Another possibility (if you have the stomach for it and if your local economy supports it) is to become an independent consultant. Most of the contracts I see are hourly; work more than 40 hours, and you bill more than 40 hours. One downside is that you have to plan for downtime, though most of the decent consultants I know have minimal downtime. Another downside is that you are responsible for your own taxes and benefits; for many people, that's more than they want to deal with. It's not for everyone, obviously. But if you can handle the extra accounting (which, on the whole, isn't that much) and the increased uncertainty (which may not be that much more, depending on your local market), independent consulting can provide you with a decent income *and* the ability to charge by the hour.
I'm a fairly serious amateur photographer, and I used The GIMP almost religiously (on Linux) for a number of years. But I finally outgrew it and switched to Photoshop (and bought a Mac on which to run it, 'cause I simply can't abide Windows). Here are some of the reasons:
Adjustment layers. The GIMP needs adjustment layers just to be taken seriously, in my opinion. I cannot overstate the power, convenience, and usefulness of adjustment layers.
16-bit color support. 8-bit just doesn't cut it.
Alternate color spaces. (And not just CYMK.) This is an absolute must if you're at all serious about printing photos.
Better B&W support. Photoshop's support for grayscale is outstanding. It has features The GIMP simply does not have, such as a more intuitive channel mixer; the Calculations feature; a new CS3 B&W adjustment layer (which effing rocks); a photo filter adjustment layer (useful for toning the final B&W); support for duotone, tritone and quadtone (albeit only in 8-bit mode), with a full suite of built-in Pantone filters.
Better RAW support. Photoshop's Camera RAW capability just gets better and better. Before I switched to Photoshop, I purchased the BibblePro tool (which runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) because of its outstanding RAW support. At that point, I still planned to stick with The GIMP, but I actually paid for a commercial tool because The GIMP's RAW support just doesn't cut it. (I still use Bibble.)
Photoshop's healing brush, CS3's quick selection tool, and a host of other tools make selections and other common manipulation tasks easier than they are in The GIMP.
Photoshop's history palette. If you've used it, you know what I mean.
Recordable actions. They work like macro recording in your favorite text editor: Turn it on, and it records what you do until you turn it off. And you can save the macros. I created a Contrast Mask macro in 10 seconds; it's now available to me whenever I need it, at the press of a button. I'm a professional programmer, so writing a GIMP plug-in isn't especially scary for me. But it still would've taken me longer to create the same kind of plug-in for The GIMP, and it would've been a lot more annoying to do. (Yeah, I know The GIMP already has a Contrast Mask plug-in. That's not my point.)
Workflow support. Photoshop works well with Bridge, which eases the workflow when you have 200 images from a shoot that you have to sift through, before deciding which one(s) to spend serious time working.
Commonality of terminology. I participate on some photo enthusiast web sites, and I frequently read tutorials on image manipulation. They are, almost without exception, Photoshop-oriented. I got tired of trying to translate Photoshop into GIMP. Even if The GIMP doesn't support all the features Photoshop does (and, frankly, I don't see how it'll catch up any time soon), the features it does support should be supported as closely as possible the way Photoshop does them. These tools are so complicated that even the pros refer to tutorials. If those tutorials and tricks could be more readily applied to The GIMP, without the necessary head-scratching translations that are often necessary, it sure would help.
HDR. I don't do HDR very often, but when I need to do it, I sure can't do it with The GIMP.
Stitching. Photoshop's stitching plug-ins are surprisingly good. Again, as with HDR, it's not a feature I use every day, but when I need it, nothing else will do.
I'm sure I could come up with others, but those are the ones that leap immediately to mind.
I like The GIMP; it's installed on every desktop I use. It's also installed on my Mac laptop. It's damned useful for plenty of image-related tasks. But it doesn't hold a candle to Photoshop, and until it supports at least a large subset of the above capabilities, it hasn't a prayer of being taken seriously by most photographers.
