Though nearly anyone would look at works by these people and see true art and beauty, critics have long derided them as simply crafts, not true art. But check out the pottery at the Chicken Farm in Texas, or any textile artist, or even good Amish furniture and compare it to say say "Umbrellas" (Christeau maybe??) and you tell me which has more artistic value.
But you could be in my place; Trying to convince the Dean of the Fine Arts that a final exhibition working solely with lasers does count as fine art and I should graduate (plus get me some grants)
Say what you want about their religion, but ask any shortwave enthusiast and they will tell you that when it comes to strong, unbiased, professional reporting, The Monitor is world-class. Everything I've heard indicates the same for both their print and on-line publications.
I've been listening for years and consider CSM to be, if not totally perfect, one of the least biased, best sources of news information in the world.
...consistent claims that cell phone radiation is harmless...
Now, whether radiation from cell phones is dangerous or not is one thing, but I think people need to start waking up to the idea that nothing, given sufficient time or quantity is totally harmless.
Life is about moderation and taking calculated risks.
It's the easiest way to glorify the mundane.
For instance, a high school job as a Customer Service Associate had me bagging groceries. As Assistant Director of Ecology and Conservation I taught nature merit badges at a summer camp.
Try for words like consultant, independant, or freelance. For instance, I now work as a Freelance Scenic and Lighting Designer and as an Independant Laser Graphics Artist.
Or, go the route of a former professor, whose cards had a name, number, and "witty, vivacious, fun-loving, and talented"
Dvorak's great and I'd love to switch, but I don't want to shell out $70 for a new keyboard. Sorry, I'm a visual person and while I touch type now, its more or less by picturing the keys in my head....I need to see the keys with the letters on them to learn the new layout.
And I have yet to find a decent keyboard where the keys all have the same profile so I could change the caps around and remap.
Give me cheap dvorak!!
I work with a small group of about fifteen guys in a sort of tech related field; we install, maintain, and design all of the electronic systems in a major theme park. Now, for four weeks before the park opens in May, and about two after it closes in October, we work ourselves near to death. Arrive at 7:30 am, go home at two or three. It's absolutely killer, but with such a narrow window between the departure of cold weather and the arrival of customers its necessary. When they hired me straight out of high school, the addition of myself to the payroll caused our tiny department to start breaking all of Anheuser-Busch's records of ours worked by a team.
But we were well taken care of. Free food during those weeks, free hotel next door if we lived far away. And if we did our job well, the rest of the year was spent answering occasional service requests, a few high adrenaline, exciting emergency repairs, and hours upon hurs of napping, flirting, or watching DVDs on our plasma screen (mind you this was five years ago....)
Moral of the story is, sometimes a company can make those long hours worth it. If you enjoy your job and aren't constantly in crisis mode, sometimes blowing 80+ hours in a week is not such a bigg deal. Just don't try and do it forever. We got to work outside in the sun and fresh air. You'd never stick me in a cubicle for that many hours.
Well, if this case is going to go to the Supreme Court, it had better get their fast (an unlikely option, I'm afraid) For the next four years, any new justice on the court is going to be very pro-business. If enough justices retire during W's term, it may be forty years or more before we get a court that will really listen to the concerns of the individual over the concerns of the corporation.
Color Kinetics is one of the most respected manufacturers of lighting for stage, concert, and architectural or themed environments in the world. Their products are consistently innovative, cost effective, and very reliable. In particualr their work with LED illuminaries has really impressed me.
This company isn't a little.com startup, they are a seroious business.
Some of the advances and advantages I've found with using Color Kinetics instruments in my theatrical and theme park work include full RBG without the use of gel or moving dichros, low heat output, no lamps to replace, low voltage requirements, and a very uniquely smooth-textured light quality. Not the bold, strong light (and washed color) or say, and 8" fresnel lamp, and not the sparkling, intense color of lasers, but somewhere in-between.
Why they would ever want to get into the gaming world, I have no clue. And no, I don't work for Color Kinetics, just a happily supported customer.
