Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Gives $20M to CMU for New Building
touretzky writes "Carnegie Mellon University announced on Tuesday that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had donated $20 million toward the cost of a new building to be called the "Gates Center for Computer Science". Some faculty have suggested that in acknowledgment of Mr. Gates' profound influence on the computer software industry, the building should be painted bright blue."
Yes, the building will have Windows, but the Office will cost extra.
Even when he tries to do something nice, he gets flamed. The man just donated 20 million to the school. give him a break
How the heck would the color blue pay homage to Bill ?
the building should be painted bright blue."
Ah.... A monument to ugliness, much like the XP color themes. I get it!
...Blue screen of death? ;)
they should build it properly after 3 service packs
They can write BSOD in big white letters on the top of it.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Now I like BSOD jokes as much as the next person but seriously I think that's one area we can atleast applaud Microsoft at. It's really quite a rare date (or an indication of hardware failure) to see a BSOD in Windows XP. Now those damned security issues on the other hand...
Paint it aqua!
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
They should paint 'IRQL not less or equal' on the side of the building.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Why doesn't Bill gates run around spending money on fun stuff? NSYNC guys almost buy a trip a to space. Woz has like 20 segways (and plays on a segway plo team). But why doesnt Bill Gates spend his money on such crazy things?
He just wants control of their water-walking robots. No bathtub will be safe!
Funny thing about Carnegie Mellon -- there's a lot of people there who spell Microsoft with a dollar sign and refer to it as the "evil empire," yet every Microsoft presentation is standing-room only. There are plenty of people there that actually respect Microsoft as a company, and of course President Jared Cohon was more than happy to accept a $20 million gift.
Now the Gates Center is a $50+ million project. If you want to name the building in your honor instead, you could always kick in the rest of the dough.
For more information, click here.
If they are so short on money that they need an external investor to pay for the new building then why are they suggesting wasting some by painting it blue? Keep in mind we are talking about $1000~2000 for a paint job alone.
Not to mention the new color scheme would be very quickly hated and could even be a hazard to aircraft (they might not see it!)
By the time he's dead, there will be so many buildings with his name on them, he'll be everywhere, like all the towns with Carnegie libraries today. And like Carnegie, he'll be remembered fondly for all the stuff he did that still endures, and not for the things Slashdot likes to bash him for today.
Like it or not...
Unfortunately none of the doors have locks and all of the windows are wide open by default.
$20Million to CMU? Please Bill... Couldn't you have done something a bit more charitable? Like the students at CMU need a new building? How bout helping out the children of Cleveland Ohio of whom 53% are living in poverty. Half the school buildings here would be condemed if it weren't for the fact that 87 of the 100 building inspectors were laid off last year. And who do we have to thank? Queen Jane. But thanks Bill, thanks for giving unNeedy spoilded rich kids a chance.
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
In a Related Story,
At the Borland Conference in San Jose this week, Borland gave CMU a check for $1M. They must be doing something right at CMU!
I'm always afraid of huge corporate donations to CS departments, because they tend to want to push the program in a certain direction. I don't think it helps anyone to have a Microsoft centric CS education, because CS shouldn't be about practical implementations, but rather theoretical concepts. I hope CMU isn't tainted by this donation.
I'm not just getting down on Microsoft either, I would feel wary about any large software company. On the other hand, it is a very nice thing for Mr. Gates to do. I'm always impressed by the really great things he and his wife choose to do with all of that money.
Brown University got $100M today. Bill's cheap! :)
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
On slashdot someone will complain that this charitable act is just an attempt to push his company's products on college students and the mods will make it +5 insightful.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Jeez, I hope it doesn't crash
1. To enter, you push a button and 5 minutes later the door opens
2. All digital locks can be opened with the admin password 1-2-3-4-5
3. Vibrating Window panes will cause random crashes
4. All wall decorations are essential and directly integrated into the building and cannot be removed without destroying the entire structure
...you will be greeted by a 20 foot iron sculpture of clippy.
That, and the building won't have any locks.
webpage
I'd attend class under a bridge somewhere before I stepped foot in a building bought by Bill.
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
When news of "Gates" becoming the apellation of the building broke, heated discussions appeared on the local university electronic bulletin board. Many people were dismayed that Bill Gates, a college dropout with little knowledge of computer science, would receive the honor of having the computer science building named after him. It is no ordinary building. It is the building housing the pre-eminent computer-science department that is among the top 3 in the nation.
One mathematics professor lamented that money buys anything -- including undeserved honors. He commented that Stanford University might as well name the building after "Donald Trump" since he is a billionaire.
Personally, I object to honoring Bill Gates for anything. As far as I am concerned, he is an unethical shmuck who bears principal responsibility for the suicide of Gary Kildall. Search on "Gary Kildall" if you do not know who he is.
If it was a real donation it would be more discretely done (eg. name it after a famous person other than Gates and perhaps put up a small plaque saying it was funded by Gate foundation).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Hopefully not sky blue, unless they want a helicopter to crash into it.
Curse those Stonecutters......
Money donated to computer science will be better spent in endowing fellowships in patent law.
Microsoft continues to make the world a better place for lawyers and is likely eventually to hold on retainer 51% of attorneys worldwide.
He wants the campus to build a $50M building with it. Sound like a math problem? yeah. His money is appreciated, but he's asking the campus to build more than he's willing to support, which is mildly questionable.
Even better, though, the proposed location for the new building is on top of this really shitty excuse for a building that looks like a few mobile homes shoved up against eachother and is generally an eyesore. In the artist's rendering of the plans, it apppears to be styled like many of the more nice looking new and old campus buildings (Green roof, light colored brick, etc) which is definitely a good thing. CMU has some pretty buildings, but it also has some impressive eyesores. Good to see one of them go away.
Also consider that Microsoft is the #1 employer of CS grads from CMU. This school's students and expertise have served him well, so I'm glad to see that he's willing to give something back.
Also, faculty have suggested opening large boxes of roaches and mosquitos, and never, ever, ever calling the Exterminator.
For realism's sake.
"thank you, bill gates, for donating money to an a academic instution"
the preceding is an antidote to the typical lowest common denominator slashdot bs
you may now go back to your usual tired stale jokes and rants
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
An artist's conception of the new building shows three entrances with one facing Forbes Avenue, the major Pittsburgh thoroughfare on which the campus is located.
As per a requirement from the donors, one entrance will always be kept unlocked and unguarded. If anyone steals anything at night, the door will be locked, and another chosen to remain unlocked. The full cost of any burglary or damage will remain with CMU. "This will allow us to bring the Windows experience to the physical world" said Mr Gates.
I was looking into going to CMU for their esteemed Computer Science program, but now I just hope they wont let this influence their set of courses, breadth of experience, or heterogeneous computer labs...
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
Carnegie-Mellon University officials today reported that several designs for metal keys to the new Gates Center for Computer Science, which hasn't even been built yet, were found on the Kazaa and Gnutella filesharing networks. CMU Campus Police and Microsoft are reportedly investigating the leaked keys.
I admit, I didn't get the Blue Screen of Death reference at first. I've been using Windows 2000 since it came out, and I might have seen a BSOD once... maybe twice. It just doesn't come up anymore.
Actually I was mostly confused at the joke at first, thinking, "Wait a minute, I thought IBM was 'Big Blue'"
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
What Slashdot thinks about Microsoft is the *ONLY* thing that matters. The TRUTH is IRRELEVANT you DIRTBAG.
