There are untold hordes of Immunes Surgeons would and Rikti Guardians who would nod sagely at this if they hadn't been the first ones face-down on the ground when combat started.
So they laid off 80 people on a game that was bringing in ~$2.5m in revenue every quarter, or ~$10m/year.
If those 80 people had an average total cost of just $125k (not hard to do once you figure in benefits, and software and California) then that is all of the revenue for CoH.
$2.73M profit a quarter, not income. That's after deducting all of the support and development costs. The profit from City of Heroes was something like 40% of NCSoft's North American profits, although it was only about 2-3% of the entire company's profits.
The company is trying to move players over to another game. The whole point is not to let players keep playing this game, so they'll look for a new one.
When Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa shut down, players were offered free time in some of NCSoft's other games. No such offer was made to the City of Heroes playerbase. Although, frankly, given the stink we raised about the shutdown, I'm not really surprised that they didn't extend such an offer, although it wouldn't have been very practical -- Aion is "Completely Free", so we could already have just moved over to that game, Blade and Soul wasn't out yet to move players to, and the Lineage and Guild Wars MMOs were all 'buy the box, play free', which would have pounded their bottom line by eliminating the game purchase from their income.
So what happens if they sell it to someone competent? It does better. And ncsoft loses face.
NCSoft has lost face already. Their stock value has been sliding since the day of the Unity rally on the Virtue server, and their stock sank another 7.8% after the release of the Korea Times article questioning the business acumen of shuttering the game in the first place.
Without access to the reasoning behind the decision, I have no way to be sure why they decided to close the game -- particularly with it making a profit of about $2.75M a quarter -- but I believe that it was done to conceal the fact that they were already demonstrating their incompetence. NCSoft has brought to the Western market a number of MMOs rooted in the style of the games that are their bread and butter in the Asian market, with a heavy emphasis on grinding for rare drops, patronage of the in-game store, and PvP. That these games kept doing poorly and getting closed (Aion having shown "disappointing performance" in the last quarter), while City of Heroes -- almost the antithesis of the Korean style of MMORPG -- kept making a steady profit created the appearance of NCSoft not being able/willing to understand the Western market at a time when they were making an effort to become a major online gaming provider. With the ugly counterexample gone, NCSoft could rationalize that they just needed to find the right subject, rather than a different playstyle, to make an MMO popular in the Western market.
I am reminded of the line from Rick Cook's The Wizardry Compiled:
"Applications programming is a race between software engineers, who strive to produce idiot-proof programs, and the universe, which strives to produce bigger idiots. So far the Universe is winning."
Interesting, if that's so then exactly 65 years minus 1 day after the first human to cross the sound barrier in an airplane, we have the first human to cross the sound barrier without airplane (yesterday)!
That depends on your definition of the term. On 25 January 1966, Bill Weaver was flying SR-71A 61-7952 / 2003 at a speed of Mach 3.2 when he experienced a severe case of engine unstart. Before he could tell his RSO, Jim Zwayer, not to eject until he regained control of the aircraft, the SR-71 disintegrated around him, leaving him in free fall at a speed in excess of Mach 3. His drogue chute deployed, stabilizing his fall, and his main chute deployed automatically. Weaver spotted his RSO's chute during his parachute descent; unfortunately, Zwayer had suffered a broken neck during the SR-71's disintegration and was dead before he landed. Weaver was uninjured.
In 1955, George Smith was flying an F-100 Super Sabre when the aircraft pitched into a dive and ceased responding to its controls, despite reducing the engine to idle and deploying speed brakes; he ejected from the plane at a speed of Mach 1.05. During the ejection, he experienced an acceleration of 40g, losing his shoes, socks, helmet, flight gloves, wristwatch, and ring, and had several panels blow out of his chute when it deployed due to his high speed. He was lucky to splash into the water 100 yards away from a fishing boat commanded by a former Navy Rescue Specialist. He was severely injured during the ejection, and was unconscious for days, with doctors holding out little hope for his recovery. Smith did, however, make a full recovery, and returned to flight status.
