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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."
Even when he tries to do something nice, he gets flamed. The man just donated 20 million to the school. give him a break
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...
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.
You mean like the Gates Foundation (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm)r e he basically gave away almost 1.2 billion last year? Is half a billion for education plus half a billion for world health enough?
whe
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.
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
Even worse, Slashdot will be crapflooded with dozens of people preemptively complaining about the Slashdot bias, and they will be moderated to +5 Insightful as well.
WTF? The guy give 20 million, and folks get upset because it doesn't go to THEIR charity of choice. Sigh...
This could have gone back into the Microsoft Warchest... would that have been a better option?
...on the computer software industry, it should have robust barriers to entry.
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.
Your mathematics professor should take a refresher course in logic. Bill Gates paid for most of the building. Donald Trump didn't. See the difference?
In any case, as long as you have a shiny nice new building on Bill's dime, who gives a crap what it is called? I never gave a second thought to the names on the buildings at my university even though many were named after robberbarons significantly more sinister than Bill Gates has ever been in their day and within their own respective markets.
As far as I am concerned, he is an unethical shmuck who bears principal responsibility for the suicide of Gary Kildall
That's funny, I always thought Gary Kildall bore principal responsibility for his own suicide. Isn't that what suicide is?
Giving away money doesn't make you better if it comes from illegal or otherwise immoral activities.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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 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.
Unbelievable. People like you really live in a world of fantasy. 'illegal and immoral'? Do you really have this image of Bill Gates with a monocle, a tophat, and a cigar maniacally laughing and amusing himself with the cries of the poor? It's bizarre, detached-from-reality viewpoints such as yours that will keep honest, rational reform from ever happening.
John D. Rockerfeller Jr. (John D.'s son) was the guy who actually spent a great deal of the money, and the one who had a passion for it; John D. had one passion -- the Standard Oil business. It took a generation for people to forget the Rockerfeller name stood for vicious anti-competitive trusts which left human wreckage in its wake, and turn the Rockerfeller name into one that meant philanthropy. Gates is managing that within a generation, although he did not have to start out in the public relations hole John D. did. Gates, however vilified he is by the slashdot crowd, has been more a hero to the average American. America once despised its capitalist masters. Now we lionize them.
The Rockerfellers did not follow Carnegie's lead. Carnegie took a lot of criticism for his rather shameless self-promotion. Rockerfeller had a strict religious upbringing and considered giving a duty, one that was its own reward, and was not meant for glorifying oneself. You'll see Gates memorial this-or-that here and there, but for the most part, it doesn't look like Bill Gates is interested in having lots of things named after him.
History will be very forgiving to Bill Gates. People today think anti-trust legislation is some sort of government power trip to stifle progress, not a vital safeguard that restrained some of the most brutal machinery of captialism ever unleashed. Rockerfeller was shunned and vilified by the presidents and other politicians of his day, and now he's considered a great benefactor to mankind. How much more is Gates going to be remembered as the great success story who gave his money for the good of others? Any blemishes on his character will be easily waved away as jealous competitors, not anyone with a serious grief.
Another interesting note: the guy that John D. first hired to be his chief for philanthropy was named Frederick Gates.
So he is giving a tiny percentage of the money he made using the most slimy and despicable methods known to mankind. I'm not impressed and I suspect his maker will not be either.
If a drug dealer game money to local schools would he be a saint? While we are at it Osama Bin Laden built lots of orphanages and schools too.
"Now I have not checked this, but I suspect the charitable donations from every Linux distro CEO combined would fall well short of this."
In terms of absolute dollars yes, in terms of percentages I bet they gave more.
evil is as evil does
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.
I had no idea as to who Gary Kildall was. I did a quick search and found out. The cause of death is not clear tho, but nowhere it says it was suicide.
Now, I believe you have your reasons to blame Gates for Kildall's death, but in my own humble opinion, nobody is responsible for someone else's suicide. If you take the decision to kill yourself, no external factor is to blame.