Sometimes it's not that easy. I've worked on systems where every possible combination of ground lift, buzz box and hum bucker was used to try and get rid of a downright evil 60hz buzz. Granted it was a multi-arrayed system for a smaller stadium, but try as we might we could not make that buzz go away. Ended up just pulling out the old cable and running new. I suspect that there was just too much interference on the older audio wires when running too near the ancient lighting dimmer system.
On a side note, I also worked in a stadium that was having an audible pop in the wireless mic system about every 20-30 seconds. We played for years trying to figure it out, even bought some kickass Senheiser mics that mapped all the RF holes and the like in the stadium trying to make it go away. The kicker was, it only happened during show and never afterwards when we would come to try and teck out the pop.
Well, the nice guys from Audio-technica came out and were stumped for a while until they brought out some fancy equipment and finally decided that the damp old wood flooring cobined with the metal seating created the perfect little capacitor, especially when packed full of energy generating people...every half minute or so and a nice little pop in all of our wirelss recievers.
Just goes to show, sometimes you can run into some very strange and unexpected problems.
Ahh, conduit....there is no beauty greater than a doxen or maybe even 2 dozen pieces of conduit ranging in sizes from 3/4 inch it five inch all running into one massive break-out box, with neat little color coded wire ties and labels...and...and....oh...!!
Seriously, this is a great suggestion. Save money and go with PVC conduit where possible (plus enjoy the fumes from the glues, primer, and bender). But in some places,zoning laws will amek you use metal conduit, especially in you are going through a major load-bearing wall.
I learned all about laying conduit while working for a theme park in Ohio...we're talking miles and miles of conduit, cable track, etc and I never heard of it being illegal in residential homes. if anything it reduces a fire risk by enclosing wires in a place most animals will avoid.
Now..the conduit pull horror stories I could tell....
You know,my grandfather was an Iirishman in the truest sense of the word. He used to say, "Sure the sun ne'er sets on the British Empire.... but that's because God wouldna trust 'em in the dark."
You are expressing what can only be seen as the fruits of the seeds of oppression first planted during the Industrial Revolution. I hope it was sarcasm on your part, but I doubt it. To paraphrase: "The Military-Industrial-Political complex is too stroung to fight, so why don't we just sit back, relax and rot in our own stinking decay." Or, "There will always be racism, why fight it, its too big. There will always be poor, why bother to help them". Or, "Fight the British, why fight the Bbritish, we're a rag-tag bunch of colonials, they're the mightiest empire to exist since Rome.
I don't mean to Troll, and this certainly isn't flamebait. Like I said, I hope I'm missing your sarcasm, but if not this is the most seriously depressing thing I have ever read on Slashdot.
The strength of the enemy should not be a deterrent to the fight. Jacob wrestled the angel and the angel was overcome.
But, forcing little companies out there only to make a quick buck to start doing things in a logical, orderly way that benefits the common good is the perfect job for *gasp* the Government.
While I would prefer some sort of international standards body that could force people to do things the right way instead of half way, without some sort of enforcing power, that is difficult.
Man, I can't believe I just advocated Anything for the government...on/. no less..I better go lie down.
The most interesting precedent I see being set here is that this decision is coming down from a utilities commision. In most cases I don't think the government can or should be able to force a company to stay in business, but utilites, like phone, electric and water are a notable exception. These businesses can't just shut off services because what they provide is so necessary to basic needs.
It is really interesting to see this same idea being equated with ISPs. If anything, it shows how important and and integral part of our lives the internet has become. So in this case, I agree with the State of California. Northpoint provides a valuable service that is a necessary part of economic survival for many businesses. They can't just pull the plug.
Of course, a similar situation has occurred in the past when the government has forced striking workers back to work, or that failing, manned their positions with soldiers. Sergeant Sys Admin anyone?
Run a quick Google search on dioxin and monsanto to see how right you are. Or check out
http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/companies/mons an to.html
This company is your classical evil archetype. Especially in states like West Virginia where the government has been sleeping with these sorts of corporations for years. In fact, one reason dioxin (most hazardous substance man-unkind makes) clean-up has been slow in West Viginias is becuase the former Governor, Cecil Underwood, was also on the board at Monsanto during the years when they were dumping the poinson and falsifying toxicity reports so 'Nam vets who were poisoned by Agent Orange were denied assistance.
When MS reaches these levels of pure evilness, I'll really be impressed.
