The art critics there claimed that computer-generated art was not a 'fine art' but
more of a graphic design, regardless of the quality of the work. I have received the same response from art professors here in Mississippi, and from
other schools (such as students from Glasgow School of Art in Scotland).
Depends on what art professors you asked -- I graduated from Belhaven College in Mississippi, with a B.A. in Art. I was totally computer-focused, and my senior seminar was a series of computer generated images (combination of Photoshop and 3D modelling). I had no problems in defending my series, and it was heartily endorsed and accepted.
Re: art critics, remember their job: to make themselves look good. A critic that looks like a lackey will soon be peddling opinions for spare-change: a profession with little upward mobility. Art critics are the worst of the lot: art is such a damned subjective thing, they are in constant fear of being found out for the frauds they are. It costs little to excoriate somebody's work: the potential cost of endorsing it publicly far outweighs the return. You'll only find art critics endorsing something that's politically and/or socially correct, or something that's so far off the reservation that it can be elevated to the position of a Public Debate: Maplethorpe, or the elephant dung work, to pick something recent.
Shake off the doldrums of the critics' comments. All criticism has some merit, but you have to take it with a certain sense of detachment: they aren't questioning your worth, or depth, or parentage: rather, they are talking about your works in toto. If you work to please critics, you'll produce work that will only be appreciated by critics. Apply yourself, instead, to exploring your own thoughts and feelings and reactions. Trust your gut, not your brain. Brains lie and prevaricate, your guts never do.
I hate to say this, but I have to: steel yourself for the possibility that your work comes across as graphic design. This doesn't have to be a bad thing (witness the Absolut Vodka ads -- I don't think anybody will argue that they are art as well as graphic design), but it it a valid criticism. Keep working to trancend the graphic design aspects. I noticed that your job at SAIR Inc was as a graphic designer. This mixing of work and recreation will happen, regardless of how you try to separate them, but to allow your work to grow, you will have to work to prevent this as much as possible.
Let me ask you: your computer at home, where is it located? In a home office? In your living room? I will argue that this is the wrong thing to do if you're trying to produce "true art" with it. If you must have a computer at home to do work on, separate the two: buy a separate computer to producing art with. Put it in a separate room where you only work for art. Surround your "studio" with beauty, in whatever forms you find beautiful. Art, in my not-so-humble opinion, is like any other form of work: you cannot do it in inappropriate surroundings. You would no more do office-work at a resort than you will produce art in sterile, non-stimulating environs. When you're working on art, do not let yourself be distracted by phones, faxes, or other intrusions: turn off the ringer, unplug the fax, toss the beeper in a drawer, set your mobile phone to vibrate and store it on your dresser.
I like to draw on easels -- some find a drafting table better, i like easels and low stools. My workspace is in flux at the moment, but I used to keep the easel next to the computer with a big newsprint pad and a 9B pencil for quick ideas close at hand, with bristol board and more delicate instruments easily available, with all my Ansel Adams calendars littering the walls, the stereo playing inspiring music (always separate the music from the computer, too, or dedicate a computer to the music: you don't want the tunes to stutter while Photoshop is calculating a Gaussian Blur or Strata 3D is rendering a snapshot). Much work was done there.
(I wonder, would hacking be better in such an environment? Worth an experiment, methinks)
To summarize: chin up, my brother. Don't despair if your work is frowned upon. Keep working to improve yourself (using your own metrics, not some disinterested 3rd party's), and let the creative juices flow freely. Be proud of your work regardless of the critcism, and keep an eye out for the valid criticism that does happen. Also, post a link that shows the work in question, if you can. I think we'd all like to see it, and the Slashdot crowd with fill your Inbox with lots of criticism. *grin*
Sold to Worldcom -- and they didn't keep "one strand in each bundle". That's ridiculous.
WilTel was part of Williams, and they were customers of UUNet way back in 1996. Worldcom bought 11,000 miles of WilTel fiber for $2.5 B, moved on to MFS and UUNet... and www.wiltel.net is no more.
