etc.
P.S. RMS wrote GCC! (and GDB, and half of Make, and a dozen other GNU packages)
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Yo, bro. Now I undestand why Larry Wall called his piece of crap 'Post-modernistic language'.
If George Jetson puttered by in his space car, he's puke on the windshield upon seeing that hideous abortion of architecture. WTF were they thinking when they approved that monstrosity?
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
That is utterly amazing architecture! At first I thought the buildings were colapsing, or that what I was looking at was some sort of odd artistic representation of the buildings - sort of like an initial commemorative mosaic or something - not the buildings themselves.
It's fairly fitting, I think, that a building as full of mis-match shapes, sizes, colors, and poorly geometic angles would be named after the man that is predominantly responsible for such contortions within the software world.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
In the article it says RMS is willing to move his research elsewhere,
_ ________
just out of interest what is his research centered around? and why
does he think leaving MIT will be such a big sacrifice?
Arash Partow
_________________________________________
http://www.partow.net
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
The building echoes the excitement, the lateral thinking, the bold strides into the unknown that characterise computing in the past, today and into the future. It is a challenge to try to come to grips with how the computing world has evolved and who can say where it is going next?
The odd angles and shapes are deliberately unsettling. The viewer, the visitor, the worker; all must set aside their conventional, predictable, boring views, and try to look at things in a new way. It is almost as if the buildings are the shape of the thoughts of the pioneers of computing, those who could think outside the square grey boxes of the past and lead us into exciting new areas.
Please don't criticise the building because it isn't the same as a million others. It's weird, different, stimulating and fun. Just like the wild ride that computing has given us over the past years and seems certain to keep on doing well into the future.
Instead, rejoice in the exuberance and try to open up your own thinking along unknown, unpredictable ways. Who knows where you might end up?
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hundertwasse
It's not even that, it's the fact that Bill Gates does donate generous sums of money towards charities and research.
So what if he is not kind when it comes to business? Hey, its business. He has a responsibilities to his shareholders and he is merely fulfilling that.
In the long run, he probably has contributed way more to society than most others. If you do not like his methods, just walk away.
Stallman has done a lot of things too, but that does not give him the right (or others) to diss genuine contributions that Bill Gates has made.
RMS is being a jerk, really. A classic cry-baby who needs to grow up.
These buildings are highly relevant to computing, as they epitomise the contemporary state of post-modern architects that stretch the possibilities of form, e.g. Libeskind as well.
They depend a lot on advanced materials, advanced construction techniques, and importantly, advanced simulation and modelling to ensure that stress/tolerances/forces are all correct.
Previously, structures depended upon classic forms and draftsman calculated stress/force.
A few years ago in Venice Biennale, I saw the international exhibits side-by-side. The US stood out particularly (the exhibiters from UCLA) with a lot of techno-fetish - very tacticle cyber type compute relevant forms.
When I look at these pictures I am reminded of the new building at my university, it has a very similar colour scheme (primary colours everywhere). It has only been open since Sept 2003 and has already beared the brunt of thousands of jokes.
From the wheelchair ramp that curves in an S shape (it is one lane and impossible to see the bottom from the top, of course leading to collisions), to the fact that they put that corrogated metal that is normally used for Silos _on the walls_, this combined with the fact that red, yellow, and blue is used exstensivly makes you think you are in preeschool while you are actually in differential equations
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
If it ever gets earthquake damaged, how will we know?
I've seen other pomo style buildings. MIT also has that weird dorm building that looks like a cross between a sponge and a retarded sponge. Harvard has some other dorm that looks a little more normal, but still not that appealing to me.
Dammit, we like our Swiss-cheese-concrete dorm.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Although personally I don't mind Gehry's buildings (in small amounts), you would have thought that MIT would have been more interested in a building by one of the more engineering-orientated architects...someone that designs buildings by 'hacking' materials, structure, & construction.
Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners would have been prefect for the job - designers of the really really cool Eden Project.
I agree. While I think the thing he did at Bilbao works for an art museum, the "Gehry bandshell" at the over-budget Millennium Park here in Chicago looks excessive and needless. The overall area isn't too bad, with a canopy over the grassy area from which speakers are hung, eliminating the need for towers, but the actual bandshell looks ridiculous in the Windy City. 20 years or so down the road people will look at his stuff and think "wow, that stuff is ugly."
Thankfully, Gehry is in his in his mid-70s so hopefully he only has a few more years of design left in him.
As someone who's partner is a planner, and who's learned to appreciate all kinds of architecture as a result, I have to say that I find your thinking rather blinkered.