Agreed..I work with some extremist hi-fi fans. I had the chance to listen to two sources, one on CD and the other first run virgin vinyl. The speakers, amplification, and processing were all the same, the only difference was the source. One was a very high-end CD player, the other a turntable set-up that costs more than a small Italian sports car.
Needless to say, the vinyl sounded slightly, if only slightly better. I'm not an audiophile myself and barely have the ears to hear, much less describe the difference, but it was there.
Now, whether this sort of "lab" quality scenario applies in the real world..I doubt it.
You make a good point. The definition probably lies more in the numbers partaking in the so called *hacktivism* Of course the lines between Cyber terrorism and Cyber Civil Disobedience can and probably would be blurred at any mega-corporation worth its salt.
But in any case, 20 or 30 thousand people sending off e-mail missives to company X, crashing their servers,(especially if they contact the media and make a news event out of their doing so) is going to put a whole lot more pressure on said company/government than 3 or 4 people defacing a website.
the power of the people lies in numbers. Thousands of any sort of act, legal or illegal, will raise a lot of attention, and there is nothing companies like less than unwanted attention.
...For receipt of contributions to what we are now calling KICK INTERNET PIRACY... (And when we are asked, "well, what is KICKan acronym for?" We respond, "It's for Kick 'em in the ass!"...
I agree. Never really watched TV in high school, maybe an hour or two a week while my peers were doubling that every single night. In middle school I watched The Next Generation nightly, and that was about my peak TV usage. I picked up a cheap tuner card when I went away to college, and other than using it to impress my friends and the occasional video capture, I've probably not logged 15 hours of TV in the past three years. It's wonderful.
I'd love to make *the big switch* and lose windows. I strongly support all of the ideas behind open-source and GNU, but I can't afford the downtime to learning to use a new OS, nor can I afford a separate machine just to play and explore on. I tried dual booting a year ago. That was a nightmare.
Combine that with the fact that I'm not a huge geek and don't have much programming or coding experience, and the lack of available *nix mentors in southern West Virginia, and I'm stuck on 'Doze.
Maybe this app, or future versions, will give me the ability to get my feet wet and at least learn to navigate the Linux's interface and learn to use apps like Star Office before I once again try to change over on my own.
So what you're saying is we should let the mining companies rape and pillage other planets before they finish the job here??
I agree that money makes the world go round and would probably also make the rockets go up and down, but I'd rather have a LunarDisney than unregulated mining on other planets/ the moon. I imagine environmental disasters there would be a. common, b. very difficult to repair.
That's what it is called.
Is it a lot of fun, no, and are you being used to your best ability, maybe not, but this is a business. In school, you are given opportunities to prove yourself.In business, you find those on your own.
My first job when I was 15 was working for a summer camp digging, cleaning and maintaining a couple hundred outhouses. But I was the best damn outhouse digger in the whole place, and three summers later I was the youngest area director in the companies history, with a staff of five, the ear of the company president, and a whole lot more room to play.
Did the same thing at my last job as a field service tech. Told the above story my first or second day, said "after a job like that there is no way I can ever take someone that seriously when they say they have a shit job for me.." Busted tail, and three years later was the head of the seasonal tech staff at a major theme park, and only 20yrs old. Now I'm looking for a new job...
Moral of the Story: Don't expect your employers to automatically see what you are capable of and work you to that limit. Show them that your capabilities have no limits.
Slashdot Mirror
Though nearly anyone would look at works by these people and see true art and beauty, critics have long derided them as simply crafts, not true art. But check out the pottery at the Chicken Farm in Texas, or any textile artist, or even good Amish furniture and compare it to say say "Umbrellas" (Christeau maybe??) and you tell me which has more artistic value. But you could be in my place; Trying to convince the Dean of the Fine Arts that a final exhibition working solely with lasers does count as fine art and I should graduate (plus get me some grants)
Say what you want about their religion, but ask any shortwave enthusiast and they will tell you that when it comes to strong, unbiased, professional reporting, The Monitor is world-class. Everything I've heard indicates the same for both their print and on-line publications. I've been listening for years and consider CSM to be, if not totally perfect, one of the least biased, best sources of news information in the world.