It's a good example, but untrue. If WilTel needed fiber, it was cheaper for them to lease the bandwidth from their new bosses -- except that WilTel was now Worldcom.
2 camps of widget bigots
385 different versions of Solitaire for each widget set
1,675,394 would-be amatuer sysadmins trying to figure out why their laptop's soundcard won't work
3 tribes of BSD-fanatics jeering at the Linux proletariat
I mean, there's not even a picture of a product! I take it, then, the product is nothing more than software solution with a hardware reference platform. Bleh...
Just for the record - content filters haven't gotten any traction with Canadian politicians (*knocking on my wooden desk). I've been really
happy to see the more hysterical aspects of the various internet debates quite muted up here.
I hope it remains that way. I'm simply inherently distrustful of authority figures, especially ones with good intentions. Tyranny usually begins with reasonable people with reasonable ideas.
I'm curious, though, if Canadians have the problems Americans do with child pornography? Is it a big deal up there?
It looks like Canada is leading the way (again) with increasing availability
of cheap internet access for all to enjoy.
Hope InterlockingP is also happy when the Canadian Government decides that "256Kb/sec is plenty fast enough", or that the children should be protected by mandatory access filters.
You're usually safe to assume that Government-provided services are more expensive and/or more intrusive than privately paid for services. The last US-Government program that was cheap and worked really well was the Homestead Act, which resulted in the death or displacement of thousands of Indians.
... is that after the years spent in the (related) car audio fanciers (addicts), with jillions of dBs hammering my eardrums, I'm now happy with a 10 year old Pioneer tuner/amp, because I'm so deaf I can't tell the difference between it and a $10K Levinson.
I can do certain things (become a legislator, start a
NGO, etc.) to try to convince our government to do things I think it should do.... What this all means is that even though I don't know enough to come up with an alternative form of energy, I can work through the government
to fund people who do, or people who already have one and need some help. And this is exactly what people are doing. So too fucking bad for
you.
Great... Because you use the Government to fund the things that you particularly like (and thus increasing the Government's powers), other people can use the powerful Government to pass things like the DMCA, and then we have to listen to you bitch and moan about that as well.
If you can work through the Government to get your pet projects accomplished, then oil lobbyists can get their pet projects accomplished. So who's fucking stupid?
Are you completely fucking stupid? Let me see if we can get to the bottom of this: if someone has a problem with policy X, they should go get training in X and fix the problem themselves. So if I have a problem with, say, the AIDS epidemic, then the only way to "impress" you is to go to medical school and train myself, right?
As opposed to waving your arms and jumping up and down (or posting dysfunctional ravings on a techie bulletin board)? In a word, yes.
But your examples are flawed -- it's not a policy or a disease or a license: it's a component (or a catalyst, if you prefer). Oil is not something people want (in particular) -- it's something that enables us to do what we want. If you don't like that component, come up with a better one, don't whine and complain about how you don't like the current one.
Put in terms of computers, it's like a library. You don't like the current X libraries, because they're bloated. Okay, don't whine and bitch about it, go fix the code or write new ones. Don't know how? Go learn. Don't want to learn? Then accept the fact that there are people (like me) who aren't interested in listening to your infantile whining. Serious, constructive criticism is always welcome -- blind, hand-waving lunatic raving isn't.
I'm getting pretty tired of the "big oil conspiracy" nuts. There's a whole lot to get mad at GW about, but allowing companies to drill for oil is not one of them.
I like the fuel cell technology and think it has a future -- however, it's not widespread enough technology to base our future on (yet). In the meantime, we have millions of cars and boats and trucks that need fossil fuels to operate. The Great Engine of Capitalism requires oil, and we have to come up with it somewhere. We can either look for it on our own lands (vis, the Arctic Refuge) or we get it from sombody else (primarily the OPEC nations, most of which are not exactly buddy-buddies with the USA due to our involvement with Israel)
Until such time we can run our cars and trucks and heat our homes with something other than oil (both in a technical sense and an economic sense -- if it's cheaper to use gas than a fuel cell, you won't have a lot of people switch to fuel cells), we have to have a supply of oil.
