I attended Carnegie Mellon and have worked with professors and given talks at MIT and Harvard. I don't know a lot about Stanford, except that I have never met anyone I actually liked who graduated from there (the same goes for Cornell, interestingly).
I'm not really the encouraging type, so I'll just try to address the negative points you put down for MIT and Harvard.
MIT: The curriculum at MIT absolutely is well-rounded. Did you know they have one of the best philosophy departments in the world? Also, check out the MIT Media Lab: they bring technology and creativity together in ways that no other organization can. The Media Lab's fellows range from engineers to comedians, and their director didn't even get a degree, but it's still one of the coolest places in the world to explore the confluence of ideas and application. MIT is also a leader in biology, chemistry, and medicine, so if you think you might want to apply your engineering education to one of those fields, MIT will definitely be a good place to park yourself for a few years.
Harvard: While you may hear more about Harvard Law and Harvard Medical School than their EECS department, that doesn't mean they don't have a top-flight program. In fact, when I was looking at grad schools long ago (for EE/applied physics), Harvard was easily one of my top choices because of the sheer number of professors there who have research interests in related fields. At the time, my interests were at the intersection of robotics and medicine, and there were no fewer than three professors there who would have been an excellent fit for Ph.D. studies in that arena (and, three is a pretty big number when it comes to picking the perfect Ph.D. advisor).
I also think staying in one place for too long can inhibit a person's drive to be creative. If I were you, I'd head to MIT or Harvard - they're both excellent schools, you'll get a fantastic education either way, and Boston is a really fun city. You'll also be a 6-hour flight away from western Europe... if you have a long weekend and some spare cash sitting around (hopefully from one of the many excellent Boston-area tech internships), London is just a bad night's sleep away.
One last thing, and I'm not 100% certain about this, but I've heard MIT and Harvard students can attend certain classes at a variety of schools in the area. So if you think your curriculum is lacking in art, you could, for example, take an illustration class at Mass Art. It works the other way around, too: my sister attended Mass Art and took a history class at Harvard one semester.
I've had the displeasure of maintaining code written by duct tape programmers in the past. We called them combat programmers, and some of them worked at places like Netscape with people like jwz (who was mentioned in this article).
A thousand lines of un-commented Perl script (with few, scattered functions) that looks like it was written in cat(1), for example, is the kind of duct tape that fails quickly and makes life miserable for whomever ends up needing to fix a bug or introduce a new feature.
In my experience, this is the sort of thing duct tape programming (almost always) produces, and I think it's worth at least a little bit of actual design and documentation time to create something far better and more maintainable.
Really, I think the question is more like, "what are the good and cheap alternatives?" GoDaddy is inexpensive, but dealing with their constant up-sells and their various ploys to get more money can be frustrating and annoying.
I host my domains at GoDaddy because it's cheap. I preferred GANDI prior to that because their quality of service was high and their willingness to keep the crap to a minimum was one of their primary objectives. (I still use GANDI's VPS service.)
I would love to find a cheap, good alternative to GoDaddy, but every time I look for one, I come up dry.
Very nice. I think my girlfriend of two years is catching on, although I could easily see her making the KGB/KVM mistake... and it being useful because I'd forgotten about it. :)
I'm not really the encouraging type, so I'll just try to address the negative points you put down for MIT and Harvard.
MIT: The curriculum at MIT absolutely is well-rounded. Did you know they have one of the best philosophy departments in the world? Also, check out the MIT Media Lab: they bring technology and creativity together in ways that no other organization can. The Media Lab's fellows range from engineers to comedians, and their director didn't even get a degree, but it's still one of the coolest places in the world to explore the confluence of ideas and application. MIT is also a leader in biology, chemistry, and medicine, so if you think you might want to apply your engineering education to one of those fields, MIT will definitely be a good place to park yourself for a few years.
Harvard: While you may hear more about Harvard Law and Harvard Medical School than their EECS department, that doesn't mean they don't have a top-flight program. In fact, when I was looking at grad schools long ago (for EE/applied physics), Harvard was easily one of my top choices because of the sheer number of professors there who have research interests in related fields. At the time, my interests were at the intersection of robotics and medicine, and there were no fewer than three professors there who would have been an excellent fit for Ph.D. studies in that arena (and, three is a pretty big number when it comes to picking the perfect Ph.D. advisor).
I also think staying in one place for too long can inhibit a person's drive to be creative. If I were you, I'd head to MIT or Harvard - they're both excellent schools, you'll get a fantastic education either way, and Boston is a really fun city. You'll also be a 6-hour flight away from western Europe... if you have a long weekend and some spare cash sitting around (hopefully from one of the many excellent Boston-area tech internships), London is just a bad night's sleep away.
One last thing, and I'm not 100% certain about this, but I've heard MIT and Harvard students can attend certain classes at a variety of schools in the area. So if you think your curriculum is lacking in art, you could, for example, take an illustration class at Mass Art. It works the other way around, too: my sister attended Mass Art and took a history class at Harvard one semester.