There's a related point: How is one technology (blogging in this case, or open source in other cases) going to be the One True Technology that saves corporate America from itself? Companies that survive rarely put all their eggs in one basket. They have strategies that integrate technology, approaches, and ideas from a variety of different places--but in a way that serves their specific business needs.
When a well-meaning, but single-minded, zealot comes into a company, advocating the wonders of a single type of technology (whether it's these guys advocating wide-open blogs for any corporation or ESR advocating open source to Microsoft), I have the same reaction I have to all missionaries: You're looking at the company through your filters. Try looking at the company through its own filters, instead.
Amazon's CTO may well have been rude, and perhaps he should soften his tone a bit. But wide-eyed, naive technology evangelists should realize that no CTO or CIO (or, for that matter, halfway decent rank-and-file corporate technologist) is ever going to believe that merely introducing blogging into a corporation will cause some magical, positive transformation.
A company should adopt blogging (or podcasting or open source or...), because the technology fits its broader business goals, not because some outside blogging advocate thinks it'd be cool.
Even the best self-documenting code can't tell you why it was written.
A good comment, by contrast, can answer the question, "Why the hell did he do it THAT way?" or "Now, what the fuck was I trying to accomplish when I wrote this?"
My mistake, not a full server. Just a cheapo host.
Still, a vhost can be relatively inexpensive. My ISP sells its services a la carte, and charges me $15 a month to host my web site. They also charge a fee to handle DNS, but they'll let you handle your own, which I do. Even without a static IP, a service like Granite Canyon's Public DNS Service will let you control the DNS records for your domain.
Owning and operating your own domain does not have to be prohibitively expensive.
I have to agree with you about there not being many people with superior
technical knowledge in schools. . . . I had high hopes of filling young
minds with excitement over their upcoming broadband connection (they are
about to receive a donated T-1 line at the school) and all the things that
can be done with that kind of bandwidth. But all I got was mostly bored
kids that had no interest in it whatsoever. I would have been drooling at
the thought, but most of them didn't seem to care.
Of course, you're talking about just one school. Mike Hughes' comments
about his high school clearly reflect a different reality. I suspect that
there are plenty of schools where the students would be thrilled to
death to be getting highspeed Internet access.
It's the nongeek, nontechnical users who
will ultimately drive bandwidth consumption. As the Internet becomes even
more commercial, the general population will begin latching onto it more
and more, using bandwidth without any regard to whether they've "earned"
the right, or whether they're saturating the link. Those concepts won't
even make any sense to most them, and most won't care. It'll be one more
service they purchase, like cable or telephone. Bandwidth will be someone
else's problem to manage. Sure, there'll be geeks who want to know the
inner workings, just like there have always been guys who want to take
apart radios and TVs. But most people just won't care.
In this context, I can't help thinking of my wife's 11yearold
niece. About a month ago, her family finally bought a computer. My wife and
I stopped by for a visit one evening, and I was promptly enlisted to set it
up and get it going. It came with a free year's subscription to AOL, which
I also set up for them. The very first thing my niece wanted to know how to
use was AIM; it seems that all her friends use it. Within a week,
she was sending my wife email greeting cards, and bugging my wife and me to
get on AIM so she could chat with us. She jumped into the interactive
medium with both feet, and without the slightest bit of fear.
She's integrated the technology into her life very quickly; it's already
as much a part of her daily experience as the TV, the microwave, and the
telephone. Does she have "superior technical knowledge?" No. But she has
something far more important, IMO: Unquestioning acceptance. In 1995, when
the Internet was really starting to go mainstream, this little girl was
just entering grade school. To her, the commercial Internet has always been
around. Checking her email, or chatting with friends via AIM, just seems
natural and normal to her. And it's all socially reinforced: She's at an
age where her peers' opinions matter a lot to her, and almost all of her
peers are online.
Chat and email certainly aren't enough to saturate a highspeed
link, of course; she's not even close to feeling cramped by her 56K modem
connection yet. However, she and her preadolescent peers are all
popculture junkies. In a few years, they'll be downloading videos of
their favorite pop music stars, pulling down music clips to burn their own
CDs, etc. To them, it won't seem any more unnatural or difficult than
popping a rented movie into the DVD player or cooking popcorn in the
microwave. And you can bet every one of them will be clamoring for
faster Internet access (in addition to money for the mall).