If you're so all-fired up about saving the planet from the its destruction by the Evil Oil Companies (the dividends of whose stock is probably keeping your (or somebody else's) grandmother from eating Meow Mix), go to school, get a chemical/mechanical/electrical engineering degree and develop a better solution that's cheaper and safer. Hurling deprecations from the peanut gallery doesn't impress me one bit.
... of the "enthusiast" hardware sites' HTML 'skillz'. You know, the 8-deep nested tables filled with 1-pixel transparent GIFs, rounded corners on sidebar titles (a la Slashdot), and the whole slow-loading mess surrounded by one big-ass <TABLE>, all kept from our eager eyes by the slow-ass banner ad server.
Apropos of nothing, my girlfriend's great-grandfather used to think that if you left food cooked in the microwave out for too long without eating it, it would go back to raw.
I wish that someone (or some group) would check out the prices of [System Administrators] in the states (and around the worls for that matter). I know that there are [training] and [teaching] costs that come with each [sysadmin] but to pay $ [85,000/yr] for a [bearded whacko who treats his fellow employees as if he's pissing on them from a great height] on is crazy. I think this is why [Microsoft] became so popular. If it was easy to [setup] and [make changes to DNS records from a GUI] I am sure we would see a rise in [Microsoft stock].
I use a
wristwrest and try to keep my wrists/arms/hands at happy 90 degree angles like in those oh-so-nifty ergo diagrams,
The wristwrest may be helping to cause some of your problems. The best typing position for your hands is not with your wrists resting on anything, but suspended over the keyboard.
The same goes for mousing around -- no wrist rest for that either. My RSI problems come more from the mouse than the keyboard, which is why I switched to the Kensington TurboMouse trackballs.
That's nothing like the 68k emluation layer that Apple bungled so badly in MacOS 7.x is it?
I think you're confused. The 68K emulation layer had little to do with OS 7.x per se -- it had to do with the change from 68K architecture to PowerPC.
And how was it bungled, pray tell? It was the smoothest switch from one processor architecture to another! A few things didn't work -- things with depended on a hardware FPU primarily, which a 3rd party came up with a hack for (SoftFPU) -- but for the majority of apps, everything went swimmingly. I was part of the "big change" -- I bought a first generation 7100 -- and moved software from 68K to PowerPC native. The only problems I had were a few FPU-dependant filters for Photoshop.
The problem is, the guy stocking the store has no "real world" experience in Unix admin or production programming. Any idiot who can read can setup and install Apache/PostgreSQL/etc on a Linux box. While setting up Oracle and installing the ACS is more complex, it's still not that hard. Hell, I did it, and I'm a complete idiot.
Setting up a single machine, while somewhat impressive is not the same as building a functioning network out of a building full of oddball platforms and legacy applications -- which is very important in Fortune 500-type companies.
I'm not trying to put a damper on the guy's enthusiasm -- rather, I want to encourage him to expand his knowledge beyond simple administration of a single box. Make a trip to your local thrift store an pick up a few 486s on the cheap and integrate them into a home network. Mix and match -- don't focus on Linux only, stir in some Net/Free/OpenBSD, Windows and Mac (Mac SE/30s with a network card can be had for $30 or less, and can speak TCP/IP).
Then set up a remote access service to your home network via modem, then a VPN with a friend. Congratulations, you've just worked through the major things that Big Companies are looking for in IT workers.
I stand behind my work, but if a customer decides to screw me (people are not, by nature, always nice, reasonable, or kind to animals), I am not willing to get shafted by one malcontent (rim shot!). If a customer is not happy and sues, I lose my business -- is that no enough? Must I lose my house because a client doesn't like how I designed his brochure? Is that justice in your world?