If we had a beowulf cluster of Linux donations, we could overpower Bill Gates soooo easily!
he gives all this money to a school, but still gets the borg icon treatment on /.
CB#
free ipod and free gmail!
I know there's and unfunny joke in this about BSOD, but it made me remember that IBM was/(is?) called Big Blue. Bill gates sold IBM MS-DOS (vaporware at the time) and then startegically doomed IBM's OS2 through a duplicitous partnership. Whatever color it is, the building should definately have a pirate's flag. "Developers, developers, developers..."
Four words:
== Blue Building Of Death ==
If microsoft only make 10,000 times what I make a year for them to spend $10,000 would hurt no more than if I spend a $1. $20 million for a building with Bill Gates name plastered on it is no better then if I went and paid $200 to put a tatoo reading "by the grace of icecow" on a highschool homecommming queen's forhead.
It's just not appropriate, I'm told.
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
Anyone remember the furor when it looked like Richard Stallman's office and the Free Software Foundation would be in the new Gates building at MIT?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
...the White House should be painted blue as well.
Sooo IBM isn't the Big Blue anymore?
Painting it blue makes sense, but shouldn't it be full of (security) holes as well? I'm envisioning unlocked lab after unlocked lab, no doors, open windows.
In practice with MS's security mold they would keep the blue prints under lock and key, as to keep anyone from being able to exploit these flaws, of course.
Mod me down if you want, but I'll be the one laughing when this actually happens.
Finally found the money Micro$oft stole from me!
true dat.
I'll give you a Score:1, Interesting when you post your own 1040 return, with all charitable contributions itemized, to this thread.
Until then, STFU.
I mean in all seriousness that this is great. Say what you want about Bill and M$'s business, practices, but when it comes to charity, Bill puts his money where his mouth is.
.net with Mono. They may try Debian, but they might be waiting on Sarge to be released before making a commitment.
My question is this? With the raging debate that goes on about Linux on the desktop, do you think the PC's in this building will be running Gnome or KDE as the default.
I am assuming they will be running Fedora, but I guess Suse is a possibility. But then maybe Bill won't allow them to run Suse since they are run by Novell, who is trying to rip off
there's only one reason slashdot posts stories like that: to give people an excuse to take cheap potshots at gates and microsoft. bonus points to samzenpus for priming the pump with the bright blue paint comment.
seriously, isn't it time that everyone moved beyond the one-dimensional caricature of gates?
How about the $6Billion (not an exageration) he gave to help fight diseases in developing countries. I wouldbe willing to bet the kids dying of malaria and AIDs in Africa would find the living situation in Cleaveland quite nice.
I post on Slashdot regularly and I'm pro-Microsoft.
I'm also a pro-Bush Republican.
We are out there, we'd just rather not open our mouths about it if all you're going to do is flame childishly.
Nothing like English Lit geek humor in a computer geek article. Curiouser and curiouser!
It appears Bill has truly acted altruistically here.
This does not fit our general characterizations of the man.
How can we reconcile this seeming incongruity? By adopting the following reasoning: "$20 million for a building?! People on this planet are still starving to death! The ego!"
CMU may have quite a few good individual professors and research projects in CS, but the institution as a whole doesn't think twice about being a corporate-flak career school... from their advertising slogan "The Professional Choice" in the early '80s on (when CMU accepted a certain large donation from IBM and almost decided to make all its students buy PC's in 1982).
Thankfully, many CMU students are still practicing some degree of creative resistance, although a penguin statue allegedly placed on the roof of the student center overnight before the Gates speech was hurriedly removed since apparently CMU values its clean public image more than its students' creativity.
One other thing to note is that this is likely not much more than a matching grant for further increases in students' tuition, which pays for a much higher share of an education at CMU than at many peer schools.
Will they name it the "Blue Screen of Death". LOL. Plus, it will be too tempting for the artist in training to use some spray paint. Maybe someone will paint a penguin. LOL.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
in any event, i agree with the statement you made.
...that way, maybe it won't be the only thing Bill's given us that makes things crash.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
The disgusting propaganda link was missing from my post, sorry.
Apparently Gate's $20 million is just a part of the $1 billion the University aspires to attain (see student newspaper article Carnegie Mellon receives $20 million to construct Computer Science building). $55 million buys you the right to rename a school -- late last fall an alum renamed the business school (The David A. Tepper School of Business debuts).
BSOD
who knew graffiti could be geeky?
$1 billion over 20 years to establish the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program, which will support promising minority students through college and some kinds of graduate school.
$750 million over five years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which includes the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, Unicef, pharmaceutical companies and the World Bank.
$350 million over three years to teachers, administrators, school districts and schools to improve America's K-12 education, starting in Washington State.
$200 million to the Gates Library Program, which is wiring public libraries in America's poorest communities in an effort to close the "digital divide."
$100 million to the Gates Children's Vaccine Program, which will accelerate delivery of lifesaving vaccines to children in the poorest countries of the world.
$50 million to the Maternal Mortality Reduction Program, run by the Columbia University School of Public Health.
$50 million to the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, to conduct research on promising candidates for a malaria vaccine.
$50 million to an international group called the Alliance for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer.
$50 million to a fund for global polio eradication, led by the World Health Organization, Unicef, Rotary International and the U.N. Foundation.
$40 million to the International Vaccine Institute, a research program based in Seoul, South Korea.
$28 million to Unicef for the elimination of maternal and neonatal tetanus.
$25 million to the Sequella Global Tuberculosis Foundation.
$25 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which is creating coalitions of research scientists, pharmaceutical companies and governments in developing countries to look for a safe, effective, widely accessible vaccine against AIDS.
Source: New York Times
And all this was of the year 2000. Now I have not checked this, but I suspect the charitable donations from every Linux distro CEO combined would fall well short of this. Admit it, Bill Gates is in fact doing some good in this world.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
Now is the new building wraped in DRM and required to only use Microsoft products.
All new CS graduates are coming from IIT, as in the Indian Institute of Technology. Americans just aren't skilled enough to learn CS anymore. We're getting the New and Better(tm) jobs at Burger King.
- Stanford CS: Gates Bldg
- MIT EECS: (half only) Gates Tower in the Stata Center (Bldg 32). The brand spanking new Gehry building
- Harvard CS: Maxwell Dworkin. Harvard has a standing policy of not naming buildings after living people and Bill Gates usually wants his dad's name at the doorside. So they instead put the maiden names of Gates' and Balmer's moms on the building
Berkeley's Soda Hall, their current CS abode, is probably too old. I won't be surprised if they too got a CS building named Gates Hall.Of the other univs in the top-10, UIUC has the Seibel Center. Dunno about Princeton, UTexas, Cornell and the others...
...on the computer software industry, it should have robust barriers to entry.
I can imagine at some stage in the corner of the building. "A new update is available". These new updates will randomly add new features. Such as: - Upgrade (Another floor which is completely useless). - Security has been upgraded (some doors dont open anymore!). - More stable (we've added a required support!) - Windows Security Centre improvement (we've added a guard station, but hired no guards.) And more and more....
CMU claims it has 138 alumni working for Microsoft which is about the size of one year's graduating class in CS.
I don't know who remembers Carnegie fondly. Most people could care less who their library is named after. I associate Carnegie with the other robber barons of the time, and his philanthropy as a classic case of a guilty conscience. Not to mention the confusion over the pronunciation of the name: Carn-a-gee or carn-egg-ee. In the future maybe people will misprounce Bill's name as Ja-tees. and now from the Jaytees Foundation..