Baumgartner was the first person to deliberately exceed Mach 1 without an aircraft, but he was not the first person to exceed Mach 1 in free fall.
If you think that's something, consider the B52s that are still flying.
1LT Bob Welch, his father, LTC Don Welch (ret), and his grandfather, COL Don Sprague (ret), all served in the 23rd Bomb Squadron flying B-52s, and COL Sprague commanded the unit back in the 1970s. I wasn't able to dig up evidence that 1LT Welch actually flew the same plane his grandfather flew, but as his grandfather flew all the variants of the B-52 up through the H model, I expect that the Air Force would have arranged it just for publicity value.
So much of western sci-fi have pilots of fighters in a style that looks more WW1 than anything else because is good for storytelling. And most "sci-fi" is optimized for that.
This. Look at the progression of engagement ranges. In WWI, you had fighters shooting at each other at ranges of perhaps a couple of hundred feet, with an attacker who had surprise often closing within fifty feet of their opponent before opening fire. In WWII, with improved guns, combat ranges increased to a few hundred yards, with some excellent shots being able to hit targets six or seven hundred yards out, but surprise attacks might be made at under a hundred yards; while it was not normally possible to recognize an opposing pilot from their features (particularly with oxygen masks and the like), the aircraft markings were still identifiable. In Korea and Vietnam, the advent of missiles pushed engagement ranges out further, with surprise attacks making the biggest jump, a rear attack with a heat-seeking missile from a mile away or more. And modern air combat pushes missile engagement ranges out even further, with missile engagements at ranges of tens of miles. But with the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, fighters still have guns, and the dramatic air-combat engagements portrayed in movies are almost always short-range 'knife fights' with guns.
And BVR (Beyond Visual Range) engagements are boring. I suppose that the 'mass wave of incoming missiles' scene, as the first round of defensive missiles take out some of the incoming ones, then the rest get closer while the launchers reload and fire again, rolling back the targets' defenses until the point-defense systems get one last shot at them, raises tension and increases drama, but only as long as you don't know the stark mathematics of the engagement. There is a scene in, IIRC, Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising that portrays such an engagement, as a large formation of Soviet bombers fire hundreds of air-to-surface missiles against an allied battle group, with a matter-of-fact account of each layer of defense knocking down its share of the incoming missiles, leaving more than enough to destroy the carrier at the center of the battle group. Useful in the abstract for establishing the conditions under which the characters have to work, but not much for displaying individual character development. So the up-close, WWI/WWII type of engagements remain the 'standard' for showing off the characters in combat.
Oh yeah? How many starships have you been on? My whole point is that we're talking about Roddenberry's future, not the mundane present. On Human-crewed starships (or for that matter, Vulcan-crewed, etc etc) most of the work has been automated away, and humans have time to pursue goals other than ship maintenance. Since energy is plentiful, they can have excess mass, and thus they can have excess crew so that everyone has lots of free time to read Shakespeare and practice the violin.
Personnel evaluations are still going to be a manual process; training records and service reports may be automated, but someone still has to look at them and determine what, needs to be done with each crewman -- the computer can note that crewman Smith turned themselves in for sick call, so they'll need a replacement on their next watch, but the division head has to decide who pulls the extra duty to cover for them. There are always things that a ship's crewmembers do beyond simply keeping the ship running that take up their time, and the further up the chain of command you go, the fewer of those tasks are amenable to automation.
The "Lt. Leary" series is more Napoleonic-era naval combat; until Leary came up with the idea of using micro-jumps to reposition his ships in the middle of combat, it was very much a 'line up and slug at each other' sort of affair, with ships using the High Drive to escape battle, not to maneuver during battle. And he does have the advantage of having opponents largely mired in antiquated combat practices; it would be interesting to see how much of an advantage he retained if he had to face the same opponents six months or a year later, after they've had the chance to develop similar tactics on his own. But the RCN seems to be in the 'England' role, with better-trained personnel than the 'French' of the Alliance, despite their bigger and better-manned ships.
Also, presumably this material won't require the tanning process, so one will get material equivalent to vegetable tanned w/o the nasty chemicals of chrome tanned.