Slashdot Mirror
Another possibility (if you have the stomach for it and if your local economy supports it) is to become an independent consultant. Most of the contracts I see are hourly; work more than 40 hours, and you bill more than 40 hours. One downside is that you have to plan for downtime, though most of the decent consultants I know have minimal downtime. Another downside is that you are responsible for your own taxes and benefits; for many people, that's more than they want to deal with. It's not for everyone, obviously. But if you can handle the extra accounting (which, on the whole, isn't that much) and the increased uncertainty (which may not be that much more, depending on your local market), independent consulting can provide you with a decent income *and* the ability to charge by the hour.
I'm a fairly serious amateur photographer, and I used The GIMP almost religiously (on Linux) for a number of years. But I finally outgrew it and switched to Photoshop (and bought a Mac on which to run it, 'cause I simply can't abide Windows). Here are some of the reasons:
Adjustment layers. The GIMP needs adjustment layers just to be taken seriously, in my opinion. I cannot overstate the power, convenience, and usefulness of adjustment layers.
16-bit color support. 8-bit just doesn't cut it.
Alternate color spaces. (And not just CYMK.) This is an absolute must if you're at all serious about printing photos.
Better B&W support. Photoshop's support for grayscale is outstanding. It has features The GIMP simply does not have, such as a more intuitive channel mixer; the Calculations feature; a new CS3 B&W adjustment layer (which effing rocks); a photo filter adjustment layer (useful for toning the final B&W); support for duotone, tritone and quadtone (albeit only in 8-bit mode), with a full suite of built-in Pantone filters.
Better RAW support. Photoshop's Camera RAW capability just gets better and better. Before I switched to Photoshop, I purchased the BibblePro tool (which runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) because of its outstanding RAW support. At that point, I still planned to stick with The GIMP, but I actually paid for a commercial tool because The GIMP's RAW support just doesn't cut it. (I still use Bibble.)
Photoshop's healing brush, CS3's quick selection tool, and a host of other tools make selections and other common manipulation tasks easier than they are in The GIMP.
Photoshop's history palette. If you've used it, you know what I mean.
Recordable actions. They work like macro recording in your favorite text editor: Turn it on, and it records what you do until you turn it off. And you can save the macros. I created a Contrast Mask macro in 10 seconds; it's now available to me whenever I need it, at the press of a button. I'm a professional programmer, so writing a GIMP plug-in isn't especially scary for me. But it still would've taken me longer to create the same kind of plug-in for The GIMP, and it would've been a lot more annoying to do. (Yeah, I know The GIMP already has a Contrast Mask plug-in. That's not my point.)
Workflow support. Photoshop works well with Bridge, which eases the workflow when you have 200 images from a shoot that you have to sift through, before deciding which one(s) to spend serious time working.
Commonality of terminology. I participate on some photo enthusiast web sites, and I frequently read tutorials on image manipulation. They are, almost without exception, Photoshop-oriented. I got tired of trying to translate Photoshop into GIMP. Even if The GIMP doesn't support all the features Photoshop does (and, frankly, I don't see how it'll catch up any time soon), the features it does support should be supported as closely as possible the way Photoshop does them. These tools are so complicated that even the pros refer to tutorials. If those tutorials and tricks could be more readily applied to The GIMP, without the necessary head-scratching translations that are often necessary, it sure would help.
HDR. I don't do HDR very often, but when I need to do it, I sure can't do it with The GIMP.
Stitching. Photoshop's stitching plug-ins are surprisingly good. Again, as with HDR, it's not a feature I use every day, but when I need it, nothing else will do.
I'm sure I could come up with others, but those are the ones that leap immediately to mind.
