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."
Brown University got $100M today. Bill's cheap! :)
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
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'
I was actually at the party to celebrate his gift yesterday at Newell-Simon (the free food force overcame the Anti-Bill Gates force), and through talking to people, I had actually heard that it would be named after Turing, but I guess that is something else. The problem is, though, this guy is really rich, and yet he gave only $20,000,000 of the $50,000,000 required for the building, meaning that they need to raise $30,000,000 from other people for a building that will be named after someone else. I hope that they succeed, because it would be nice to see yet another construction project on campus, but it seems rude not to give more for something named after him.
$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.
Depends if you think 5.5 years is very long
Someone at Slashdot is very confused. IBM is "Big Blue", not Microsoft.
If that's UNIX FUD, it's a very strange form of it, as UNIX has many intentional forced-reboots.
The more Highly-Available you get, the more forced-reboot paths you get. Counterintuitive? Look at SunCluster. When it detects a condition which could, even only theoretically, cause data corruption, any potentially-dangerous node will deliberately PANIC itself.
Take a simple 2-node cluster, with storage shared between them. When everything's running smoothly, they can both write to the shared storage. If the interconnect between them dies, then neither node can know the state of the other node. Both race to put a SCSI reserve on the quorum device (the SCSI protocol ensures that only one can succeed) - any nodes which fail to get their SCSI reserve on the quorum device will kill themselves the fastest way possible - the "failfast" driver.
It might turn out that it would have been safe for them to stay around and shut down cleanly, but with mission-critical data, it is not worth taking the risk - don't even pause to work out if it's safe - those microseconds could trash the database.
UNIX is perfectly happy to accept the possibility of unknown bugs, and take responsibility for them in advance, as well as for external hardware faults. If a reboot may be needed, it's better to lose uptime than to lose data.
And, of course, uptime is something in which UNIX excels, so it's not even much of a compromise.
FWIW, I believe that Windows clustering has a similar quorum model, although the Windows view of clustering appears to be rather more conservative.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
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 was going to moderate you as flamebait or overrated since I have mod points, but I felt it more important to actually state how your point is so wrong.
The Bill Gates Foundation donated $10 million to Milwaukee Public Schools this year, in order to help them with their plan of breaking up the large schools and creating smaller ones. The money has facilitated this and the inner city students are already showing increased grades and scores on their standardized tests.
Without the money, the switch would have taken close to a decade. With the money it will take 2-3 years. His foundation has donated to MANY good causes like this, so who the fuck cares if he gives additional money to CMU?
You come across as a complete idiot on this one. Gates may be a ruthless businessman with illegal business practices, but his charitable giving is above and beyond what every other billionaire gives.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I posted this previously, but Stanford was named after Leland Stanford Jr., the son of the robber baron. Junior died of typhoid fever and the University is a rememberance to him.
Gary Kildall... It seems you know the name but not the history. You see Gary didn't commit suicide, not as we've come to know the term. He was killed in a brawl in 1994 at a biker bar. However his contribution to the computer science society was long before Gates even knew what a Micro Computer was. Gary developed CP/M for a little company called Digital Research in 1974. Before the IBM PC hit the market, before MS-DOS, hell 9 years before a 10 meg hard drive hit the market costing just a wee bit over $3000.00 (USD) Gary was writing an operating system, supporting it, and a growing user-base. IBM offered to buy this operating system, but Gary refused, just as Radioshack had refused to buy Bill's operating system while he was working for them. Now They shell out billions to Bill, whom graciously accepted IBM's offer of $50,000 at the time.