Now, whether radiation from cell phones is dangerous or not is one thing, but I think people need to start waking up to the idea that nothing, given sufficient time or quantity is totally harmless.
Life is about moderation and taking calculated risks.
Try for words like consultant, independant, or freelance. For instance, I now work as a Freelance Scenic and Lighting Designer and as an Independant Laser Graphics Artist.
Or, go the route of a former professor, whose cards had a name, number, and "witty, vivacious, fun-loving, and talented"
Dvorak's great and I'd love to switch, but I don't want to shell out $70 for a new keyboard. Sorry, I'm a visual person and while I touch type now, its more or less by picturing the keys in my head....I need to see the keys with the letters on them to learn the new layout. And I have yet to find a decent keyboard where the keys all have the same profile so I could change the caps around and remap. Give me cheap dvorak!!
Man, you've been spending too much time on E2.
Mod this up. Then mod me down for writing this post.
But we were well taken care of. Free food during those weeks, free hotel next door if we lived far away. And if we did our job well, the rest of the year was spent answering occasional service requests, a few high adrenaline, exciting emergency repairs, and hours upon hurs of napping, flirting, or watching DVDs on our plasma screen (mind you this was five years ago....)
Moral of the story is, sometimes a company can make those long hours worth it. If you enjoy your job and aren't constantly in crisis mode, sometimes blowing 80+ hours in a week is not such a bigg deal. Just don't try and do it forever. We got to work outside in the sun and fresh air. You'd never stick me in a cubicle for that many hours.
Well, if this case is going to go to the Supreme Court, it had better get their fast (an unlikely option, I'm afraid) For the next four years, any new justice on the court is going to be very pro-business. If enough justices retire during W's term, it may be forty years or more before we get a court that will really listen to the concerns of the individual over the concerns of the corporation.
Color Kinetics is one of the most respected manufacturers of lighting for stage, concert, and architectural or themed environments in the world. Their products are consistently innovative, cost effective, and very reliable. In particualr their work with LED illuminaries has really impressed me. This company isn't a little .com startup, they are a seroious business.
Some of the advances and advantages I've found with using Color Kinetics instruments in my theatrical and theme park work include full RBG without the use of gel or moving dichros, low heat output, no lamps to replace, low voltage requirements, and a very uniquely smooth-textured light quality. Not the bold, strong light (and washed color) or say, and 8" fresnel lamp, and not the sparkling, intense color of lasers, but somewhere in-between.
Why they would ever want to get into the gaming world, I have no clue. And no, I don't work for Color Kinetics, just a happily supported customer.
On a side note, I also worked in a stadium that was having an audible pop in the wireless mic system about every 20-30 seconds. We played for years trying to figure it out, even bought some kickass Senheiser mics that mapped all the RF holes and the like in the stadium trying to make it go away. The kicker was, it only happened during show and never afterwards when we would come to try and teck out the pop.
Well, the nice guys from Audio-technica came out and were stumped for a while until they brought out some fancy equipment and finally decided that the damp old wood flooring cobined with the metal seating created the perfect little capacitor, especially when packed full of energy generating people...every half minute or so and a nice little pop in all of our wirelss recievers.
Just goes to show, sometimes you can run into some very strange and unexpected problems.
Seriously, this is a great suggestion. Save money and go with PVC conduit where possible (plus enjoy the fumes from the glues, primer, and bender). But in some places,zoning laws will amek you use metal conduit, especially in you are going through a major load-bearing wall.
I learned all about laying conduit while working for a theme park in Ohio...we're talking miles and miles of conduit, cable track, etc and I never heard of it being illegal in residential homes. if anything it reduces a fire risk by enclosing wires in a place most animals will avoid.
Now..the conduit pull horror stories I could tell....
You know,my grandfather was an Iirishman in the truest sense of the word. He used to say, "Sure the sun ne'er sets on the British Empire.... but that's because God wouldna trust 'em in the dark."
I don't mean to Troll, and this certainly isn't flamebait. Like I said, I hope I'm missing your sarcasm, but if not this is the most seriously depressing thing I have ever read on Slashdot.
The strength of the enemy should not be a deterrent to the fight. Jacob wrestled the angel and the angel was overcome.
