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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
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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
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!"
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
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
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!
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.
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
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.
GCC was possibly the most robust C compiler in the late 80's.
Of course, that's can't be *proven*, but consider this: The version of GCC that RMS wrote was good enough for the rest of the FSF staff to write GNU, and it was good enough for Torvalds use to write Linux.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
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?
If it ever gets earthquake damaged, how will we know?
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
= 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...)
But was that because it was the best or because because it was the best of the free ones, the only free one, or good enough. Your right, it would be hard to prove. I still don't like RMS anyway.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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
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.
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?
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
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
Sorry, but this set of buildings at MIT look like somethign out of Tim Burton's "A nightmare before Christmas".
Hardly architectural masterpieces for generations to come.
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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.
Word on the street is that he mostly just bothers people. Also he is terrified of water(isn't hydrophobia a symptom of rabies?) and spider plants. To keep the madman from their offices his colleagues hang spider plants in their doorways.
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.