Al Hoang

Kudos to BoingBoing for this link. It’s an account of the last days of the 2d animation department at Disney. In many many respects this is a sad thing to hear. I grew up watching cartoons way before 3d was popular. I like 3d animation but to me it’s just another medium for animation artists to use. It saddens me to think Disney fell to the hype of 3d and toasted their 2d department. Are there any studios left that still respect doing 2d art in the U.S.? I know in Japan many of the anime studios have moved to using computers to help the production process but many of them look the same 2d as ever.

Update: I should update my comments on the 2d death. It seems that Disney stopped
their traditional 2D department and forced them to move over to computers. Disney also wanted to thin the numbers that made the transition. Amusingly, their efforts to try to whittle down the numbers so they could have a smaller staff backfired as many of the animators jumped right on to the new toolsets in the boot camp that was offered (gee… now that’s a surprise. Give a carpenter a power hammer and guess what?)

Got this link via email. Seems the Office of Management and Budget deem Apple and Linux fit enough to add them into the reference models that the OMB uses. This could be a good thing for Apple and Linux.

The Cincom Smalltalk Blog by James Robertson points to rants by Tim Bray and Robert Scoble about how they don’t see a future working in IT and feel they might want to push their children to do something else like study Chinese (I think a better reason to encourage your children to study Chinese is because of interest in the culture, not just business).

James debunks their fears on IT. In general, I agree with James about the IT field. First of all, it’s still huge and rightly so. Congrats all to all of you techies the world now runs on computers guess who’s going to be needed to maintain and add more to that infrastructure in the future. It ain’t going to be plumbers. The IT industry at the moment is definitely in a slump but I think it’s also a weeding out process if you look at it from the big picture. The people that are really into it for just money will leave which leaves behind the ones that still like doing IT even if the payoff isn’t that great nor the perks.

The main problem for us folks looking is the waiting part.

On a side note. I talk about Tim and Robert and James as if I sorta know these folk but in reality I never met them. It’s interesting to think that but I guess it’s taken for granted in the weblogsphere.