Month: August 2012

Wasted Education

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

Recently I read a great article about how a well renowned web designer who was getting top chops from the major brands in the world to work for them was getting denied by most of the schools in that area, not because of lack of any skills but due to his lack of having a Master’s degree … the post was about the differing practices of Web Design that they teach in School and that what is being practiced in the Industry.

A community college costs about $5,000 per semester. So that’s $1,000 per course, divided by 15 classes equals about $66 per class. So if students are paying that much money for web design classes, shouldn’t theyat least be getting taught up to date technology?

The pricing figures are pretty much spot on, in India we spend a good 5 lakh INR on getting a decent graduate degree. If the course cannot teach us anything worth then what is the use of such a degree? A study conducted in 2008 showed that a measly 4% of engineering students in India (out of a massive 700,000) are employable. The rest have to be taught from scratch how to code.

This means that the opportunity cost of bring this new joinee up to speed is more than his yearly income. The company has to pay for this learning by providing the right set of education and also pay the new joinee during the period of this education.

With average salary in any decent IT firm being roughly 3-4 Lakh INR, that translates into just under the amount that the graduate has paid to get the degree. A degree which is more or less worthless since it has not taught any practicable skillsets to the graduate.

Is this not a colossal waste of money?

Financing Retirement for Seniors

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Some time back I had written about equity release, and I wanted to talk about several things at once in that post (possibly the reason why I ended up sounding a bit cautious and a bit enthusiastic at different points in that post). In order to avoid this confusion, here is a simpler post … equity release is the perfect retirement financial vessel for senior citizens.

This article is aimed for senior citizens who might have been aware of this instrument but are scared of taking any kind of action to ease their livelihood. The idea is to help you make informed decisions instead of blindly signing on the dotted line.

A lot of seniors face the same question – who will support me in the later part of my life? Well … now that question is answered … its to use your house as a vessel to fuel your future income.

In case if you have not thought of any source of passive income, then this question might put people in a quandry.

Once the value is arrived at, then the next step should be finding the right firm whom you can come to terms with. Here you need to ensure that the people you end up transacting with are open, friendly and willing to put your concerns to rest. A smart idea would be to see if the financial organization is not putting any undue pressure on you to use up your release amount faster.

Once the terms of agreement are mutually agreed upon, then you simply have to enjoy the benefits of your home and the income generated from your house’ sale.

It’s like having your cake, and eating it too!

War of the MMOs

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More than seven years back Blizzard launched the World of Warcraft. What initially started off as a small campaign within the Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne game, suddenly shadowed the entire Warcraft RTS series … Blizzard had struck on a gold mine with the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), a game which would later on be synonymous with the entire category … World of Warcraft took the real world by storm, and at its zenith it was known to have more than 12 million monthly subscribers.

Yes, the bad part about this was that there is a monthly subscription to play the game, and more than 12 million people were gladly willing to part ways with their 15 USD per month to fight the forces of evil and defend the lands of Azeroth.

Over the period of years, the game put on several features and became easier to play … this attracted a lot of new users (including me!), but it also detracted a lot of the previous loyal following that the game had. After 3 successful patches (Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm), the game’s growth in popularity suddenly started sputtering. After over a year’s launch of Cataclysm, the game subscriptions started dipping … now at a figure of 9 million users (that’s a drop of 25% in users folks!), the people at Blizzard are getting worried about the launch of their next patch … Mists of Pandaria.

With this drop in users, there came in a distinct need for other MMOs, something which would stave gamers’ need for playing online games. Thus followed a slew of MMORPGs … Guild Wars (I and II), Rift, Dungeons and Dragons, Vanguard, Star Wars, Torchlight 2 … the list seems to go on.

I have seen quite a few of them and though most of the games differ slightly in game play with World of Warcraft, I think almost every one of those games have borrowed elements from the game. Mounts, factions, guilds, dungeons … these are the things that the good folks at Blizzard had already thought of … to make a WoW Clone goes ahead and fuels WoW’s popularity … in the end, the only game which ends up winning this War of MMOs, is WoW … not because of only being the first successful MMO, but also it has become the de facto genre defining game.

All the other MMOs that I have seen copy from WoW. If a new MMO were to be launched which would be drastically different from WoW, I wonder what would happen to its popularity? Or perhaps, thats what the hush-hush secret Project Titan is intended to do.

Dune references in Diablo3

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

Shaitan_BroodmotherI am a big fan of Blizzard, not only because the quality of their games completely sucks you in, but also since they manage to include a lot of popular culture within their games. For example, during Christmas, the whole of Azeroth would also celebrate it with the rest of the real world.

As I was farming Act II in Nightmare mode with my Demon Hunter, I was suddenly engulfed by a big rock worm, not only was it an elite boss, but it also had a lot of baby rockworm minions to accompany it. When I went back and looked closely at its name … it was Shaitan, The Broodmother … also known as the Great Maker!

Fans of the very popular Dune series, will easily link up the facts .. big ass worm + desert + great maker + shaitan … as a clear cut reference to the worms on Arrakis.

Dune references in Diablo3

On killing this elite, you get access to its random dungeon which spawns from where the worm appears. More loot and sadly no more references to dune. It would have been great if a dying fremen or two would have been there in that cave.