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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."
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 ?
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
It will be ugly all right, if it looks anything like this Bill Gates computer science building.
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
Not exactly a check -- just free software. Check out the press release.
...you will be greeted by a 20 foot iron sculpture of clippy.
That, and the building won't have any locks.
webpage
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.
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
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.
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!
You've got to be kidding me? I'm not spoiled. I'm not rich by any means, I am at CMU because I work my ASS off.
I made a conscious decision in my life to work hard and stay in school because I knew what it meant for my future. So who is it that really DESERVES it more? Is it the people who are the best and the brightest and have worked their asses off to show it; the ones who will be changing the world? Or is it another 15 year old mother of 2 who thought her baby-daddy jamal had a better future as a crack dealer than he could have if he stayed in school. I love the concept that if you are capable, you should be shat upon. I hope that someday, YOU, cdtoad get to live in a world where everything is designed by this lowest common denominator you love so much. Cars? Nope. Computers, of course not! Light bulbs??? Hell no. These folks are not the ones who are driving society and innovation. I'll stick with beleiving in hard work, wise decisions, and innovation personally.
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?
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.
...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...
$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.
- 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.
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.
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
Yes it is true. There is a checkbox in system settings under the System Failure section that says "Automatically restart". It is checked by default.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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)
There won't be a front entryway to the building. But there will be hundreds of back doors.
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.
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 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
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) --
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
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
dont be naive or stupid
I remember the time when Mr Billy was the only mega-corp billionaire that never donated a thing to charity.
I kept repeating that again and again in forums. Then maybe their marketting team listened. And then started first donating Winblows "software" to school (great marketting).
MS software is ludicrously expensive to purchase in the 3rd world. No wonder they are all going linux.
And donating money to America's AIDS research. Wow how generous. AIDS treatment drugs are too ridiculously expensive to the 3rd world - despite being cheap to produce. Let's put a price on death shall we? So no wonder countries like Brazil are producing cheaper clones (instead of $99 per pill you have $0.99!).
So don't be such down right thick, there are people who are rich and succesfull philantropist - who don't get villified as such.
If someone is shady - the truth will show. Come on we live in the 21sth century. All false heroes will be exposed.
For me naivity of people the worse evil of all. It made Hitler powerful.
I don't know if this is necessarily a deceptive move or not (I think it might have been just to keep people from going crazy when "fatal error" or something popped up), but I can confirm that my OEM XP CD as of last month and a Win 2000 version from last year or so both came with a "Reboot upon system error" option checked.
Removing it involved delving into the registry in 2000, but there's a simple checkbox in XP.
Either way, it was a royal pain the first time I discovered this "feature" when my Win2K box got a virus and began crashing on boot to windows, thus ending up in an infinite reboot cycle with no real way of understanding what was happening. It took me a while just to get it to stop rebooting, and THEN I had to repair the virus.
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.
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
--
Simon
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.
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
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!"
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