Category Archives: Commentary

IT industry questions

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mj writes:

  • are university degrees worth the bother?
  • are universities correctly servicing the IT industry (and specifically the games dev market) with skills, knowledge, toolsets?
  • why have IT graduates decreased from 1900 in 2004 to 600 in 2007?
  • are we seeing a knock on effect from technology failures in the province, e.g. Nortel, Seagate
  • with the improvement of toolsets, a lone hobbyist can create ‘flickr’ or ‘facebook’. Is this relevant?
  • will we see an upsurge again with demand from Citigroup, Aepona, ATG etc?

Degrees are only useful to get you your first job. If you’ve got your first IT job without a degree, then you don’t need one. After that, it should be possible to achieve what you want with a bit of hard work. At least that’s what I’ve found.

I don’t think universities can be blamed (too much) for not servicing the industry, just given the nature of each. A degree takes 3-4 years to complete, and the content of it is usually created before the degree starts. 3-4 years is a long time in computer terms: 2-3 generations of processor speeds, anywhere from 1-4 major releases of software/language/OS. Really, the best a degree can hope to do is teach good guiding principles and a reasonably relevant language (and yes, I do think Java is probably the best language to learn at Uni).

As a recruiting manager, I’ve found that IT graduates are decreasing for two reasons: the pay is not what it used to be, and you can’t become a millionaire overnight any more. Ironic, given that starting pay has now gone up and some 2.0 companies *are* becoming overnight millionaires. This same trend in hiring is across the world, not just Northern Ireland.

Technology failures: maybe – however, both of those companies are large multi-nationals who opened an outsourced hardware plant in the province. To jump ahead to your last bullet point, these new companies are doing the same but for software/services, which (arguably) has a lower capital investment and, given the more dynamic nature of it, a higher chance of success. I think Northern Ireland really needs some more home-grown successes, and preferably ones that aren’t as staid as Lagan.

Toolsets: it’s semi-relevant. See my earlier post.

D&D 4th Edition … now with more!

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I had a poke through a friend’s copy of 4th Edition D&D. It seems it has been genericised to the nth degree, and everything has been made more powerful from the word go. On top of that, alignments have been simplified and there is even the concept of “unaligned” (maybe they read my previous article). More races, more abilities, more, more, more! I remain unconvinced that the gameplay has improved any since the first edition. Can’t be arsed with any more words on the topic.

Originally written for lategaming.com.

It’s All About Relationships

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Software is not about code. It is about your company’s relationships. I have started seen companies with innovative products that use cutting edge technologies fail, simply because they didn’t understand their relationship with their customers, or didn’t understand it in time. Likewise, companies with demonstrably crap software (or even vaporware) thrive because they know who and what pays their bills.

This is both good news and bad news. Given how easy it is today to create any kind of app (and it’s getting easier, with Apple, Amazon, Google and Yahoo! all pushing open source frameworks and cheap services to lower the barrier of entry) the bad news is that your cash cow is easily copied by a Small Team with a tight focus. The good news is that if you are doing things right, it’s not about your software it’s about your relationships. So, once Small Team has created a faster, more scaleable, prettier version of your app but fails to get anywhere because you have your market sewn up, why not just buy them instead of spending money trying to compete on features? That works for Small Team too, because they get to continue to focus on what they do best (innovating) while someone else handles the money.

This approach seems to work well for non-software companies. I’ve seen software companies acquired by more “brick-and-mortar” enterprises, simply because said enterprise needed the technology to compete and didn’t want their competitors to be able to buy it.

Learning and Fear

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I just recently finished taking a course as a rescue diver. In it, I learned techniques for dealing with a panicked diver on the surface and underwater, dealing with unconscious divers, rescue breathing, CPR and many other things I’d never done before.

The instructor pointed out that I kept apologizing every time I did something wrongly. She pointed out that I’d never done it before, and that I was on the course to learn how to do it. This seemed obvious, as soon as she mentioned it, but it got me to thinking about why I was apologizing.

There’s an old saying about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks. People apply this to themselves as they get older as a way to say they can’t learn anything new.

The conclusion I reached is that I was apologizing for being incompetent. I’m used to being good at the things I do: whether it’s professionally or personally, after 31 years on the planet I’ve become reasonably competent at a whole bunch of things. Trying to learn new skills makes me incompetent again, and there’s a fear of failure that goes with that. It’s a lot easier to deal with now that I’ve acknowledged it – this fear is purely a fear of appearing foolish or incompetent.

Next time I’m learning something new, I just need to acknowledge that it’s OK to be incompetent :-)

Dolphins

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I was out on a boat trip just off the coast when we spotted some dolphins. The adults came over by the boat and led us away from where the babies were feeding, which of course made for some great photos. Here are a few – apologies for small file size, but uploading from here is a pain.

Dolphin 1
Dolphin 2
Dolphin 3

225 days

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SI 1995/3297, also known as “The Duration of Copyright and Rights in Performances Regulations 1995”, this UK law came into effect on January 1st 1996. At its most basic, it extended the copyright for any written work from 50 years after the author’s death, to 70 years. Any work which had already become public domain prior to 1st January 1996 remained public domain.

H. G. Wells died on the 13th August, 1946. All of his works thus missed becoming public domain in the UK by 225 days, and now remain copyright to his estate until 2016. Bizarrely, his works are public domain in the USA.

We’re currently investigating whether it is still feasible to publish War of the Worlds: Earth after learning of this curious quirk of legality.

Originally written for lategaming.com.

Twitter P2P

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From mj:

They break out the infrastructure and make it P2P. This could shift the responsibility for uptime to others and allow them to host their own options for advertising or value-added services. Maybe even license the software out so there are a bazillion twitter servers out there. This would be the method by which Twitter could sneak up and murder Instant Messaging in it’s sleep. I tweeted recently that Twitter was not Broadcast IM. But, of course, it is.

Reminds me a bit of Zed’s UTU project.

To speak to some of the other points that mj makes (and bear in mind I’m only a recent Twitter user), I think that Twitter could monetise easily enough. There is definitely a stigma against running adverts on your website – I know I don’t do it on any of the sites that I run, even though I know I would make some money. But consider the sorts of users who use Twitter a lot – they are the same sorts of people who are happy to pay $10-$25 for an app to allow them to use Twitter more easily.

Twitter haven’t charged anything for their API or the right to use their service as a platform for making money, which no doubt has earned them a lot of kudos and is probably another reason for the large uptake. I’m certain that a portion of those people who use their service every day, n times a day, would be willing to pay that $10-$25 for improved services. I think mj is right with things like being able to add pictures, having URLs automatically “tinied”, being able to make their own look and feel to posts and so forth. Would it make enough?

I don’t know how many users Twitter has, but I’m willing to be that all of the active ones fall squarely in “Early Adopter” (if you subscribe to the Crossing the Chasm metaphor). In using the Twitter site, I’ve been a bit underwhelmed by it’s functionality. Keep the free service, improve it gradually, but innovate like crazy in a pay-for service.

One possible ego-stroking mechanism. Make it such that you must be on the pay-for service if you have more than 100 people following you.