Did I get that right?
No. You either deliberately misunderstood me or are particularly obtuse. A corporation is not a "dodge" for responsibility any more than a programmer's "suitability of purpose" disclaimer is a dodge. To be logically consistent, if you are a programmer, you should be held personally responsible for every bug and misuse of your program. Are you willing to do that? If not, then stuff it.
If corporations are the problem--which they are; one doesn't need the remedial
Business Ethics class to see that (which is something most MBAs blissfully ignore, anyway)--then they should be removed.
Oh, Lord... look out for those e-e-e-v-i-l corporations! They'll suck out your eyeballs and spoon out your brains! They'll be rude to your mother and tease your dog! They'll spit in your ice cream and piss in your whiskey!
I'm part of a corporation. I guess you could say I'm the CEO, since it's a partnership and I'm one of the partners. Now that I'm and Evil Overlord, I probably need to brush up on the Rules before I go plundering across the countryside.
My corporation is merely a legal fiction by which I can avoid losing my house if a client gets a bug up their ass and sues us. I stand behind my work, but I'm not willing to bet *everything*, every day! It's conceptually similar to playing Russian Roulette every day -- are you willing to do that?
A corporation like Enron or GlofaxMegaThorp is simply a scaled-up version of my little LLC. Even if they do something low down and evil (which does happen, I'll admit) it's not likely to be as dangerous or as permanent as what a government can do (put another way, Three Mile Island 0, Chappaquiddick 1), and in the end you can sue them for damages to yourself.
Please try to not be so shallow and reactionary as to claim that corporations need to be removed.
You get what you pay for -- from Adobe you get a rock solid toolbox for graphic work, be it print, web, or video design.
From the GIMP, you get Free software written for programmers that does pretty good for small web graphics, but not much else.
Just because something is free and Free doesn't make it better -- it simply makes it free (or Free). Photoshop is a better environment and a better solution for graphic design than the GIMP. Sorry.
Also,
there really isn't much need for it. I mean this monitor is nice and all, but with a 20K pricetag and no real applications for it (for the average user,
anyway - maybe this would be useful in some 3d modeling scenarios, perhaps), I doubt we'll be seeing technolgy to support this kind of thing in
even high end workstations for at least a few years.
I could see this used for film resolution work as well. It's close enough to film rez specs that I tend to think that's the market the researchers are targeting in the near term.
Slashdot Mirror
All Male, All Students, All White. Nerdvana at last!
If an exclusionary 'Net is what you want, go live in a cave.
Let the trolls submit Ask Slashdot questions to inflate the page views. This might actually work!
I used to work at Worldcom -- this is the first I've ever heard of the story, and I've heard them all.
Depends on what art professors you asked -- I graduated from Belhaven College in Mississippi, with a B.A. in Art. I was totally computer-focused, and my senior seminar was a series of computer generated images (combination of Photoshop and 3D modelling). I had no problems in defending my series, and it was heartily endorsed and accepted.
Re: art critics, remember their job: to make themselves look good. A critic that looks like a lackey will soon be peddling opinions for spare-change: a profession with little upward mobility. Art critics are the worst of the lot: art is such a damned subjective thing, they are in constant fear of being found out for the frauds they are. It costs little to excoriate somebody's work: the potential cost of endorsing it publicly far outweighs the return. You'll only find art critics endorsing something that's politically and/or socially correct, or something that's so far off the reservation that it can be elevated to the position of a Public Debate: Maplethorpe, or the elephant dung work, to pick something recent.
Shake off the doldrums of the critics' comments. All criticism has some merit, but you have to take it with a certain sense of detachment: they aren't questioning your worth, or depth, or parentage: rather, they are talking about your works in toto. If you work to please critics, you'll produce work that will only be appreciated by critics. Apply yourself, instead, to exploring your own thoughts and feelings and reactions. Trust your gut, not your brain. Brains lie and prevaricate, your guts never do.