He's ging away MY money, your money and everyone else's money. It is easy to give if you have a lot of it. The issue is, how did he get it. We all know that.
He should give the money back to all the people he stole it from.
I wonder if only the Windows Operating System and related software is allowed within the building ... in order for that large of a donation to be made. No Unix/Linux or Open Source allowed!
If not, then that was quite a generous donation from Mr. Gates.
Linux is like a wigwam -- no Windows, no Gates, Apache inside.
IIRC many of the errors which caused blue screens in Win2K/Win9X were changed in XP to just cold reboot the machine. This behavior change can make it seem to Joe User like the power glitched, a hardware fault caused an NMI, etc, instead of Windows just flaking out for some random reason.
If the above is true, Microsoft has executed a brilliant act of market deception, even against highly technical users.
[Disclaimer: I've never run WinXP. I will certainly accept factual corrections from someone with an accurate knowledge of its internals].
When I went to CMU (back in the days before the WWW) the new technology on campus was by by Apple. Our computer clusters (which were called Apple Orchards - sigh) were about 50% Apple, 20% Unix, and 30% Microsoft. There was a big NeXT following in the very early days as well. I guess we're not going to see a push for alternative OS's there in the near future. As a side note, one more new building on that campus isn't going to make much of a difference. It's looked wrong ever since they tore down Skibo.
"2.Set up a future harvesting ground for hiring into his empire when the time is right."
Job openings easily available for future graduates? Is that so bad? Is he really screwing up their future by hiring them? That answer is extremely subjective.
"3.Spread the good word about Microsoft - 20mil worth of marketing does not seem to have the same effect."
Microsoft is NOT donating $20M... The Gates Foundation is. Do NOT confuse the two. Anyway, how exactly is this beneficial to Microsoft? Will it persuade more people to opt for Microsoft's products? Will it help Microsoft in various anti-trust lawsuits? I don't think so.
To put it mildly, I don't always hold Microsoft in the highest regard. But this is not about Microsoft.
This is not my sig.
Have some fun with philanthropy while making it more cost-effective.
Seastead this.
People always hate the big guy until they get a chance to be a part.
Doesn't change the validity of hating them.
people will be very quick to badmouth the US, but start giving out free plane tickets and you'll get mobbed.
Classic US attitude. Treat non-US'ians as if they were single group. The US is a tiny fraction of the world's population. Many of the world's population like the US, largely because of Hollywood escapism. Many informed people don't.
Yes, I know I'm treating the US as a single group. See how it feels?
Yikes, this is weird -- i'm suddenly _defending_ Windows a lot more than I normally do lately, even though I prefer *nix. Funky.
Regards,
John
Falling You - beautiful
Mod funny
all his money? statisticly it is a waste of time for Bill to pick up $50 thousand off the ground because in the time it takes to pick it up, he would have already made that much. 20 million to bill is like 20 bucks to us
because BILL PH34RZ WEAN!!1!1
(from when he came to speak on campus last year).
Will include build-in firewalls?
Sorry, I just had to do this!
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
"It looks so much better...a beautiful sky blue"
*helicopter crashes into it*
End Communication.
Why think when you can just accept the hype at face value? Congratulations on being a marketer's (and Republican strategist's) wet dream.
You missed the last half of the quote: Gates is phenomenally good at pleasing consumers--that is, at creating wealth for others.
Think about it: how much money is spent by corporations annually to hire consultants to fix their Windoze boxes after they have been exploited? This man's a genius! Look at all that wealth he has created! As the saying goes, If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
Disclaimer: This comment was generated by a Flock of Trained Microsoft Programmers for Aqua_Geek.
The $20 million only covers part of the project, estimated to cost more than $50 million. The new building will replace several others, drastically changing the campus. According VP of University Advancement, it's just part of their funding goal: "Do we aspire for $1 billion? Yes. Is that our goal? No," said Kosak.. Alumnus Tepper donated $55 million in the spring to the business school, which was renamed the Tepper School of Business. Gates couldn't put up a couple extra mill to have the CS school named after him?
I can't stand people who bash Bill and his foundation. Sure bash Microsoft if you must, but why the foundation?
Yes he is mega rich but he still doesn't have to give the money away does he?
I am sure he could find other ways to get rid of the money. Instead he is doing some good.
His foundation has practically wiped our Malaria in third world countries.
I suppose he did that for advertising as well??
No I am not a MS support, Linux is my vehicle of choice, but I am man enough to applaud someone doing good for the community.
Would be nice if some of the wallies posted here could do the same.
Yeah I know, fat chance of that.
Games Programmer And Designer
I am a student at CMU, we knew about this yesterday. They announced it by handing out fliers with a drawing of the new building on it. Well it turns out that the building and the Society of Automotive Engineers http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/org/sae/ garage seem to occupy the same space. Hum, I wonder what is going to happen to our garage. Dear Mr.Gates, do you think you could spare an extra $30,000 to help build something other then more computer clusters on our campus?
Bill here just donated 20 mil and u guys go on ranting about how he is pure evil from the darkside.
1) you guys analyze way too much...
2) no you arnt the smartest people in the world slashdoters
3) god damn can u leave that guy alone once? i dont love him or anything (i dont even have windows installed anywhere in my house ~_~) but just shutup for once god damnit. You go get some money and tell me if u'd do anythign differently (if u say u would that i add #4 to the list [you guys are ignorant fags])
I say PR. If it were an act of generosity, Gates would have encouraged them to come up with a more creative name. Nothing like the ego of someone with too much money, too much power, or just a delusional state of having either.
I totally agree. In fact, it was downright despicable to give the campus only $20 MILLION dollars out of the $50 million needed to actually complete the structure. He should just go back to campus, apologize for his rudeness, rip up the check he gave to the college and go home and write a letter of apology for his rudeness.
Who cares if he's really rich? If he gave away $20 million every day, he wouldn't be for very long, would he? No matter how you look at it, $20 million is a LOT of money.
I am sometimes absolutely appalled by the unappreciative nature of some people.
More like a genuine Robin Hood, robs from the rich^H^H^H^masses and gives to the poor^H^H^H^Horganization where prospective customers will be studying.
Skynet was after all created at CMU. Now Microsoft is giving money to CMU. Will Terminators have glowing blue eyes instead of glowing red eyes?
cry me a goddamn river
if you weren't such a blind american cow, you would have seen that bill g is investing in your ejewmacation.
FUCK i hate it when people like you come nagging whenever somebody donates something "ohhh why not the poor blind children why not the poor ethiopians
how much have you donated to ANYTHING lately?
The Gates Foundation is administered by Belinda Gates. Bill.G does NOT have any voice over what she does.
The Belinda gates Foundation has started many, many projects for AIDS in africa and India, projects which have nothihng to do with capturing market share, or Windows (tm). Hundreds of lives have been saved, thousands have benefitted through his fundings of their education, etc.
Although it may be hard to digest for you Bill.G haters, his ruthlesness is only in his business and does NOT extent to real world. Show me one another who has donated and build so much for so many people WITHOUT crowing around !!!
Do NOT judge a person for what he is, but judge him what he does.
Dumbasses.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
It represents the Blue Screen of Death.
It's about time that CMU got a Gates building. Stanford has had one for a while. It doesn't seem that the name is having any inappropriate effect on the students, faculty or administration here, though. The CS curriculum only has one Windows programming course (an elective) and most of the computers in the labs are either Macs or Suns. Even many of the staff use Macs here.
