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
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...
Blue Screen of Death.
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
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
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.
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
he gives all this money to a school, but still gets the borg icon treatment on /.
CB#
free ipod and free gmail!
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.
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.
$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.
...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
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.
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.
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
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)