I hate to say this, but I have to: steel yourself for the possibility that your work comes across as graphic design. This doesn't have to be a bad thing (witness the Absolut Vodka ads -- I don't think anybody will argue that they are art as well as graphic design), but it it a valid criticism. Keep working to trancend the graphic design aspects. I noticed that your job at SAIR Inc was as a graphic designer. This mixing of work and recreation will happen, regardless of how you try to separate them, but to allow your work to grow, you will have to work to prevent this as much as possible.
Let me ask you: your computer at home, where is it located? In a home office? In your living room? I will argue that this is the wrong thing to do if you're trying to produce "true art" with it. If you must have a computer at home to do work on, separate the two: buy a separate computer to producing art with. Put it in a separate room where you only work for art. Surround your "studio" with beauty, in whatever forms you find beautiful. Art, in my not-so-humble opinion, is like any other form of work: you cannot do it in inappropriate surroundings. You would no more do office-work at a resort than you will produce art in sterile, non-stimulating environs. When you're working on art, do not let yourself be distracted by phones, faxes, or other intrusions: turn off the ringer, unplug the fax, toss the beeper in a drawer, set your mobile phone to vibrate and store it on your dresser.
I like to draw on easels -- some find a drafting table better, i like easels and low stools. My workspace is in flux at the moment, but I used to keep the easel next to the computer with a big newsprint pad and a 9B pencil for quick ideas close at hand, with bristol board and more delicate instruments easily available, with all my Ansel Adams calendars littering the walls, the stereo playing inspiring music (always separate the music from the computer, too, or dedicate a computer to the music: you don't want the tunes to stutter while Photoshop is calculating a Gaussian Blur or Strata 3D is rendering a snapshot). Much work was done there.
(I wonder, would hacking be better in such an environment? Worth an experiment, methinks)
To summarize: chin up, my brother. Don't despair if your work is frowned upon. Keep working to improve yourself (using your own metrics, not some disinterested 3rd party's), and let the creative juices flow freely. Be proud of your work regardless of the critcism, and keep an eye out for the valid criticism that does happen. Also, post a link that shows the work in question, if you can. I think we'd all like to see it, and the Slashdot crowd with fill your Inbox with lots of criticism. *grin*
Sold to Worldcom -- and they didn't keep "one strand in each bundle". That's ridiculous.
WilTel was part of Williams, and they were customers of UUNet way back in 1996. Worldcom bought 11,000 miles of WilTel fiber for $2.5 B, moved on to MFS and UUNet... and www.wiltel.net is no more.
It's a good example, but untrue. If WilTel needed fiber, it was cheaper for them to lease the bandwidth from their new bosses -- except that WilTel was now Worldcom.
You forgot:
2 camps of widget bigots
385 different versions of Solitaire for each widget set
1,675,394 would-be amatuer sysadmins trying to figure out why their laptop's soundcard won't work
3 tribes of BSD-fanatics jeering at the Linux proletariat
Which, unfortunately, consists mostly of pictures of multi-cultural kids at an iMac having a good time.
I mean, there's not even a picture of a product! I take it, then, the product is nothing more than software solution with a hardware reference platform. Bleh...
I hope it remains that way. I'm simply inherently distrustful of authority figures, especially ones with good intentions. Tyranny usually begins with reasonable people with reasonable ideas.
I'm curious, though, if Canadians have the problems Americans do with child pornography? Is it a big deal up there?
Hope InterlockingP is also happy when the Canadian Government decides that "256Kb/sec is plenty fast enough", or that the children should be protected by mandatory access filters.
You're usually safe to assume that Government-provided services are more expensive and/or more intrusive than privately paid for services. The last US-Government program that was cheap and worked really well was the Homestead Act, which resulted in the death or displacement of thousands of Indians.