Microsoft is an excellent way to do CS. You should be able to do things in theory but everything keeps crashing it's practically hopeless. =)
It could be worse. Here come the Trouble Windows girls
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
MOD PARENT UP! He's right, /. is full of marketing parasites.
Ok, what we really need to do now is infect his daughter with HIV. I bet a cure would be found really fast then. I'm sure it would be some kind of patent encumbered and extremely expensive vaccine tho. (and he would make billions from it). (This could be funny or flamebait, I don't know which way it will go but it had to be said)
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
I wonder what professors will feel like teaching real Computer Science in a building named after Bill Gates. The irony probably casts a fog in the classrooms.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Who here has never seen a UNIX box panic? Or spontaneously reboot? Anyone who thinks that kernel faults are a unique feature of Windows doesn't know JACK SHIT about UNIX, or operating systems in general.
Yet more proof that Slashdot is more about UNIX snobbery than anything else.
we should raise matching funds for cmu so we can add a word -- the "gates sucks computer center"
I have not checked this, but I suspect the charitable donations from every Linux distro CEO combined would fall well short of this.
I'd say the best measure of the man's charity would be to figure out the percentage of his income that he gives to charitable causes. I don't want to knock the charity that BG has done, because it is clearly considerable... but it's not quite fair to say he's a better man for giving 1% of whatever billions than someone giving 20% of a few million (note: invented statistics).
Yes, I know I'm treating the US as a single group. See how it feels?
...you act as if that was something new.
Ive been to many different countries esp in Europe. I was supprised at how often people would tell me how "Americans" think. Then I would have to point out that the United States is a very large country with many people with very strongly different opinions from each other. Funny enough when I ask them if they have ever been to the US or how many people they know from the US they hardly had anything to say.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Is he dying of cancer? They (read: the rich) tend to blow a few hundred million on things like this when they're getting older.
It'd be cool if they used some of that money to fund public research for cures or something that would benefit all of mankind. That I would definitely applaud.
How much do you think he's saving by giving? I am sure he means well but it is also the smart thing to do. Not to mention that he gets to have his name in big bold letters everywhere for posterity (and not for posteriors like the silly benches).
With restricted "students only" checkpoint access through the front and "everybody else" access through the doors in the back.
This isn't the first time Gates has donated money for a CS building. There is already a William Gates Computer Science building on the Stanford campus.
By the way, don't worry: the Stanford students, despite mostly being pretty pro-business and/or business-savvy and thus (I would assume) less likely to have a moral problem with Bill Gates, still do fundamentally get it. In other words, the fact that the building is named Gates doesn't really influence their thinking. They haven't lost their grasp of what computer science is supposed to be about. By the way, Don Knuth's office is in that very Gates building, at least according to his web page.
Someone at Slashdot is very confused. IBM is "Big Blue", not Microsoft.
Would he get to rename the center "Delphi Center for Ellisonian Computing Omniscience"?
He's just crazy enough to try... go for it Larry!
Then again I guess it's just cheaper to strafe the completed building with a MIG on opening day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bill Gate's gave away 1 billion dollars in scholarships ($50 million per year for 20 years and it will only cost him 70% of that due to tax benifits), but decided not to give any of the money to whites or asians.
He gave $555 million to fight aids worldwide, then invested $200 million in pharmacutical companies who are blocking low cost drugs with TRIPS to places like Africa.
He talks about the gap between the rich and the poor when donating money while flagrently violating anti-trust laws making him richer.
There are many more examples of this back and forth. Though since the other side goes unreported it allows him to push his image to a greater status.
Now we have a brand new business school (mainly full of geeks), and its called the Tepper School of Business. Unfortunately, unlike Gates, no one really knows who or what a Tepper is.
(David Tepper graduated from the program, back when it was known as GSIA [grad school of industrial administration], made a killing in the markets, and kindly donated $55m last year)
Man I would jump to that college if they taught java and linux . It seems to all matter to me.
That is great that Bill donated that money and all. I just wonder why he doesn't just open his own schools. Aside from donating to universities, he throws all this money/computers at failing rundown schools. A lot of those schools should be rebuilt from the ground up with that money. Throwing a few new PCs in a school that's falling apart isn't going to help much. New schools need to be built altogether. Those kids need a nice new happy place to go, not some rat infested hole in the ground with a shiny PC in the corner which is probably the only thing keeping the classroom warm in the winter.
"Will Code For Food!"-sign being held by a homeless techie standing on the corner.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Some faculty have suggested that in acknowledgment of Mr. Gates' profound influence on the computer software industry, the building should be painted bright blue
No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue
I could not foresee this thing happening to you
If I look hard enough into the settin' sun
My love will laugh with me before the mornin' comes
I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes
Hmm, hmm, hmm,...
I wanna see it painted, painted black
Black as night, black as coal
I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky
I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black
Yeah!
___ /
| |
(*)(*) Would you like help?
| |
|| || * Search for duplicate articles
||__|| * Scan for bad grammar in TFA
|____| * Use a cliche from saved templates
from the Stonecutters episode:
Homer assembles the crew to repaint an apartment building covered with graffiti. The superintendent walks out and kisses Homer. "It looks so much better...a beautiful sky blue," she admires as a helicopter crashes into it.
from snpp.com
Yup - what a pain. According to this Bill is making roughy 14 million a day. and this says (as of this writing) that Bill is worth 60 Billion Dollars. Add to this Microsofts War Chest and we can geusstimate this to be about a total of 110 Billion dollars. At 20 million a day Bill and Microsquish could "only" keep it up for ~5500 days. Now doleing it out only on business days, taking your weekends off, but no real vacation, real this means that Bill could only do it for about 20 years, this is assuming of course that Bill and Microsquish never makes another dime.
Bill was born in 1955, which when the well runs dry in 2024 he will 59 years old, not old, but hardly young anymore. So though it is a stretch, but I think it is possible to argue - that Bill could do this every day for the rest of his life.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Building the Gates CS Bldg as pictured will require tearing down CMU's best building, known as Hammerschlag Hall. The architect even put the bow of a ship on the back side of this true classic. I vote he put his building somewhere else.
That loud sound you just heard was only one of the first in a series major ass kissing. Expect more to follow, folks.
Context:
There was a bit of a fracas at Harvard over whether the dumb terminals that had been donated by Gates and Ballmer and then prompty wiped of the weird Windows terminal software and replaced with Linux should be taken down when Ballmer was there for the official ceremony honoring him and the building (they were, I believe, but promptly reappeared within a few days afterwards).
In Montreal one of our finest Commerce Universities (HEC), when they built a complete new campus they decided to sponsor each classroom and put the name of the sponsor on the front door of each classroom. Its ok when your finance classroom is named after a bank, but one classroom was named after a chicken fast-food chain and their was a little bit less of glamour in the name of that class. :)
Anyway they had an insanely great new campus for less money and who cares about the names?
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
It may take a number of years for the building to be completed. CMU will be rolling some of the building's features into already existing - though more poorly constructed - buildings.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
How many billions of copies of a free software package will you have to sell to match Bills donation?
Bill spending $20 million to get his name on a building is like someone with $500k of wealth spending $164.
So next time you buy a Games Console for your nephew stick your name on it to show everyone how generous you've been.
(And if it's an XBOX you're helping a very small amount to pay for another University building)
I can't help but wonder what CMU's KGB organization will do when this building goes up. Basically, KGB is an on-campus group which engages in all sorts of random silliness, and describes itself as "an eccentric bunch of nerds, geeks, freaks, visionaries, outcasts and ne'er-do-wells, who plan on being on the right side of the guns when the Revolution comes."
