Bill Gates Gives $20M to CMU for New Building 919
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."
Cheapskate (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In a Related Story (Score:2, Informative)
It would be better spent on law school (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft continues to make the world a better place for lawyers and is likely eventually to hold on retainer 51% of attorneys worldwide.
Re:Why doesn't Bill Gates blow more of his money? (Score:3, Informative)
IBM (Score:4, Informative)
Actually I was mostly confused at the joke at first, thinking, "Wait a minute, I thought IBM was 'Big Blue'"
Re:Poor Bill (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Beatch Please! (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm
htt
etc
Give the man a break (Score:5, Informative)
$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.
one more CS dept gets a Gates building.... (Score:2, Informative)
- 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...
XP BSOD == Cold Reboot (Score:1, Informative)
If the above is true, Microsoft has executed a brilliant act of market deception, even against highly technical users.
[Disclaimer: I've never run WinXP. I will certainly accept factual corrections from someone with an accurate knowledge of its internals].
Re:BSOD jokes (Score:1, Informative)
Rebooting without notice might be nice in an unattended server, but those of us who use our computers might want to know what caused the (latest) crash.
Is this disgusting? You bet! Is Microsoft disgusting? You bet!
Re:XP BSOD == Cold Reboot (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Something not so funny about Bill Gates ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Rude? (Score:5, Informative)
Depends if you think 5.5 [google.com] years is very long
IBM (Score:3, Informative)
Re:XP BSOD == Cold Reboot (Score:5, Informative)
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.
What's $20m when you are worth $61 Billion (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Re:XP BSOD == Cold Reboot (Score:2, Informative)
I have seen the BSOD on XP several times, and yes - it does reboot almost instantly. I've even run into the problem on boot, so I couldn't even change the option if I wanted to because I couldn't read the error code to look it up and fix the machine. Ended up having to run the repair tool on the CD and it fixed whatever it was that was wrong (not preferred way of fixing things).
Re:Poor Bill (Score:3, Informative)
Now, if 20,000 large doesn't freshen your breath to CERT, dunno what will.
Actually CERT is within SEI [cmu.edu] which is pretty much a free-standing entity.
Re:Beatch Please! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Not Wiping Out Malaria (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Something not so funny about Bill Gates ... (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe if you tried a different search engine [google.com] you would know that the popular legend that he killed himself is not true [thocp.net]. He was killed in a fight at a bar, and by all accounts it wasn't the least bit deliberate.
you want crazy.. you GOT crazy (Score:3, Informative)
Suchetha
Re:Something not so funny about Bill Gates ... (Score:3, Informative)
1. The desktop model of computering is old, really old. There are demos from the late 60's, early 70s. MS lifted its windowing ideas the same place Apple did, from Xerox. Seems everything is initially derived from Xerox.
2. The home computer didn't hit critical mass until Netscape and the web gave people a real excuse to buy a home computer or two. Especially people who didn't at the time use a computer at work or were otherwise not in the income bracket that allowed for a $2,000+ computer.
Re:Something not so funny about Bill Gates ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Something not so funny about Bill Gates ... (Score:3, Informative)
ObNit: not named for Leland Stanford (Score:3, Informative)
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!
Re:Before you ask (Score:2, Informative)