... is that after the years spent in the (related) car audio fanciers (addicts), with jillions of dBs hammering my eardrums, I'm now happy with a 10 year old Pioneer tuner/amp, because I'm so deaf I can't tell the difference between it and a $10K Levinson.
Great... Because you use the Government to fund the things that you particularly like (and thus increasing the Government's powers), other people can use the powerful Government to pass things like the DMCA, and then we have to listen to you bitch and moan about that as well.
If you can work through the Government to get your pet projects accomplished, then oil lobbyists can get their pet projects accomplished. So who's fucking stupid?
As opposed to waving your arms and jumping up and down (or posting dysfunctional ravings on a techie bulletin board)? In a word, yes.
But your examples are flawed -- it's not a policy or a disease or a license: it's a component (or a catalyst, if you prefer). Oil is not something people want (in particular) -- it's something that enables us to do what we want. If you don't like that component, come up with a better one, don't whine and complain about how you don't like the current one.
Put in terms of computers, it's like a library. You don't like the current X libraries, because they're bloated. Okay, don't whine and bitch about it, go fix the code or write new ones. Don't know how? Go learn. Don't want to learn? Then accept the fact that there are people (like me) who aren't interested in listening to your infantile whining. Serious, constructive criticism is always welcome -- blind, hand-waving lunatic raving isn't.
I'm getting pretty tired of the "big oil conspiracy" nuts. There's a whole lot to get mad at GW about, but allowing companies to drill for oil is not one of them.
I like the fuel cell technology and think it has a future -- however, it's not widespread enough technology to base our future on (yet). In the meantime, we have millions of cars and boats and trucks that need fossil fuels to operate. The Great Engine of Capitalism requires oil, and we have to come up with it somewhere. We can either look for it on our own lands (vis, the Arctic Refuge) or we get it from sombody else (primarily the OPEC nations, most of which are not exactly buddy-buddies with the USA due to our involvement with Israel)
Until such time we can run our cars and trucks and heat our homes with something other than oil (both in a technical sense and an economic sense -- if it's cheaper to use gas than a fuel cell, you won't have a lot of people switch to fuel cells), we have to have a supply of oil.
If you're so all-fired up about saving the planet from the its destruction by the Evil Oil Companies (the dividends of whose stock is probably keeping your (or somebody else's) grandmother from eating Meow Mix), go to school, get a chemical/mechanical/electrical engineering degree and develop a better solution that's cheaper and safer. Hurling deprecations from the peanut gallery doesn't impress me one bit.
Yep, NN4.7 user -- on a Pentium 133 (which is the real culprit)... I'm more sensitive than most regarding poorly coded HTML.
... of the "enthusiast" hardware sites' HTML 'skillz'. You know, the 8-deep nested tables filled with 1-pixel transparent GIFs, rounded corners on sidebar titles (a la Slashdot), and the whole slow-loading mess surrounded by one big-ass <TABLE>, all kept from our eager eyes by the slow-ass banner ad server.
Apropos of nothing, my girlfriend's great-grandfather used to think that if you left food cooked in the microwave out for too long without eating it, it would go back to raw.
He still says it, but now intends it as a joke...
I wish that someone (or some group) would check out the prices of [System Administrators] in the states (and around the worls for that matter). I know that there are [training] and [teaching] costs that come with each [sysadmin] but to pay $ [85,000/yr] for a [bearded whacko who treats his fellow employees as if he's pissing on them from a great height] on is crazy. I think this is why [Microsoft] became so popular. If it was easy to [setup] and [make changes to DNS records from a GUI] I am sure we would see a rise in [Microsoft stock].
The wristwrest may be helping to cause some of your problems. The best typing position for your hands is not with your wrists resting on anything, but suspended over the keyboard.
The same goes for mousing around -- no wrist rest for that either. My RSI problems come more from the mouse than the keyboard, which is why I switched to the Kensington TurboMouse trackballs.