If you don't tan it, what you have is rawhide, not leather; tanning preserves the flexibility, softness, and stretchability of the material. It wouldn't be necessary to unhair the material, and since you'd be able to control what layers of the skin are grown, you would reduce or eliminate the need for fleshing it, and could control the fiber growth to reduce or eliminate the need for liming it, but you'd still have the tanning process itself, whether vegetable or mineral.
The original author's mistake is thinking that's a fundamental design feature of QR codes - you scan them, it takes you to a website. Which, if it were true, would indeed be a glaring security hole. Which is why nobody would do such a thing.
Reading the original article about using QR codes on bills, my first thought was that a validation device could read the serial number off the bill, the denomination of the bill, and put them through a hash function, then compare the hashed value against the value encoded in the QR tag. The validator would be entirely standalone -- it could, for example, be embedded in a new model of the machine banks use now for counting stacks of bills, kicking bills that failed validation into a second bin for a manual check.
Somehow, I think that's even more appropriate a comment than the "...can't hold Blizzard liable..." that I think you intended to write.
I suspect, though, that Blizzard will make a response to this news... and the response will consist solely of pushing the data through an encryption function before it is used to watermark the screenshot so that it's no longer plaintext.
Zwillinger denied the rumor, and Back Alley Brawler, who left Paragon Studios to return to work at Cryptic, posted that he'd asked Jack Emmert about it, and Jack was surprised that this would come up. NCSoft received a license in perpetuity to use the game engine behind City of Heroes for CoH and any derivative products when they bought the game from Cryptic back in 2007.
This is just ugly, horrid programming practice. I remember a project I worked on years ago that managed training documents with a built-in tree structure to the contents (1, 1.1, 1.2. 1.2.1, 1.2.1.1, etc.), and the first thing I did was write a library to manage a generic double-linked tree structure with a generic pointer to the actual content block, so I could use the same list manipulation functions for all the document types.
Neither of the two subsequent superhero MMOs, Champions Online and DC Universe Online, even came close in character creation. I wonder why? That was what lead to alt-itis for me, filling at least 6 servers' worth of characters. It's such a fun, seductive part of the game, why does no other game pick it up and go with it?
City of Heroes, and the other superhero MMOs, are probably unique among MMOs in that your character's abilities don't have to have any relationship to your character's appearance; this makes everything about the character's appearance open to customization, and you can retain that appearance all the way through the character's career, binding it up in what makes the character what they are. Fantasy MMOs, in contrast, are locked into what I call "you are what you wear" -- you may have all sorts of sliders and choices to customize the person of your character, but when that person is hidden by chest armor, gloves, helmet, leg armor, boots, capes, belts, amulets, et al., and carrying their weapon -- and each of these will change again and again over time as the character finds, makes, or buys better gear -- there is ultimately little you can do in character creation to make each character unique. Aion tried to give players some control over their characters' appearance by creating a mechanism where you could pay to have a piece of armor destroyed to give its appearance to another piece of armor, but that didn't change the fact that you can only choose to copy existing armor pieces, or that each visual 'design' is re-used over and over again for different levels of gear.
Auto Assault, Exteel, Dungeon Runner -- NCSoft has had a poor track record in the 'casual games' market, which led them to buy the casual-gaming company Ntreev for a reported $97.5 million. As a result of this purchase, the marketing costs associated with the rollout of the MMORPG Blade and Soul in Korea, "increased labor costs", and "disappointing performance" by Aion (a lower-than-expected number of microtransactions), NCSoft posted a $6 million loss for the second quarter of 2012, with a 12% decrease in revenue. City of Heroes, at the time of the announcement of its shutdown, was still running in the black, making a profit for NCSoft.