When Bill Gates came to visit campus earlier this year, the group painted the Fence (a frequently painted object in the middle of campus) bright blue in his honor. Also, during the Q&A session of the talk, KGB's president Ed asked the following:
(transcribed from rough memory)
Ed: Hello Bill. Have you ever used Linux?
Bill: Yeah, a few times.
Ed: Would you accept my gift of Linux? [holds up Linux CD]
(chuckles and applause from audience)
Bill: What's it worth? (grins)
(more chuckles and applause from audience)
Bill: Sure.
(Ed gives Bill Linux CD)
Or rather the replies to posts like this that show the true measure of Slashdot's maturity. That measure is "0".
This wankfest known as "Slashdot" has gone on long enough, it serves no useful purpose whatsoever. Do the world a favor and pull the plug now. Linux can only be HELPED by doing so.
What kind of a sick and twisted world are we living in when a man who does so many great things is villified because some people don't like his product? Microsoft aside, the man donates more money to charities than any one person that I can think of at the moment. Maybe some of you flamers should go out and donate billions of dollars to charities, maybe then you'll have some room to speak badly of Bill Gates, because after all, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
That it turns out better than Stata (Which Gates also donated a large sum to help build)
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
..the fortune at the bottom of ./ right now says "The savior becomes the victim."
That thing scares me sometimes..
-Kenneth Sundby-
to symbolize M$ contributions to computer science..
There won't be a front entryway to the building. But there will be hundreds of back doors.
I am utterly blown away by the people who are pissed that Bill gave away 20 million in exchange for having a building named after him. People are pissed because they see it as exchanging money to boost his public image. One question: Are you fucking joking me?
Personally, I have absolutely no problem with corporations giving away money to good causes to boost there image. Would you feel better if they spent the money on TV advertising and pop up ads? If a company can make money, advertise, and do something good in the world all at the same time, why the fuck would you complain? Personally, I would like to see companies do MORE public relation boosting campaigns by giving away big sweaty wads of cash to worthy causes with no strings attached.
I know Slashdot is hung up on the entire corporations are pure evil thing, but you need to get a hold of yourself and get things in perspective. If a big old evil corporation decides it wants to boost its image by saving whales, giving money to educators, and in general throwing money around worthy causes, that is a good thing.
Finally, your points about Gate's evil plot for that science building really being an indoctrination center is down right foolish. He didn't give them 20 mil to teach Windows. In fact, I would say it is pretty damned safe to say that he gave the money away with no strings attached. Once the money is out of his hands it is gone forever. There is no leverage or threat he can use to take it back. They can fill the building up with Macs if they want and Bill can't do anything to stop them.
So, I suggest getting off your high horse and taking a clue that corporations handing out money falls into the 'good thing' category, yes even when Slashdot's arch nemesis Bill Gates of the Evil Micro$oft (-- witty use of the $ sigh) Corporation is the one doing the giving.
Someone should really point out what an amazing thing we have done with AIDS.
First, AIDS is an entirely preventable disease. Don't want it. Wear a condom. Simple answer, but it happens to be true.
Second, and this is more important. In the short span of 20 years we have turns AIDS from a disease that kills to a chronic condition, like diabetes. It took us 6,000 years to beat syphilis (another condom solvable disease). It took us 20 years to effectively beat AIDS. Just wrap your mind around that.
How few other diseases have we just decimated like that? Smallpox. Polio. But in such short a period of time.
Now I know poor people still die of AIDS. They die of diabetes too. The fact that wealth buys longevity isn't something new. It is just kind of a fact of life, that only the simple or naïve complain about with seriousness. The Ancient Egyptians had the same "problem." Of course, you could just call it Darwinism.
Oh Geee... like you don't have ignorant people in the US. At least those jackasses in Europe could single out your country in a map.
4. All wall decorations are essential and directly integrated into the building and cannot be removed without destroying the entire structure
"I wouldn't do that, that's a load bearing poster.."
I once knew a camel
who painted the enamel
of all of his teeth bright blue.
When I asked him, "Why?"
His answer was "Why
I'd tell you if only I knew."
(Something I learned in grade school, but forgot the author's name. Perhaps a modern prophet predicting Perl on Windows?)
then maybe I wouldn't smell so bad and my head wouldn't be on fire
Sorry pal, I don't need no stinkin' DRM infested bloatware on any account, much less to read about Gates grandstanding again.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
If you read the link you put there, he has given a bunch of money to RESEARCH towards a malaria vaccine.
Just to point out wiping out Malaria would be HUGE HUGE, every anthro professor I've had who did work in S America had it.
So just ya, Gates has wiped out Malaria as much as Reeve has wiped out paralysis.
They'll buy an old building already on campus, slap a bit of paint and window dressing on it, then fence it in with a high electric fence and charge a massive fee just to look at the building (let alone using it). Then they proceed to send a bill to all the people using all the other buildings, claiming they own the concept of a building and that their buildings are based on methods found in SCO's building...
Sure, SCO's building and all the other buildings are based on far older principles and methods, but still they insist on owning the concepts because they were in the building they bought and thus it is theirs forever.....
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Tom Siebel gave my school (UIUC) THIRTY million for a new building
- http://pakman.sytes.net/
One of the HP founders did. Memory escapes me as to whether it was Hewlett or Packard, but one of the two donated significantly more than Gates.
...
-S
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
this article on autoweek from a little over a year ago (almost to the day) talks about how bill gates and other rich folkses fought to get the porsche 959 made street legal. obviously this would have cost a tad more than a bunch of segways
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
At least those jackasses in Europe could single out your country in a map.
Most people know where China and Australia are too. They are all kind of hard to miss.
2024 - 1955 = 59? Your mathematical prowess is staggering.
I actually like his new haircut. Now if only he would finally notice that he can't beat OSS and therefore join the bandwagon, so that I need not talk my mouth fuzzy with convincing my customers to use Linux I'd be cool with the man.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
how'd you find your way around?
You make it sound as if Bill Gates intentionally went out of his way to make Kildall's life miserable. It just happened that their businesses were competing against each other.
"By the time he's dead, there will be so many buildings with his name on them..."
And he'll STILL be behind THIS guy.
Who did you think the "M" stood for? Mother Teresa?
Some other oxymorons:
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Will microsoft has a say on the open source research projects going on in CMU now? CMU-SNMP, CMUSpinx are the two which turned up on a google search.
Oh, I am sure there wont be overt pressure.. but surly this gives lot of clout to Microsoft in influencing the powers that be in CMU.
I really like the idea of alumni or other rich persons sponsoring universities or museums as long as they don't take too much influence on the issues being taught.
I would fear that a 'Gates Center for Computer Science' would mean a typical Microsoft-monoculture.
Using the latest development stuff by M$ and all that. Bad Thing.
"Some faculty have suggested that in acknowledgment of Mr. Gates' profound influence on the computer software industry, the building should be painted bright blue."
...because CS shouldn't be about practical implementations, but rather theoretical concepts...
This is exactly the opposite of what I beleive. We desperately need more education in "practical implementations". One of the biggest problems with software today is that very very few people know how to actually produce it and a fraction of those are given the latitute to deliver it. What good is theory when our applications are riddled with race conditions and yet people are debating how the buttons look. There needs to be much much more work regaring practical applications of computer science. In particular our general method of developing software is horrible. At least all of the methods that I have been witness to are absolutely pathetic. They should be talking about state machines, data structures, and algorithms, and not degenerate use-case analysis that some clueless MBA created with MS Project.
