The French Disney studio was closed because France was always too expensive to do animation in. The studio was only created to appease the French government to get Eurodisney through.
The Japanese studio closing is a sad thing. Disney don't have enough quality product to feed their studios, so it came down to Australia and Japan, and Japan got the arse for whatever reason. There is still an active studio in Australia producing 2D stuff, most of which goes direct to video but there is some film work. A lot of the crappier TV/direct to video stuff is done by contractors in the philipines. So 2D, hand drawn animation still does exist at Disney.
One of the biggest changes a move to an entirely computer based system presents is it takes away your training school for new animators. Traditionally, animators start out as inbetweeners, doing all the grunt work to get a film through. The inbetweeners with talent are soon picked up and moved through the various departments before they become proper animators and eventually senior animators if they are good enough. Moving to an entirely digital platform means the inbetweeners and cleanup artists suddenly don't exist anymore. Where do the animators come from in this new model? It's a pretty big change.
That said, most animation at Disney has been mostly computer based for years. While most of the 2D frames are still drawn on paper, they're scanned and painted and composited entirely on computer. It speeds the process up and improves the quality significantly, while still preserving the feel of hand drawn animation, which is a good thing imho.
I'm all for the various open source(tm) (remember, that term has a specific set of criteria a licence must meet) licences out there, but if you think MS is going to ever comply with some of the conditions attached to most open source licences (freedom of redistribution is an obvious one), you're dreaming.
What MS should do imho is provide complete source code with all their software, at least on request. Users should be free to modify this source for their own usage, and for use within a single organisation (ie company wide deployment). The changes should be owned by the users, but the users would not have the right to redistribute the software with these changes. Users should be free to contribute these back to MS for inclusion in future versions, royalty free, but that is the users ultimate choice, as they own the patches.
I don't know how practical that is, but it solves one of the key gripes about proprietary systems in general. The 'you've got a problem? fix it' principle applies here. It's not open source, but at least its a step in the right direction.
It seemed like Red Hat were holding this release back as long as possible to try to squeeze GNOME 2.0 in. With the release so imminent, I guess they ran out of time and had to stick with 1.4.1. Shame.
I love everyone who takes the time to complain about mozilla's speed without bothering to understand how this project has progressed. Obviously M16 isnt even a public beta release so the usual 'your milage may vary' rules apply but please, before you start bitching, goto mozilla.org and learn about the agenda for the future. AFAIK mozilla isnt even feature complete yet (altho M16 is very near final feature base) and speed optimisation is not due to commence until well after the feature set has stabilised!!
mozilla is a pretty special piece of software and the developers dont pretend it is bug free (hence the existance of bugzilla. Last i checked IE doesnt have such a public forum to air REAL grievances about bugs and performance. If you dont like it, contribute, mozilla is not netscape and you can influence its direction by getting involved.
I know this is kind of off the wall, but its true to an extent, think about the current IA32 platform, intels business thrives on making your system appear faster and faster, if MS were coding efficient (read 32bit) operating systems for the consumer market, intel wouldnt sell anywhere near as many high end chips to 'power users'. Even their 32bit code bites as far as speed goes. The great thing about linux is i can still run it on my (old by todays standards) k6-233 and it screams, NT in particular, you're pushing it. By helping out Linux get on Merced at launch along with the other unixes Intel and co secure the server market, while the desktop market is set to make big bucks simply because intel can keep cranking out chips that simply -have- to go faster because MS's software is so inefficient. *shrugs*, maybe I just have a thing for conspiracies
Being an Australian with lots of bad experiences with Telstra, i'm not so certain this is a good idea. The idea of allowing competition on _telstras copper lines_ is good as far as price goes but very bad as far as data goes. I, and many of my friends have had consistant problems with telstra's phone lines not being able to connect at even 21600!! and telstra of course refuse to do anything because im not paying business rental rates.
By allowing all the phone companies around here to hop onto telstras lines removes the key reason why i switched to optus' local network, it wasnt saving 5c/call (although thats nice), it was the fact that i got a decent phone line that i could actually use. Allow everyone to use the same crap lines that have been there for decades and are maintained by a company that likes to halve its support staff every 6 months and you will get rid of this 'other option' that I and many others have taken. All competition does is allow telstra to slash even more staff and lower service standards to new lows, from a net connection point of view. The ACCC really need to kick telstra up the arse in regards to their net service, a cable modem in Australia costs at the lowest $70 and you have a 100mb download cap and 35c/mb thereafter. Telstra need to flesh out a peering agreement with the backbones in the US so they aren't paying by the Mb and hence passing it on 10 fold to the rest of us.
I love the concept of this offer but how bout be get a few (i understand there is a japanese and possibly a european) international distributors. I just ordered a copy of be (had to order it from be in the US) and it ended up costing me $180AUD (im in Australia). I could get windows98 for that price =P.