City of Heroes has been an outlier in the games NCSoft ran; it didn't push you out into the game world to grind materials to grind skills to keep your gear from falling behind the power curve, it didn't keep you coming back to the in-game store again and again to buy stuff to help keep you from falling behind the power curve, and it was perfectly possible to go from start to level cap without ever having to team up. As such, it is the antithesis of the type of game that is NCSoft's bread and butter -- and while those games do well in the Asian market, where NCSoft makes more than 99% of its money, bringing that type of game to Western markets has been much less successful, as the failure of the above three games, and the 'disappointing performance' of Aion has shown -- while, City of Heroes flopped in the Korean market because its play style was so foreign to the Korean gaming culture. City of Heroes' admittedly moderate success in the Western market, while NCSoft's 'traditional' MMOs fail there, creates a conflict of image for the company, and eliminating City of Heroes returns NCSoft to being a provider of one style of MMO wrapped in different cosmetic shells, so the company can convince itself that it's the shell, and not the play style, that is making its games fail.
Second, as mentioned in the summary, traveling by air is a giant PINA.
I think that if done right, rail travel could be cheaper than air travel and much more pleasant.
Much more pleasant... right up until TSA makes its VIPR program mandatory for trains and buses nationwide, at which point it loses the cachet of not subjecting you to a cavity search to travel.
Second, as mentioned in the summary, traveling by air is a giant PINA.
I think that if done right, rail travel could be cheaper than air travel and much more pleasant.
Much more pleasant... right up until TSA makes its VIPR program mandatory for trains and buses nationwide, at which point it loses the cachet of not subjecting you to a cavity search to travel.
And thinking about people climbing up the billboard stand and then trying to figure out where the rectenna is on the billboard so they can wave their smartphone over it makes for an entertaining mental image. The whole point of NFC is that it is near -- you have to get your device close to the other device or rectenna for it to work, while you can point your smartphone's camera up at a billboard and capture the QR code on it from tens of feet away. This technology isn't going to be useful anyplace where your audience isn't going to be able to wave their smartphones across the rectenna.
These rectennas can be covered by advertisement without impairing their function.
No, you just impair the company using them. If you're an executive with a large corporation, and you want to put an ad in a magazine that includes a link to an online presentation of your new product line, which type of link are you going to choose -- A QR code in the ad art, which reduces the usable space on the ad somewhat, but can be worked into the design, and for which all the cost is a few cents of the graphics departments time modifying the artwork delivered to the magazine's publisher, or an NFC rectenna, which is going to cost a penny per rectenna, and is going to require that the publisher have a machine that will be capable of gluing those rectennae -- and the rectennae of every other advertiser doing this -- to precisely-positioned spots on a roll of paper moving at high speed through a web press, and pay the additional costs that the publisher will charge (setup, tear-down, and a per-unit cost) for them to use the machine (look at how, for example, publisher charge for 'spot color' or 'full color' space)? Not to mention that the ad with the QR code will be accessible to any reader with a camera-equipped smartphone, but the ad with the NFC rectenna requires that the reader have an NFC-capable smartphone -- which may be a good bet in Japan or Korea or China, but is a great deal less so in the US.
Oh, and while you're going on about how the space for the QR code takes away from the space available for the advertisement, you might want to take a closer look at your examples. I expect it's going to be a long, long time before anyone comes up with a way to put an NFC rectenna in a TV image... but it's easy enough to image a QR code right off the screen.
I'd say that the reason usage QR codes has greatly increased in the last few years is because they are not so limited or inconvenient as the article asserts.
Not to mention the fact that it's a lot easier to download a QR scanner app to your smartphone and process the QR captured with its the smartphone's camera code than it will be for people to download an app to process the NFC signals... on smartphones lacking NFC functionality.
During WWII, they cranked planes out by the 1,000's if not 10's of 1,000's.
Just for some perspective, Russia built more than 40,000 Il-2 Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft during WWII; Germany built almost 30,000 Bf 109 fighters; the US produced more than 15,000 each of the P-51 Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt, and more than 12,000 each of the F6F Hellcat and F4U Corsair. From 1939 through 1945, the various combatants produced more than 750,000 military aircraft of all types. Just like the combat records of the Luftwaffe pilots who were kept in battle year after year, we're never going to see that level of production again.