Yes, you may not like it, and yes, it might not be a clone of every other building in the area but that doesn't make it a bad thing. If everyone thought as you do then we wouldn't have the Gugenheim Museums of New York and Bilbao, The Sydney Opera House, La Defense (in Paris), Swiss Re (in London) or the planned "Shard of Glass" (also in London).
And those are just modern examples. Virtually every noteworthy building in history has been on the receiving end of flak for being an eyesore at one time or another, yet today they are regarded as classic examples of their time.
What would you rather have architects do? Design drab, uninteresting buildings? Isn't physical architecture a valid artform? Why not? Because you say so? Why is the building "pretty ugly"? Because you say so? Ah, so you've studied architecture at length, have you? You're an expert on the aesthetics of the built environment? No? I didn't think so.
How would you feel about a world where everyone was required to dress the same way as people have always dressed, like the same art and music that people have always liked, and enjoy only the things that have been enjoyed for ages? Would you really want to live in a world that stood culturally still? Well, you might, but I don't.
Try and appreciate that things change, and that, just because you don't like it, that doesn't mean everyone agrees with you. I guarantee you that, in twenty years time, 90 percent of the people who feel that the building is "pretty ugly" now will be looking at the same building and calling it fantastic.
In fact, the building is beautiful right now. Anyone with a trained eye would rattle off a whole lot of reasons why, just as a good art student could tell you why Picasso's work is genius.
What you call an eyesore is actually anything but. That you don't see it is a real pity.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I live in Cambridge near MIT, maybe you should look around some more, there is a lot of different architecture in Cambridge. If Cantabrigians wanted all the same looking stiff crud they'd move to Boston where they are more strict about how stuff looks. BTW, the Virgin Records store (formally Tower Records) is designed by the same architect. There is a large plateau on one of the corners where a large teabag was supposed to go, as in Boston Tea Party. The residents of Back Bay stopped the tea bag from going up. The Stata center is some small way a big f u to the Back Bay which is right across the river. Drive around Cambridge more, there is a lot more here than just the swapfest.
True to Microsoft tradition, looking at the concept model here, it appears that Bill's building has already crashed.
Thanks folks, I'll be here all night...
- sm
Engineers (as apposed to Computer Science majors) typically need to take a number of professional development classes where we learn such things as conflict resolution, how to work on a team, and ... well, let's just leave it at not being a jerk.
Being serious, how do you go about making an college-level course for conflict resolution and not being a jerk. They seem like things that are best taught at the primary school level, and that by the time kids reach college, it would be very hard to change these sorts of behaviors.
I'm being serious because I'm not very good at these skills, being your stereotypical Slashdotter, but this seems more of a social problem, best attacked through play-dates, mentoring, peer groups, and other socializing oriented attacks. I wonder how such a class would be structured.
= 9J =
Just because MIT have the right to do a vast array of things on their property doesn't make it ethically right... There are any number of things they could (but don't) do that would make life that much more difficult for people working there.
RMS's argument is that MIT chose a system of security that was convenient for them but did not take into account the privacy concerns of those working in the building.
Flatly saying that "MIT have the right to do whatever they want, and RMS can simply go stuff himself" sounds a little like the sys-admins who complain about the users -- when really they should be there FOR the users..! (not despite...)
It seems reasonable to me that the doors of the CS lab shouldn't be unlocked at 3 am. It also seems reasonable that if someone who works there wants in, they should be able to get in a 3 am. Finally, you need a method of giving people keys that won't allow them to copy them. I am sure that the hackers at MIT have little regard for the "do not duplicate" warning on traditional keys. They'll probably figure out how to dupe an RFID card as well (it can be done) and pretty soon everybody will be able to access the building as RMS.
If RMS is this concerned about his "privacy" wait till he finds out that the GNU/Linux systems he logs on to have "log files" that the administrator can read!
Lasers Controlled Games!
I used to work for the computer and network operations centre on campus. Just before I started there, they installed a magnetic card lock system on the doors. Instead of using keys, you use your university ID (and a PIN code on critical doors as well). This was highly desirable because it was much easier than keys, provided fine grained control, and provided logging and accountability. Well people raised a fit over "big brother" watching them. An even bigger fit was raised when security cameras were installed on all the entrances and all critical rooms.
Now, of course, this building contains a $25 million phone switch (Lucent 7R/E, latest model, only a few in the world), another $10 million in Cisco networking gear, the IBM mainframe that runs the entire university's finincials, a super computer, and plenty more high dollar, high importance gear.
Doesn't matter to some people, they carried on about their rights and being watched and stuff. Of course, no one actually was watching them, the logs and tapes sat unused in a vault unless something actually went missing. However people cried over it all the same.