Particularly since the more famous pieces of software
from CMU (esp festival/flite stuff) are mostly developed on Linux.
It would be even better if Linus got truly rich and
they named a better building just opposite "The Linus
Torvalds Medical Center".
(Hey, all of those XP addicts will need it)
Yeah, we all hate BSOD, and most of us hate windows, blah blah blah. When a guy gives 20 million dollars, could you cut him a break?
Christ.
---- keep it simple.
At last, somone with a brain and intact moral centre posting in this topic.
The American religion is ca$h, and it is sickening and revolting to see how many people say "If you pay for it your neame goes there". None of them understand merit, none of them understand what bestowing an honor means - they are base, money worshipping people, and it is this same ideology that fueles the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.
It is really disheartening to read those words from people who are otherwise capabable of understanding things that are very complex. It implies that no matter how smart you are, you can still be as thick as shit when it comes to ethics. This is not right, since ethics are built on logical constructs, so geeks on the whole should really be more ethical than ordinary folk.
Turns out they are just as dumb.
Will per seat licensing apply to this building?
There's blue everywhere. And the default XP theme looks like it's designed for a preschooler.
Longhorn doesn't look much better. A shiny blue turd, is still a turd.
With their huge coffers, can't Microsoft hire good UI designers? Or perhaps they wouldn't know good design if it hit them over the head?
I've found more ignorant people in USA than in Europe and those ignorant people I've seen in Europe is not that stupid as their yankie counterparts.
Well, doing a "Jay walking" in Europe wouldnt be as much fun since you wouldnt hear people say that it was "George Hitler" that was the bad guy in WWII.
I don't think this donation will change the culture towards Microsoft at CMU at all. As has already been mentioned, there are a TON of CMU grads that work at Microsoft. CMU grads know Microsoft wants them and many of them do go to work for them. Avie Tevanian, CTO for Apple, is a CMU grad and has done great things with them. CMU is a Linux and open source hotbed. "The Microsoft Way" is the last thing many of them want to learn. This [apple.com, QTVR required] is an example of why CMU isn't going to all of sudden jump to "The Microsoft Way." They have a significant interest in UNIX and Apple, and that's been there since 1983.
I went to Carnegie Mellon 2 years ago for a seminar on integrating OS X into a college campus. I got to take a tour of the lab pictured in the link and imagined the 120 PCs and CRT monitors in there and it wasn't a pretty sight. The 15" iMacs they replaced them with are much nicer in terms of size and flow in the room, especially when the room is full. It's a nice donation by Bill, so don't take it as his way of converting CMU to Microsoft. Of all the schools in the world, CMU would probably be one of the last to go.
After having had the building knocked over flat twice, they'll retrofit a giant chicken-wire mesh cage, enclosing the building on all 4 sides and above, to keep out that pesky woodpecker.
s/suicide/death/
I even knew that. Damn you for making me think it.
I have a mate doing his PhD in Comp. Sci up there, and he says a lot of the staff in there are militant Linux advocates. They relish the irony.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Most of the money will go on the Windows licenses, so Microsoft will get the money back soon enough.
;).
This sort of circular stuff could be a good way to launder money
Big donars do it all the time so they aren't the only ones responsible for a campus and keep alumni involvement up. My Alma Mater raised 30million for a science building that way, $15 million came from the family the building is now named after. And their donation actually was $1 for every $1 donated by other individuals.
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
I think we should watch out for Gates invest in facilities (and other things) for increasingly younger generations. If you think about it, this could give him access to the minds of the future at an early age, where his influence can be the greatest. One he has this access he can turn a large percentage of the new generation into Microsoft drones (not employees - users). Gates know first hand what it means to have access to the masses (Windows desktop). Think about it and monitor where this is going.
Simpy
I dont care who pays, what is it called, or how much does it cost, as long as someone is gonna get a decent education(even if it is MS based). Some ppl cannot afford to go to college to have decent jobs, things like this at least give them the slightest chance.
Now that doesnt mean i am a Gates fan, nor a MS fan for that matter, but you have to balance the matters here and diffrentiate between him personally, and his job.
If this is a troll then prove it.
The lunatic is in my head
I found another great picture, of the roof of Wean Hall at CMU:
e en_fence_front_small.jpg e en_fence_back_small.jpg
BILL PH34RZ WEAN!!1!1
Also, here's some better pics of the front and back of the blue fence of death:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~akj/stuff/gates/blue_scr
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~akj/stuff/gates/blue_scr
he gives 20 big ones away you say "he should have given 50"... /. who would castigate bill if he gave a kidney away...
he pledges most of his wealth to charity you say "ya but he earned it by (choose)[stealing, monopolizing, kiling baby seals]
there are folks on
you should be a little more mature and try and seperate the man drom the corporation (m$)...
so he wants his name on the building. wouldn't you? if it was only about having his name on something he could use his massive amounts of cash to have his name engraved on the moon...
All the torrents you could want.
The first link I got for Gary Kildall was this:
http://www.maxframe.com/EUBANKS.HTM
While it's an interesting tale, the blame for Kildall's failure to become a billionaire (as opposed to a mere multimillionaire) seems to rest pretty squarely on himself. He had a company. It made some money but was too slow in bringing out new products, because Gary was more interested in his own life than in making a business empire. So the clients switched to QDOS. Duh. Later he died of something or other 'during a night out'.
Only a true Slashdottva could turn that into 'Bill Gates bears principal responsibility for the suicide of Gary Kildall'. FFS, get a grip.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
--
Simon
Please, stop ragging on Bill Gates. The guy and his wife have done more to stamp out malaria than most countries, ours included. The guy is brilliant, and yes he's a damn good businessman. Jealousy is not becoming people. I admire the man and his generousity. Let's leave it at that. And yes I am wearing my asbestos underwear!
The .edu.au I work at kisses Bill Gates ass and he hasn't made any donations.
i think baboon's-ass red would be a more appropriate color.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
From the think-about-it-dept.
Plug different devices into Windows often enough and you'll see the reference for yourself. However, the BSOD is sort of a well known reference to Bill's OS, so it's a good color scheme for his building too.
Anyway, I thought the jokes about leaving the building via the doors marked Entry, or that the building's offices cost extra, that 640 stairs ought to be enough for anyone, and that the building will look like what Apple had 5 years ago jokes were funnier!
I knew I should have forwarded that chain letter.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Apple ][ plus VisiCalc and, later, IBM plus Lotus 1-2-3 got microcomputers onto every desktop.
Personally I would find it appropriate for a business school to have a Gates building, but as much damage as Bill has done to the entire computing industry and even computing science, I'd have to say the name of the building is entirely inappropriate. He and his company have caused (and are still causing) far too much damage to computer science and to the economy.
Better to name it after someone or something else. What's next the Osama Bin Laden building for Womens Studies?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Isn't this great news for FOSS??
:)
I wish there was some kind of study showing the importance of unis in the FOSS world, a LOT of the software I use was made or started in
one uni or the other (most the rest is/was made by folks working for commersial sw companies, and a small part was made by folks working as paperboys).
Thank you sir Bill Gates!