I like The GIMP; it's installed on every desktop I use. It's also installed on my Mac laptop. It's damned useful for plenty of image-related tasks. But it doesn't hold a candle to Photoshop, and until it supports at least a large subset of the above capabilities, it hasn't a prayer of being taken seriously by most photographers.
There's a related point: How is one technology (blogging in this case, or open source in other cases) going to be the One True Technology that saves corporate America from itself? Companies that survive rarely put all their eggs in one basket. They have strategies that integrate technology, approaches, and ideas from a variety of different places--but in a way that serves their specific business needs.
...), because the technology fits its broader business goals, not because some outside blogging advocate thinks it'd be cool.
When a well-meaning, but single-minded, zealot comes into a company, advocating the wonders of a single type of technology (whether it's these guys advocating wide-open blogs for any corporation or ESR advocating open source to Microsoft), I have the same reaction I have to all missionaries: You're looking at the company through your filters. Try looking at the company through its own filters, instead.
Amazon's CTO may well have been rude, and perhaps he should soften his tone a bit. But wide-eyed, naive technology evangelists should realize that no CTO or CIO (or, for that matter, halfway decent rank-and-file corporate technologist) is ever going to believe that merely introducing blogging into a corporation will cause some magical, positive transformation.
A company should adopt blogging (or podcasting or open source or
Even the best self-documenting code can't tell you why it was written.
A good comment, by contrast, can answer the question, "Why the hell did he do it THAT way?" or "Now, what the fuck was I trying to accomplish when I wrote this?"
My mistake, not a full server. Just a cheapo host.
Still, a vhost can be relatively inexpensive. My ISP sells its services a la carte, and charges me $15 a month to host my web site. They also charge a fee to handle DNS, but they'll let you handle your own, which I do. Even without a static IP, a service like Granite Canyon's Public DNS Service will let you control the DNS records for your domain.
Owning and operating your own domain does not have to be prohibitively expensive.
Of course, you're talking about just one school. Mike Hughes' comments about his high school clearly reflect a different reality. I suspect that there are plenty of schools where the students would be thrilled to death to be getting highspeed Internet access.
It's the nongeek, nontechnical users who will ultimately drive bandwidth consumption. As the Internet becomes even more commercial, the general population will begin latching onto it more and more, using bandwidth without any regard to whether they've "earned" the right, or whether they're saturating the link. Those concepts won't even make any sense to most them, and most won't care. It'll be one more service they purchase, like cable or telephone. Bandwidth will be someone else's problem to manage. Sure, there'll be geeks who want to know the inner workings, just like there have always been guys who want to take apart radios and TVs. But most people just won't care.
In this context, I can't help thinking of my wife's 11yearold niece. About a month ago, her family finally bought a computer. My wife and I stopped by for a visit one evening, and I was promptly enlisted to set it up and get it going. It came with a free year's subscription to AOL, which I also set up for them. The very first thing my niece wanted to know how to use was AIM; it seems that all her friends use it. Within a week, she was sending my wife email greeting cards, and bugging my wife and me to get on AIM so she could chat with us. She jumped into the interactive medium with both feet, and without the slightest bit of fear.
She's integrated the technology into her life very quickly; it's already as much a part of her daily experience as the TV, the microwave, and the telephone. Does she have "superior technical knowledge?" No. But she has something far more important, IMO: Unquestioning acceptance. In 1995, when the Internet was really starting to go mainstream, this little girl was just entering grade school. To her, the commercial Internet has always been around. Checking her email, or chatting with friends via AIM, just seems natural and normal to her. And it's all socially reinforced: She's at an age where her peers' opinions matter a lot to her, and almost all of her peers are online.
Chat and email certainly aren't enough to saturate a highspeed link, of course; she's not even close to feeling cramped by her 56K modem connection yet. However, she and her preadolescent peers are all popculture junkies. In a few years, they'll be downloading videos of their favorite pop music stars, pulling down music clips to burn their own CDs, etc. To them, it won't seem any more unnatural or difficult than popping a rented movie into the DVD player or cooking popcorn in the microwave. And you can bet every one of them will be clamoring for faster Internet access (in addition to money for the mall).