Well, I happen to like the look of the buildings, at least based on the pictures. The style fits the spirit of innovation and risk-taking of its researchers. I expected the Slashdot crowd to show less conservatism than this.
Of course whether the building will prove to be functional or not is a different story, only time will tell!
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
I find it amusing when I see comment after comment denigrating Richard Stallman, he made it through the math55 program. He has written more complex and well coded software than anyone I have met personally. He has strong opinions and sticks to his guns. Its almost like half the slashdot crowd wants lots of free software sans the opinions of the author. Be a good boy code me something I use every day but don't open your mouth. I am no stallman zealot but if most of the mental midgets who have such a problem with his insistence on precision in terminology, stopped and thought about where it stems from, the fact that he is a bigger math geek than practically and human walking this ball of mud today hence that type of mentality offers no lenience when it comes to imprecission. The man can be an asshole, and he is full of himself. To me he has earned the right to be full of himself. While most of you shooting your mouth off have never done anything for open source at all. As to being an asshole join the club most of us just dont get that kind of spotlight shown on our flaws. Ranting about the peanut gallery is useless I suppose goddamn hypocritical jackdaws.
Panel F, Relay #70
It's like architects have forgotten how to build an attractive, subdued, building. They also seem to often live in their own world and give no consideration to the surrounding architecture. We are having that problem at the University of Arizona. Our campus, more than most, ha(s/d) a nice, uniform architecture. All the buildings are done in the same general red-brick look. There is plenty of individual variance, of course, but they all had the same general theme.
Well that's not the case any more, there are more buildings cropping up that just seem to come from their own little world. Our student union was one of the first. It is a nice building and not unpleasing to look at, but it is very white, and stands out. Worse is the new dance theatre. It is a big curvy, black peice of crap with random metal segments on it. Looks NOTHING like the dance building to which it's attached.
It's really annoying.
Does anyone have a clue about what kind of research Richard Stallman does today at MIT?
I couldn't find him on eecs.mit.edu/people.html
I can tell you, being at another university that uses swipe cards, it causes lots of wear and tear on cards and on readers. If you have a reader getting swiped 100 times a day, which isn't uncommon for one that controlls access to an area with lots of people, it wears out quick. Cards likewise. I've replaced my card 2 times at the university, both while I worked in a building with card access. Before and after that aren't a problem since it sits with my other cards in my wallet most of the time.
RFID is a better idea since you don't have any physical contact so much less wear. I don't imaging the readers should ever wear out, barring a random failure or accidental damage.
Even more BUTT-UGLY than the Experience Music Project (EMP) of Seattle.
Did someone doped up on Mescaline and wayyy too into Tim Burton Movies and with a shit load of private funds insist upon such an aesthetically putrid design?
Imagine if the Operating System you run had as unappealing design as this pathetic waste of $280 Million Dollars?
What the hell ever happened to Architects with Class?
Egads and Gadzooks! What an ugly building!
Ugly, ugly, ugly! Ugh.
naeem
The difference between you and RMS is that whereas you "despise Bill Gates' operating philosophy and business tactics," RMS despises the very foundation of commercial software. I'm not saying he's right (in fact, I'd even say that he's wrong), but given his philisophical views, I don't believe his behavior is totally inappropriate.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
http://www.rit.edu/~930www/paley/
1.6 million dollars. Have yet to talk to a student who does not think the thing is hideous.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
about Dr. Seuss when they first saw the photos?
Just curious myself.
Try not to let life get in the way of living.
The subject line is "RMS raises a stink as always" and not one Slashdotter made a shower joke. Ahh, I must be getting old...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I was drunk when I stumbled by this building a few months ago.
I guess I can add that memory to the "did happen" file.
-John Fenley
... Gym.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
When designers attack!!!!
Details at 11.
The difference between you and RMS is that whereas you "despise Bill Gates' operating philosophy and business tactics," RMS despises the very foundation of commercial software.
But he wants to have his cake and eat it, too.
If RMS is truly entrenched in this worldview so much that he cannot bear the thought of working in a building with Gates' name on it, then maybe instead of griping publicly he ought to take a principled stand.
If he has a problem with working in the Gates building, he should leave it. OTOH, if the Gates building is such a cool piece of architecture and contains such useful technology that he can't bear not to work there - or if his job demands that he stay there, and he values his position and stature more than his philosophy - then he should stfu and stop complaining about the teeth on his gift horse.
A lot of buidlings use RFID cards to get in and out. If he doesn't like it he can always quit.