CMU was/is a Macintosh university! I wonder how Apple is taking this? Well, I guess, prior to OS X, they had pleanty of other types of servers there, but most students were using Macs. The User Guide for Andrew, their campus network, was printed in the style of the Macintosh literature, that stretched Garamond font (I know... I type set it for a McGraw-Hill affiliate). Well, there is still lots of Mac stuff there:m acintosh&x=45&y=12
http://www.google.com/u/cmu?sitesearch=cmu.edu&q=
Bill's only putting up 20$ million where the new "Gates" building is going to cost 100$million. Is that all it takes to get your name on a building?
karma: ouch!
I'd vomit on you if it would help to put out the flames. But I wouldn't go so far as piss on you though.
No blue, with a big error message on the front of the building in large letters above the doors :)
in that building !!! eeeewwwwwwwwww
At least to my ear, the "Science" in "Computer Science" sounds a lot like the "Science" in "Social Science", or "Library Science", or "Marketing Science", or, moving from the campus to the commercial world, "Shampoo Science". The intention seems to be more to inflate than to describe -- to distinguish the work of folks who think logically and who are not afraid of technology from the work of the chin-strokers and pipe-puffers on the other end of campus, where they dress better and mainly in black.
Better names for CS might be "Information Technology", or perhaps "Computing Studies". Even "Computing" is catchy and rings true..
... Gates is getting involved with computer science after all those years of having to mess around on the trial-and-error level.
Certainly not too much money for this.
Great day for him, I suppose.
Hmm... Bright Blue building.. Watch out birds and choppers. Doh..
Hahahaha!
Hitler wasn't the bad one. It was Henry Stalin.
Bill Gates and Columbian drug lords? please, give me a break, the tension of your thin moral line is killing me.
Soros's Deep Pockets vs. Bush
NEW YORK -- George Soros, one of the world's richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project: defeating President Bush.
I don't exactly know how much BG has given away, although I'd doubt it would be significantly above and beyond what George Soros has given away. BG isn't the only billionair giving away large amounts of his money.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
This building will just hire lawyers to tear down the other buildings on the university.
www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me
Christ on a broken crutch, it's right there man.
I don't buy the suicide bit either, but that doesn't resolve Gates of his being a complete ass.
Marked as "foe" until you prove you have your ADHD under control enough that you can read an entire post(not skim!) before responding.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Microsoft recruits like mad at CMU (esp. for Microsoft Research) because it's a good computer science school, not because they have special ties.
.DOC format and the next day came in, apologized to everyone due to all the complaints, and asked whether we'd prefer PDF, PS, RTF, etc instead. You could theoretically get by using Microsoft Office, I guess, but there's quite a bit of pressure to use LaTeX in SCS. My databases class focused on Postgres, because you could recode parts of the scheduler (unlike, say, MS SQL), which was important for teaching DBMS internal theory. I remember when one SCS professor, Gregory Kesden (damn cool guy, BTW), asked some Microsoft guy to come give a lecture on the .NET framework in a university lecture hall, and got absolutely chewed out by the SCS administration for doing so, who viewed this as promoting a Microsoft product.
It's very true that the university administration (not the School of Computer Science administration) is big on having buddies at large businesses, at having ins in the defense world, stuff like that, to help suck in grant money.
However, the School of Computer Science is quite different. SCS is very critical of Microsoft. I don't think there is a single SCS course taught on Windows or using any Microsoft products (there are a few taught using Mathematica, but generally one uses either Solaris or GNU tools, and not even proprietary products). I remember one CMU philosophy course (a Humanities and Social Science class, not even SCS) where the professor handed out a document in
If CMU has ties to any company, it's Apple. Apple's OS X kernel was written at CMU, CMU uses a ton of Macs -- probably about as many Windows machines, down from a majority of Macs at one point, and Apple people come to speak more often than Microsoft people.
CMU maintains their own Linux distribution (Andrew Linux) and develops and has developed a phenomenal amount of open source software, including major packages. CMU's done a lot of the OSS SNMP code out there, AFS is from CMU, festival (the OSS speech synth package) is from Alan Black at CMU, Coda is from CMU, and so forth.
CMU has an absolutely ridiculous degree of interaction with Slashdot just because of all the *IX geeks at CMU. I attended CMU's SCS and knew a single Windows guy -- did work on Windows, liked Windows, etc. Not common.
I agree that the SCS people probably won't like having a building on campus called the Bill Gates building -- Bill Gates is not particularly well-known for advancing the field of computer science, and a number of people feel that he's tended to hold it back in the name of profit. The university people, though, who are responsible for finding offices and lecture rooms for the SCS people, are probably thrilled.
Of all the major CS universities that I visited when deciding on a university, CMU was the *only* done that didn't rattle off a list of "the places that you can get a job" or push their job-placement services. The assumption was that you were coming because you liked/were interested in research, not because you wanted job placement. That was a major turn-on for me.
Point is, CMU isn't likely to be much of an MS school any time soon.
May we never see th
You seem to be confusing DeG-Spot, the Michael Hall, with TheG-Spot, the Ernst Gräfenberg Recreational Area. Please never do that. The latter was named after a guy who has invented the Command Line Interface Terminal, known as the only intuitive interface, after which it's all learned.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The William Gates building will be the new Fence.
(For non-CMUites: the Fence is a fence that is regularly painted by CMU students with all kinds of political, social, and technical comments. Before the original wooden Fence collapsed and was replaced with a metal fence, it was the most heavily painted structure in the world, and today most of the mass of the Fence is still many layers of paint.)
The Fence got painted last time Gates came to CMU, and given the CMU propensity to write on everything (Archie's Leap, for instance), I expect that it will become a new favorite forum.
May we never see th
No, you're confusing the country with its inhabitants, spaztard.
Given the army of bugs in Windows, ORKIN donations and ingratiations are more appropriate.
To all the guys (and girls) bagging him because he is "only" giving such a small amount of his fortune, i ask you this (and answer truthfully): How much of _YOUR_ paycheck has gone to charity this year?
...
yeah, thought so.
but it has to be said:
In Soviet Russia, the Bill Gates building crashes You!
It will probably be locked like all the other buildings. About 5 years ago CMU installed electronic door locks on most of its buildings. The kind with the big magnets that keep the door shut. There is a motion sensor on the inside that releases the door when someone approaches the exit.
Now just outside many of these doors is a box full of copies of The Tartan, CMU's student newspaper. So what happens if you take a sheet of newspaper and shove it through the gap in between the double doors, right under the motion sensor? Ah hah....
Some faculty have suggested that in acknowledgment of Mr. Gates' profound influence on the computer software industry, the building should be painted bright blue."
But they failed to mention that the follow lines will be embossed in Silver using four foot high letters.
This will be allow the message to be seen across the campus as well as from the air.
A fatal exception 03 hase occurred at 00020:C000DEFE in VxD VMM(01) + 00010E36. The current application will be terminated.
* Press any key to terminate the current application.
* Press CTRL+ALT+DEL again to restart your computer. You will lose any unsaved information in all applications.
Press any key to continue
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
As if anyone really cares about the lame ass friend/foe in /.
What next? are you going to call him a "Doodie head"?
You take yourself WAY too seriously.
The Rest of the world does not!
My web domain.
OTOH, my point still stands, and you can't knock it down by making fun of me, you ridiculous dipshit.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Eventually there will be a schism as to which way the building is going to develop. Some will think there are excessive orniments and features that take away from the functionality. Others will mourn the fact that the Microsoft building has off-set it's doors so that access paths no longer reach it. Eventually the building will physicaly split in half but each half will still have to share things like plumbing and bathrooms.
Blar.
My web domain.
Don't forget the HUGE puke-green doorbell!