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The French Disney studio was closed because France was always too expensive to do animation in. The studio was only created to appease the French government to get Eurodisney through.
The Japanese studio closing is a sad thing. Disney don't have enough quality product to feed their studios, so it came down to Australia and Japan, and Japan got the arse for whatever reason. There is still an active studio in Australia producing 2D stuff, most of which goes direct to video but there is some film work. A lot of the crappier TV/direct to video stuff is done by contractors in the philipines. So 2D, hand drawn animation still does exist at Disney.
One of the biggest changes a move to an entirely computer based system presents is it takes away your training school for new animators. Traditionally, animators start out as inbetweeners, doing all the grunt work to get a film through. The inbetweeners with talent are soon picked up and moved through the various departments before they become proper animators and eventually senior animators if they are good enough. Moving to an entirely digital platform means the inbetweeners and cleanup artists suddenly don't exist anymore. Where do the animators come from in this new model? It's a pretty big change.
That said, most animation at Disney has been mostly computer based for years. While most of the 2D frames are still drawn on paper, they're scanned and painted and composited entirely on computer. It speeds the process up and improves the quality significantly, while still preserving the feel of hand drawn animation, which is a good thing imho.
I'm all for the various open source(tm) (remember, that term has a specific set of criteria a licence must meet) licences out there, but if you think MS is going to ever comply with some of the conditions attached to most open source licences (freedom of redistribution is an obvious one), you're dreaming.
What MS should do imho is provide complete source code with all their software, at least on request. Users should be free to modify this source for their own usage, and for use within a single organisation (ie company wide deployment). The changes should be owned by the users, but the users would not have the right to redistribute the software with these changes. Users should be free to contribute these back to MS for inclusion in future versions, royalty free, but that is the users ultimate choice, as they own the patches.
I don't know how practical that is, but it solves one of the key gripes about proprietary systems in general. The 'you've got a problem? fix it' principle applies here. It's not open source, but at least its a step in the right direction.
It seemed like Red Hat were holding this release back as long as possible to try to squeeze GNOME 2.0 in. With the release so imminent, I guess they ran out of time and had to stick with 1.4.1. Shame.
I love everyone who takes the time to complain about mozilla's speed without bothering to understand how this project has progressed. Obviously M16 isnt even a public beta release so the usual 'your milage may vary' rules apply but please, before you start bitching, goto mozilla.org and learn about the agenda for the future. AFAIK mozilla isnt even feature complete yet (altho M16 is very near final feature base) and speed optimisation is not due to commence until well after the feature set has stabilised!!
mozilla is a pretty special piece of software and the developers dont pretend it is bug free (hence the existance of bugzilla. Last i checked IE doesnt have such a public forum to air REAL grievances about bugs and performance. If you dont like it, contribute, mozilla is not netscape and you can influence its direction by getting involved.
I know this is kind of off the wall, but its true to an extent, think about the current IA32 platform, intels business thrives on making your system appear faster and faster, if MS were coding efficient (read 32bit) operating systems for the consumer market, intel wouldnt sell anywhere near as many high end chips to 'power users'. Even their 32bit code bites as far as speed goes. The great thing about linux is i can still run it on my (old by todays standards) k6-233 and it screams, NT in particular, you're pushing it. By helping out Linux get on Merced at launch along with the other unixes Intel and co secure the server market, while the desktop market is set to make big bucks simply because intel can keep cranking out chips that simply -have- to go faster because MS's software is so inefficient. *shrugs*, maybe I just have a thing for conspiracies
Being an Australian with lots of bad experiences with Telstra, i'm not so certain this is a good idea. The idea of allowing competition on _telstras copper lines_ is good as far as price goes but very bad as far as data goes. I, and many of my friends have had consistant problems with telstra's phone lines not being able to connect at even 21600!! and telstra of course refuse to do anything because im not paying business rental rates.
By allowing all the phone companies around here to hop onto telstras lines removes the key reason why i switched to optus' local network, it wasnt saving 5c/call (although thats nice), it was the fact that i got a decent phone line that i could actually use. Allow everyone to use the same crap lines that have been there for decades and are maintained by a company that likes to halve its support staff every 6 months and you will get rid of this 'other option' that I and many others have taken. All competition does is allow telstra to slash even more staff and lower service standards to new lows, from a net connection point of view. The ACCC really need to kick telstra up the arse in regards to their net service, a cable modem in Australia costs at the lowest $70 and you have a 100mb download cap and 35c/mb thereafter. Telstra need to flesh out a peering agreement with the backbones in the US so they aren't paying by the Mb and hence passing it on 10 fold to the rest of us.
I love the concept of this offer but how bout be get a few (i understand there is a japanese and possibly a european) international distributors. I just ordered a copy of be (had to order it from be in the US) and it ended up costing me $180AUD (im in Australia). I could get windows98 for that price =P.