I don't doubt this report. However, my understanding is that the point of F-22 is to conduct its engagements at long-range and avoid these close-range knife fights. If the threat gets to dog-fighting range, the F-22s have screwed up and lost their greatest advantages.
That was the point of the F-14 Tomcat, too -- an airframe designed around carrying the AIM-54 Phoenix long-range missile to engage and destroy incoming Soviet bombers at ranges that would force them to launch their anti-ship missiles before acquiring good targeting information; while the swing-wing gave it an increased flexibility in maneuver, it was still a large, relatively unmaneuverable fighter. You will note that, despite upgrades like the Super Tomcat, the F-14 has been phased out, replaced by the much smaller F-18 and variants, plus the increasingly late and over-budget F-35C.
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There are untold hordes of Immunes Surgeons would and Rikti Guardians who would nod sagely at this if they hadn't been the first ones face-down on the ground when combat started.
So they laid off 80 people on a game that was bringing in ~$2.5m in revenue every quarter, or ~$10m/year.
If those 80 people had an average total cost of just $125k (not hard to do once you figure in benefits, and software and California) then that is all of the revenue for CoH.
$2.73M profit a quarter, not income. That's after deducting all of the support and development costs. The profit from City of Heroes was something like 40% of NCSoft's North American profits, although it was only about 2-3% of the entire company's profits.
The company is trying to move players over to another game. The whole point is not to let players keep playing this game, so they'll look for a new one.
When Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa shut down, players were offered free time in some of NCSoft's other games. No such offer was made to the City of Heroes playerbase. Although, frankly, given the stink we raised about the shutdown, I'm not really surprised that they didn't extend such an offer, although it wouldn't have been very practical -- Aion is "Completely Free", so we could already have just moved over to that game, Blade and Soul wasn't out yet to move players to, and the Lineage and Guild Wars MMOs were all 'buy the box, play free', which would have pounded their bottom line by eliminating the game purchase from their income.
So what happens if they sell it to someone competent? It does better. And ncsoft loses face.
NCSoft has lost face already. Their stock value has been sliding since the day of the Unity rally on the Virtue server, and their stock sank another 7.8% after the release of the Korea Times article questioning the business acumen of shuttering the game in the first place.
Without access to the reasoning behind the decision, I have no way to be sure why they decided to close the game -- particularly with it making a profit of about $2.75M a quarter -- but I believe that it was done to conceal the fact that they were already demonstrating their incompetence. NCSoft has brought to the Western market a number of MMOs rooted in the style of the games that are their bread and butter in the Asian market, with a heavy emphasis on grinding for rare drops, patronage of the in-game store, and PvP. That these games kept doing poorly and getting closed (Aion having shown "disappointing performance" in the last quarter), while City of Heroes -- almost the antithesis of the Korean style of MMORPG -- kept making a steady profit created the appearance of NCSoft not being able/willing to understand the Western market at a time when they were making an effort to become a major online gaming provider. With the ugly counterexample gone, NCSoft could rationalize that they just needed to find the right subject, rather than a different playstyle, to make an MMO popular in the Western market.
I am reminded of the line from Rick Cook's The Wizardry Compiled:
"Applications programming is a race between software engineers, who strive to produce idiot-proof programs, and the universe, which strives to produce bigger idiots. So far the Universe is winning."
Interesting, if that's so then exactly 65 years minus 1 day after the first human to cross the sound barrier in an airplane, we have the first human to cross the sound barrier without airplane (yesterday)!
That depends on your definition of the term. On 25 January 1966, Bill Weaver was flying SR-71A 61-7952 / 2003 at a speed of Mach 3.2 when he experienced a severe case of engine unstart. Before he could tell his RSO, Jim Zwayer, not to eject until he regained control of the aircraft, the SR-71 disintegrated around him, leaving him in free fall at a speed in excess of Mach 3. His drogue chute deployed, stabilizing his fall, and his main chute deployed automatically. Weaver spotted his RSO's chute during his parachute descent; unfortunately, Zwayer had suffered a broken neck during the SR-71's disintegration and was dead before he landed. Weaver was uninjured.
