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."

Comments

Cheapskate

[gorbachev]

Brown University got $100M today. Bill's cheap! :)

Give the man a break

[McBeer]

I notice that Gates is getting flamed despite his many charities. As much as many of you disagree with Microsofts operating policy, Bill Gates alone has given:

$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.

Re:Rude?

[cosmol]

If he gave away $20 million every day, he wouldn't be for very long, would he?

Depends if you think 5.5 years is very long

Re:XP BSOD == Cold Reboot

[sparkz]

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.