What privacy concerns? Give me something that doesn't sound like a retarded tinfoil hat wearing moronic theory and I MIGHT be inclined to give a shit.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Speaking as someone who spent a good part of life in the MIT AI Lab, I should point out that it had been a long standing tradition--unspoken, though--not to lock door, and in many cases, not even locking the screen when you step away from the desk or go home. The tacit assumption is that if people want to use the machine, e.g., to kill a printer job, they will not touch your personal stuff. For almost ten years when I was there, till the late 90s, I had never encounted anything unpleasant. People may take your books or CDs, but always put them back.
There had been theft problems, and the solution was that everyone affiliated with the Lab was given a huge key that opens the main lobby door--no RFID--and I still have one.
The Lab for Computer Science has always been a bit different; they have now merged with AI. Things started to change in the late nineties, even in the AI Lab: more Windows machines, coutesy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, more industry-supported research, and fewer open doors.
Ok, so as an MIT student, I've watched the institute blow its money on pretty stupid things. When I got here, Simmons Hall was finishing construction, and Stata was just a big hole in the ground. Simmons was the solution to overcrowding on campus, to build a huge dorm full of holes that can hole about 10% of the people a building that size should hold.
Now, there's Stata. It's pricetag was $283 million, up from a proposed $95 million. Even worse, Gehry's quoted in The Tech complaining about having to deal with "stupid things like budgets". I'm glad they managed to stop him at only three times the initial spec.
A final amusing tidbit about State. Many of the offices and rooms have these large, angled concrete columns. Most of them are covered with marking by construction workers, jotting notes of what wires to run where and which holes go in which walls. No one told the workers that the columns weren't getting painted over, though. Now these offices look like someone came in to graffiti the columns.
-InsaneFolder
My other char is '!'
This is nothing more than the Windows OS's architecture mapped into the physical world. A pile of... ?
RMS does not do any "computer science" research.
RMs does political activism. Without him research will become illegal (DMCA2), software development will become illegal (software patents), and collaborative software development would have died.
Unfortunately, computer science has been living under a central control regime for the last ~10 years (and now the central controller has been honoured with this building). In this time, innovation has been sucked out of the public to somewhere behind a lead door in Redmond. The legacy is that the most important thing happening in computer science today is politics!
I hope RMS never gives up his current line of research and work. (I condemn him to this - I'm sure he'd rather be hacking Emacs or some new GNU software for Guile or GNOME.)
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Seriously, something out of roger rabbit....
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
For anyone that hasn't been to MIT's campus, the place is in a warehouse district. Sure the view from the River looks beautiful with Killian Court, but the otherside of the campus is pretty gross. The computer science buildings (32, 34, and 36 IIRC) were on a nearly abandonned ally, and walking in/out of that building late at night was creepy, I can't imagine what the girls in Course 6 (EECS) thought, or perhaps that is why they didn't stay late for labs...
:)
The new building here is in a even less school-like location, right near major roads. If you were a parent and saw that building, you'd probably forbid your son to wander there in the middle of the night, and you definitely would fear your daughter being there.
Forget terrorism, forget equipment, how about the fact that you have 18-25 year olds working in those buildings at all hours of the night... and in the Winter, Boston gets cold, the last thing you want is some psychofrenic homeless man sneaking in the sleep and scaring/assaulting people (my Office, in a nicer area of Greater Boston was left unlocked one night and we had that problem)...
You want to explain to a Massachusetts Jury that the school took all reasonable precautions and isn't liable for a student being assaulted/killed/raped, because security measures would have infringed upon privacy?
Sorry, but MIT needs to look out for the safety of its people... I expect a bunch of liberty/security quotes, but this IS NOT an infringement on ANYTHING, but gives some measurable level of security.
I respect RMS, he's a personal hero for what he has accomplished, but MIT isn't his personal playground, and his desire to come and go as he pleases with nobody knowing is NOT more important that the safety of those grad students that the faculty use as free (paid by grant) labor...
Alex
It's an ugly mess that looks like it was made by a cartoonist on acid.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Well...I'm not an expert taster, but if I had to eat shit I would probably say it didn't taste very good.
Let us give credit where credit is due: Richard Stallman did write GCC, but GCC is built on the RTL back end developed by Chris Fraser, who is better known as part of the team the developed iburg and lcc.
I would estimate at least half, myself included. Why on earth should we have to listen to the man? Please, whilst you deny it you are showing all the signs of being a fanboy. Stallman has no more earned the right to talk nonsense and be listened to than any other personality (mainstream or "geek"). Indeed, there are brighter people than Stallman that we are under no obligation to listen to either.