I think you're confused. The 68K emulation layer had little to do with OS 7.x per se -- it had to do with the change from 68K architecture to PowerPC.
And how was it bungled, pray tell? It was the smoothest switch from one processor architecture to another! A few things didn't work -- things with depended on a hardware FPU primarily, which a 3rd party came up with a hack for (SoftFPU) -- but for the majority of apps, everything went swimmingly. I was part of the "big change" -- I bought a first generation 7100 -- and moved software from 68K to PowerPC native. The only problems I had were a few FPU-dependant filters for Photoshop.
The problem is, the guy stocking the store has no "real world" experience in Unix admin or production programming. Any idiot who can read can setup and install Apache/PostgreSQL/etc on a Linux box. While setting up Oracle and installing the ACS is more complex, it's still not that hard. Hell, I did it, and I'm a complete idiot.
Setting up a single machine, while somewhat impressive is not the same as building a functioning network out of a building full of oddball platforms and legacy applications -- which is very important in Fortune 500-type companies.
I'm not trying to put a damper on the guy's enthusiasm -- rather, I want to encourage him to expand his knowledge beyond simple administration of a single box. Make a trip to your local thrift store an pick up a few 486s on the cheap and integrate them into a home network. Mix and match -- don't focus on Linux only, stir in some Net/Free/OpenBSD, Windows and Mac (Mac SE/30s with a network card can be had for $30 or less, and can speak TCP/IP).
Then set up a remote access service to your home network via modem, then a VPN with a friend. Congratulations, you've just worked through the major things that Big Companies are looking for in IT workers.
No, read it again. Slowly, if neccessary.
I stand behind my work, but if a customer decides to screw me (people are not, by nature, always nice, reasonable, or kind to animals), I am not willing to get shafted by one malcontent (rim shot!). If a customer is not happy and sues, I lose my business -- is that no enough? Must I lose my house because a client doesn't like how I designed his brochure? Is that justice in your world?
Did I get that right?
No. You either deliberately misunderstood me or are particularly obtuse. A corporation is not a "dodge" for responsibility any more than a programmer's "suitability of purpose" disclaimer is a dodge. To be logically consistent, if you are a programmer, you should be held personally responsible for every bug and misuse of your program. Are you willing to do that? If not, then stuff it.
Oh, Lord ... look out for those e-e-e-v-i-l corporations! They'll suck out your eyeballs and spoon out your brains! They'll be rude to your mother and tease your dog! They'll spit in your ice cream and piss in your whiskey!
I'm part of a corporation. I guess you could say I'm the CEO, since it's a partnership and I'm one of the partners. Now that I'm and Evil Overlord, I probably need to brush up on the Rules before I go plundering across the countryside.
My corporation is merely a legal fiction by which I can avoid losing my house if a client gets a bug up their ass and sues us. I stand behind my work, but I'm not willing to bet *everything*, every day! It's conceptually similar to playing Russian Roulette every day -- are you willing to do that?
A corporation like Enron or GlofaxMegaThorp is simply a scaled-up version of my little LLC. Even if they do something low down and evil (which does happen, I'll admit) it's not likely to be as dangerous or as permanent as what a government can do (put another way, Three Mile Island 0, Chappaquiddick 1), and in the end you can sue them for damages to yourself.
Please try to not be so shallow and reactionary as to claim that corporations need to be removed.
You get what you pay for -- from Adobe you get a rock solid toolbox for graphic work, be it print, web, or video design.
From the GIMP, you get Free software written for programmers that does pretty good for small web graphics, but not much else.
Just because something is free and Free doesn't make it better -- it simply makes it free (or Free). Photoshop is a better environment and a better solution for graphic design than the GIMP. Sorry.
I could see this used for film resolution work as well. It's close enough to film rez specs that I tend to think that's the market the researchers are targeting in the near term.
If you replace "Dell" with "Democrat/Republican" and "Gateway" with "Republican/Democrat", you get the level of discourse in Washington today.