Don't bend down.
fanaticism, bias, grudge, hate...etc etc, they'll notice that the world is not such a bad place to live in. This deal is not such a bad deal.
Free money?
I will agree that, if a Colombian drug lord had made the contribution, then I'd say there is room for some of the hatred/criticism I read below, but that is not the case.
Close minded?
If we like to be called Open Source, then why the hell do we have such a *CLOSED* mind?
Benefits
When you receive your cheque either every week, or two, do you concentrate on who gave you the cheque, or *how big* the cheque was and how you're going to spend it?
Reality
My Unix geek boss, still thinks that WIndowsNT 4.0 is the latest OS from Microsoft, so he keeps repeating how full of holes that OS is. I asked him when the last time was that he read anything about MS technologies? None can *force* you into any platform anymore. It is the reality. It's the incentives that come with each platform that will finally make one prevalent over the other. The word SECURITY and the word *FREE* can only take you so far.
The impact of such donation should overshadow the name of the donator and the controversy, not the other way around.
Congrats Carnegie! Spend it well. Like it or not Gates is one of the largest (if not the largest) contributors to education. Indireclty that affects the new Open Source generation in a very positive way.
The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid. Fcuknig amzanig eh!
I ran the numbers, albeit a year or so ago. I compared Bill Gates to my net worth. Now I am not wealthy, but I am not poor. I have been working in the IT industry for 10 years, I have a house, 2 cars, and no real outstanding debt. I am doing OK.
Bill Gates giving away $1,000,000 is the equivalent of me giving $5. And we both live in the same world, where a dollar has the same value for everyone. So he is not being generous. If I would give away 1/2 of my net worth, I would be in big trouble - he could give away 9/10 easily and still be able to survive. I applaud him for donating money, but let's not kid ourselves and pretend he is making any sacrifices. If he was a genuine philanthropist, he wouldn't have named his foundation after himself and his wife.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Other computer deci-billionaires like Larry Ellison , Michael Dell, Paul Allen, Steve Balmer have barely given away their windfalls while Bill Gates has given away almost half of his to education and medicine.
Look at the seal sometime: it's Leland Stanford Junior University. As a Stanford grad school alum, I always get a kick out of that- I got my doctorate from a junior college!
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
>>If anything, Gates drove a company that put computer science on the map.
Okay, let's see just what msft invented for the PC:
First PC: no
First widely used PC: no
Hardware: no - ibm
16-bit OS: no - no msft bought it
32-bit OS: no - no: x86 *way* late
GUI: no - apple
LAN: no - novell
wordprocessor: no - wordstar(?)
spreadsheet: no - visicalc
database: no - dBase(?)
email: no
internet access: no
Contrast this to Apple:
First practical PC
First practical GUI
Ran the first practical application: visicalc
First widely used 32-bit PC OS?
BTW: I am no fan of apple, I use a PC with linux and win2k partitions. But I like to give credit where it's due.
I don't mean to flamebait you, but really, just think about those amounts before you hail Bill's staggeringly big heart and love of humanity. As an example
He spends $25 million on an AIDS vaccine initiative. In South Africa alone, there are between 5 to 12 million people with HIV. In South Africa alone. There are known, generic, safe drugs that can keep those people who have AIDS alive. The third world generic versions made in Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and India were under fire from the US government for "destroying IP" (where have we heard this disgusting fuckshit before? - hint:MS and SCO). The US government is lobbied heavily by the pharmaceutical industry. Guess how much your big hearted Bill Gates invested in that industry: $250 million.
If that's philanthropy, then I'm fucking Jesus and I can turn shit into bread.
Bill Gates giving Stanford $20 million is like me giving them about $100, based on our relative riches. If I give Stanford $100, will they name a building after me?
Furthermore, chances are Bill didn't actually give anything away. The mega-rich put a chunk of their capital into foundations, and fund their 'generous' 'charitable' donations out of the profit the foundations make by investing that cash. None of Bill's actual cash is given away, just the profit he makes lending it to people like us.
Plus the guy's a crook who lied under oath in a court of law. We all saw the tapes of him lying outrageously. He escaped by buying off the Justice Department, funding Ashcroft's re-election campaign.
I look forward to Stanford announcing the Ken Lay School of Business and the Harold Shipman Department of Medicine.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If they paint it blue, that would just remind me of IBM (Big Blue). I'd have alot more respect for an IBM building than a Microsoft one.
There is a rumor that bill gates donated the money to stanford just so a professor who flunked him at Harvard would have to work in the "Bill Gates" building every day. I asked the professor in question, and he confirmed that he flunked him. Bill hasn't scheduled a one-on-one for me to confirm his side.
If true, that would be a true geek's revenge!
I just hope the building doesn't start shaking until everyone runs around and closes all open windows.
Yeah, but is hating them valid in the first place, or was it just inspired by jealousy?
Especially when people hate software MS hasn't even finished yet... is it a rational response to a perceived flaw in the product, or just knee-jerk bashing?
I suspect this article was posted just to see how many funny comments can get modded up to 5. The fact that Bill donated to a school isn't significant, nor is the dollar amount.
David Filo of Yahoo! and Jim Clark of Netscape each donated individual contributions of $30M each to Tulane's Engineering school to be used for engineering scholarships.
That seems more worthy of mention in slashdot, as it means more educational opportunities for (possibly) future slashdotters.
Several leaks will appear in the roof, which will require a never ending number of *patches*. However, these patches will then cause an ever increasing static load on the roof, requiring removal of certain Fixtures in the building. These fixtures in the building must be removed because the building can no longer *support* them.
Next, due to all of the leaks and subsequent rise in relative humidity inside the building, mold will form at an astounding rate, spreading to other buildings. Then, one of the biology students in attemp to 'help', will introduce a mold *VIRUS* which will spread like wildfire to all of the *buildings* on campus
This is dealing with the devil. Money shouldn't always talk.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
it should have robust barriers to entry.
Ehhhh, that sounds an awful lot like security to me. Would never happen.
Given that CMU CS is a unix-only operation. Wouldn't it be ironic if the money was used on mostly unix not windows machines?
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Yes, the Big Blue building - IBM would be pleased indeed! "You named a building after us? Why?" *chuckle*
-Matt
For a LONG time I have been wanting this question answered, unequivocably:
After he and his wife donate funds for construction or computers and software, do they CARE or look the other way if LINUX is put on those boxes or in those buildings?
Is the question moot maybe because they carefully screen, select and hone those environments to make absolutely damned sure that there is next to NO chance of Linux or F/LOSS getting in?
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
$20 million is not "most of" the $50 million cost. Fair enough to name a building after the person who contributes 50% or more of the cost. But in this case, that's not Gates.
According to opensecrets.org, on 6/28/2004, the Gates Foundation gave $2,000 to the John Kerry presidential campaign.
($2000 is the federal limit)
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
Why does it have to have his name? I mean, doesn't that get terribly boring after a while?
I would stash away any thought of benevolence here. There are plenty of causes that deserve help, but even UNICEF and Medicins sans Frontiere (apologies if I misspelled this) have to cough up for MS licenses and systems. Maybe that would be a worthy cause. To sponsor a Uni into enough goodwill to continue buying MS software ('coz he's been so good to us) is a deal I'd examine with a serious degree of caution.
I think it's way, way, waaaay too soon to claim that this is all without self interest - that is not the Gates Modus Operandi.
There's an applicable proverb:
"forgive - but don't forget"
A.nonymous.
Sir, I do believe you have too many hands involved in this discussion...