As for "honoring" him by naming the building after him, well, he is paying for it. If the donation comes with strings attached and Stanford doesn't like it, they can always turn him down.
He might be a college dropout with little knowledge of CS, but he *is* doing something for the field: he is donating resources, just like the person who doesn't know anything about medicine, but donates money for a new hospital wing, or simply gives blood. You contribute with what you can.
(yes, I know Gates isn't probably doing it out of the goodness of his heart... he is getting publicity for it, but does it really matters so long as the job gets done?)
No sig
I guess the tought of a top CS building being named for the top software companies top employee doesn't really rankle me that much.
No, his point is computer science buildings should be named after men who given computer science more than they have taken from it. Men who did the research to advance the field. While I admire Bill Gates for his charitable work, I don't think he himself has contributed much to the field of computer science. If the building was for a Business School, by all means name him after Bill Gates.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
A lot of drug king pins in Colombia do a helluva charitable work actually, some are almost revered as heros. If you ignore how they got the money to begin with, then yeah... they are great people. It is how they got the money they are using to do charitable work that is the issue.
Saying that external factors cannot affect a person's decision to commit suicide doesn't seem reasonable. It's the same as saying that external factors cannot affect us at all, for any reason. Even if I did the evil things above, I certainly wouldn't be entirely to blame for his suicide (after all, he pulled the trigger, or took the pill, leapt off the bridge, whatever), but if I set up circumstances to the point where he felt like he had no way out, I would be at least partly culpable, by any reasonable moral standard. (I don't know if I could be held legally liable, in a criminal sense, although I probably could be successfully sued in civil court for wrongful death, or somesuch, assuming that his family could provide evidence).
I don't think that responsibility is always (or even usually) as simple as "one person is completely responsible for this." If a person commits a crime, and if external circumstances can affect that, then that person is still ultimately responsible, but it doesn't mean that we should relieve him of any responsibility and let him off scot-free, NOR does it mean that we should blame him entirely and not take a hard look at what society is doing that might encourage him to be criminal.
This really is getting off-topic; maybe I'll write a journal entry about it.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Uh... hate to break it to you, but most campuses name buildings after whoever fronts the cash, not after anyone "inspiring". I find it particularly ironic that this interchange was sparked as a result of discussions at Stanford, which is named for Leland Stanford: not an academic luminary, but a man who made a lot of money in railroads and used that moeny to endow a college.
As much as I am a Linux/open-source advocate, and do not like how Microsoft does its business today, I have a few things to point out about Microsoft and Bill Gates.
1. How much of KDE and Gnome (now be honest) and any other "popular" window manager for X is trying to mimick the better parts of MS Windows (the only way to take the market is to emulate it, and make it work better)?
2. Gates and Microsoft, as much as people don't want to admit, drove the PC into the mainstream use for end-user consumers. Microsoft followed others such as DEC, Sun, etc., and had something that ran on hardware of the day for academic and commercial reasons, and then took a leap (albeit Apple was already there in small representation, and Xerox just didn't market their workstation as effectively as MS did), and voila! They made a new market of people who found the usefulness of a computer at home.
3. Being an avid gamer (in my copious amounts of spare time *grin*), I need to ask this question. Since Bill Gates didn't complete college, you're saying he doesn't know much about computer science, and therefore he really can't contribute to the field. Take John Carmack, as an example. He dropped out of college after 2 semesters. He is the person that video card manufacturers worship in the hopes he uses their architecture to pioneer the next-generation of gaming. Is he someone you'd also consider not contributing to the advance of the computer science world?
If anything, Gates drove a company that put computer science on the map. There were many before him, and MANY after him, but he really can be credited to be behind the machine that made PC's mainstream. Please put your personal bias aside when posting about things like this. I'm sure if Carmack were to donate money to a college to buy a building, people would think that would just be damn cool, not a hypocrisy to computer science.