If this is a call for revolution, so be it.
While I would prefer some sort of international standards body that could force people to do things the right way instead of half way, without some sort of enforcing power, that is difficult.
Man, I can't believe I just advocated Anything for the government...on /. no less..I better go lie down.
It is really interesting to see this same idea being equated with ISPs. If anything, it shows how important and and integral part of our lives the internet has become. So in this case, I agree with the State of California. Northpoint provides a valuable service that is a necessary part of economic survival for many businesses. They can't just pull the plug.
Of course, a similar situation has occurred in the past when the government has forced striking workers back to work, or that failing, manned their positions with soldiers. Sergeant Sys Admin anyone?
Now, I just wonder how this news program would do in a ratings match-up with that news show in Russia where the stories are read by strippers.
http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/companies/mons an to.html
This company is your classical evil archetype. Especially in states like West Virginia where the government has been sleeping with these sorts of corporations for years. In fact, one reason dioxin (most hazardous substance man-unkind makes) clean-up has been slow in West Viginias is becuase the former Governor, Cecil Underwood, was also on the board at Monsanto during the years when they were dumping the poinson and falsifying toxicity reports so 'Nam vets who were poisoned by Agent Orange were denied assistance.
When MS reaches these levels of pure evilness, I'll really be impressed.
Needless to say, the vinyl sounded slightly, if only slightly better. I'm not an audiophile myself and barely have the ears to hear, much less describe the difference, but it was there.
Now, whether this sort of "lab" quality scenario applies in the real world..I doubt it.
You make a good point. The definition probably lies more in the numbers partaking in the so called *hacktivism* Of course the lines between Cyber terrorism and Cyber Civil Disobedience can and probably would be blurred at any mega-corporation worth its salt.
But in any case, 20 or 30 thousand people sending off e-mail missives to company X, crashing their servers,(especially if they contact the media and make a news event out of their doing so) is going to put a whole lot more pressure on said company/government than 3 or 4 people defacing a website.
the power of the people lies in numbers. Thousands of any sort of act, legal or illegal, will raise a lot of attention, and there is nothing companies like less than unwanted attention.
I agree. Never really watched TV in high school, maybe an hour or two a week while my peers were doubling that every single night. In middle school I watched The Next Generation nightly, and that was about my peak TV usage. I picked up a cheap tuner card when I went away to college, and other than using it to impress my friends and the occasional video capture, I've probably not logged 15 hours of TV in the past three years. It's wonderful.
I'd love to make *the big switch* and lose windows. I strongly support all of the ideas behind open-source and GNU, but I can't afford the downtime to learning to use a new OS, nor can I afford a separate machine just to play and explore on. I tried dual booting a year ago. That was a nightmare.
Combine that with the fact that I'm not a huge geek and don't have much programming or coding experience, and the lack of available *nix mentors in southern West Virginia, and I'm stuck on 'Doze.
Maybe this app, or future versions, will give me the ability to get my feet wet and at least learn to navigate the Linux's interface and learn to use apps like Star Office before I once again try to change over on my own.
So what you're saying is we should let the mining companies rape and pillage other planets before they finish the job here??
I agree that money makes the world go round and would probably also make the rockets go up and down, but I'd rather have a LunarDisney than unregulated mining on other planets/ the moon. I imagine environmental disasters there would be a. common, b. very difficult to repair.
That's what it is called. Is it a lot of fun, no, and are you being used to your best ability, maybe not, but this is a business. In school, you are given opportunities to prove yourself.In business, you find those on your own. My first job when I was 15 was working for a summer camp digging, cleaning and maintaining a couple hundred outhouses. But I was the best damn outhouse digger in the whole place, and three summers later I was the youngest area director in the companies history, with a staff of five, the ear of the company president, and a whole lot more room to play. Did the same thing at my last job as a field service tech. Told the above story my first or second day, said "after a job like that there is no way I can ever take someone that seriously when they say they have a shit job for me.." Busted tail, and three years later was the head of the seasonal tech staff at a major theme park, and only 20yrs old. Now I'm looking for a new job... Moral of the Story: Don't expect your employers to automatically see what you are capable of and work you to that limit. Show them that your capabilities have no limits.