The amount of freedom one has to give up to use Microsoft products is small compared with the amount of freedom you are suggesting we all have to give up to use OSS. Using up valuable computer cycles is one thing, using up precious mind cycles is quite another.
You ever see the Sydney Opera House? That's a totally different and distinctive building. And one which is admired and loved not just across the world, but across the universe - Carl Sagan sent a picture of it into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft.
This building echoes the excitement and adventure of computing. I cannot comment on whether it makes good use of space or is enjoyable to work in, because if I were to do so, I'd be guessing. Like you.
The fact that it arouses strong emotions is proof enough that it is succeeding on at least one level.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Ok, so as an MIT student, ...
According to the my recent WIRED, The University of Washington's Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering (Yes, that Paul Allen) cost 30% more per square foot than the Stata Center.
You could perhaps argue that we built too much, but obviously the dollars indicate a decent investment.
Also, just as a final remark, the building can hold more people than it holds now. Apparently, people don't like the way it's holding them, but that's a different issue entirely.
The anti-MS jokes are lame in general, but they're especially so when the building has nothing to do with the corporation. Bill Gates and his wife have one tower named after them out of private donation, and that's it. And people should give Ray Stata his respect; the man founded Analog Devices and has been a philanthropist for a while, now.
That's the ugliest damn building I've seen in a long time. Maybe the worst ever.
If this is what our best and brightest give us, maybe good architecture is dead.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
In other news, Stallman has agreed to stay as long as the school is renamed GNU/MIT.
Actually, he uses a CAD system developed (in-house by Dassault, I think) for aerospace engineering. This lets him do use that crazy curving and folding titanium without the whole thing falling down.
Someone below jokingly suggested that the architect might have used Lego bricks as his initial model. This isn't too far from the truth; after his initial sketches Gehry makes his first models from wooden blocks. The Bilbao Guggenheim also featured the funky design step of 3D scanning frozen fish to get natural curves.
He can do normal looking buildings too, if anyone's interested. He asks the clients how crazy he can go, so blame MIT if you think it's over the top... they signed off on it.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
We're slowly introducing it in our office and my apartment building already uses it. In both cases you need to wave your badge within about 1" of the reader.
I'm sure you can get more sensitive readers, but i doubt it's that easy to constantly ping everyone to find out where they are.
Any reputable institution is going to keep logs of who opens their doors, be it by pin code, mag stripe, rfid or smart card... It's not really any different from keeping an audit trail on a server.
The last time something pissed this man off royally, we got GNU... right?
[o]_O
this building looks like its been taken from Day of the Tentacle
It's bad enough MIT breaking with tradition and giving the building a name*. But calling it after a Harvard drop-out...the humiliation.
*For the uninitiated, MIT buildings are almost always referred to by number. The main entrance on Mass Ave has the glorious name of Lobby 12. (Or was it 7...it's been a few years)
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
He may have made some significant impacts in the computing world, but that doesn't make his opinions infallible and correct for the rest of his life.
Well, is it any less ridiculous than electing somebody governor because he "acted" (loosely speaking) in a number of action movies?
I don't begrudge Arnold his ready made political clout: the celebrity culture gives people the ability to command attention, and they have a right to use that abiltiy for whatever purposes they see fit. RMS, at least, has made his mark already in thinking about the connections between technology and politics; emacs and gcc where important contributions in their day, but the GPL is what he will be remembered for. It may not be the only or ultimate "free" license, but there is no doubting its enormous impact on the world.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The quality of slashdot readers must really be down. 300+ comments and not one about a Beowolf cluster.
Dawn of the Dead
In actuality, this building ended up costing around $350-$400 million (depending on what professor you ask). My team and I was up there for a week setting up a cluster in the STATA building (among others). It's not quite as crazy on the inside, except for the brightly colored walls. It made me think of living in a Lego house.
Another odd quirk about the building (and the architect, Gehring) is that in most of the faculty offices there will be a dull, gray concrete pillar or two in the middle of the room. Not even the professors are able to paint the pillars or hang anything on them to cover their blandness (ugliness?)
Coming soon at MIT...
The ENRON Business School
The Jayson Blair School of Journalism
The Timothy McVeigh School of Architecture
It's sad that universities are so desperate for cash that they're willing to whore themselves out to a bunch of crooks.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Is it me or does it seem appropriate that a building named after Bill Gates looks like an ugly, haphazard, hodgepodge of random stuff thrown together, kind of like Windows?
I would definitely agree. I used to live near Plochingen, Germany, where there was a wacky Hundertwasser complex, which could be seen from any train heading southeast from Stuttgart
Pictures can be seen here and here. Pretty interesting architecture.