In 1955, George Smith was flying an F-100 Super Sabre when the aircraft pitched into a dive and ceased responding to its controls, despite reducing the engine to idle and deploying speed brakes; he ejected from the plane at a speed of Mach 1.05. During the ejection, he experienced an acceleration of 40g, losing his shoes, socks, helmet, flight gloves, wristwatch, and ring, and had several panels blow out of his chute when it deployed due to his high speed. He was lucky to splash into the water 100 yards away from a fishing boat commanded by a former Navy Rescue Specialist. He was severely injured during the ejection, and was unconscious for days, with doctors holding out little hope for his recovery. Smith did, however, make a full recovery, and returned to flight status.
Baumgartner was the first person to deliberately exceed Mach 1 without an aircraft, but he was not the first person to exceed Mach 1 in free fall.
If you think that's something, consider the B52s that are still flying.
1LT Bob Welch, his father, LTC Don Welch (ret), and his grandfather, COL Don Sprague (ret), all served in the 23rd Bomb Squadron flying B-52s, and COL Sprague commanded the unit back in the 1970s. I wasn't able to dig up evidence that 1LT Welch actually flew the same plane his grandfather flew, but as his grandfather flew all the variants of the B-52 up through the H model, I expect that the Air Force would have arranged it just for publicity value.
So much of western sci-fi have pilots of fighters in a style that looks more WW1 than anything else because is good for storytelling. And most "sci-fi" is optimized for that.
This. Look at the progression of engagement ranges. In WWI, you had fighters shooting at each other at ranges of perhaps a couple of hundred feet, with an attacker who had surprise often closing within fifty feet of their opponent before opening fire. In WWII, with improved guns, combat ranges increased to a few hundred yards, with some excellent shots being able to hit targets six or seven hundred yards out, but surprise attacks might be made at under a hundred yards; while it was not normally possible to recognize an opposing pilot from their features (particularly with oxygen masks and the like), the aircraft markings were still identifiable. In Korea and Vietnam, the advent of missiles pushed engagement ranges out further, with surprise attacks making the biggest jump, a rear attack with a heat-seeking missile from a mile away or more. And modern air combat pushes missile engagement ranges out even further, with missile engagements at ranges of tens of miles. But with the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, fighters still have guns, and the dramatic air-combat engagements portrayed in movies are almost always short-range 'knife fights' with guns.
And BVR (Beyond Visual Range) engagements are boring. I suppose that the 'mass wave of incoming missiles' scene, as the first round of defensive missiles take out some of the incoming ones, then the rest get closer while the launchers reload and fire again, rolling back the targets' defenses until the point-defense systems get one last shot at them, raises tension and increases drama, but only as long as you don't know the stark mathematics of the engagement. There is a scene in, IIRC, Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising that portrays such an engagement, as a large formation of Soviet bombers fire hundreds of air-to-surface missiles against an allied battle group, with a matter-of-fact account of each layer of defense knocking down its share of the incoming missiles, leaving more than enough to destroy the carrier at the center of the battle group. Useful in the abstract for establishing the conditions under which the characters have to work, but not much for displaying individual character development. So the up-close, WWI/WWII type of engagements remain the 'standard' for showing off the characters in combat.
Oh yeah? How many starships have you been on? My whole point is that we're talking about Roddenberry's future, not the mundane present. On Human-crewed starships (or for that matter, Vulcan-crewed, etc etc) most of the work has been automated away, and humans have time to pursue goals other than ship maintenance. Since energy is plentiful, they can have excess mass, and thus they can have excess crew so that everyone has lots of free time to read Shakespeare and practice the violin.
Personnel evaluations are still going to be a manual process; training records and service reports may be automated, but someone still has to look at them and determine what, needs to be done with each crewman -- the computer can note that crewman Smith turned themselves in for sick call, so they'll need a replacement on their next watch, but the division head has to decide who pulls the extra duty to cover for them. There are always things that a ship's crewmembers do beyond simply keeping the ship running that take up their time, and the further up the chain of command you go, the fewer of those tasks are amenable to automation.
The "Lt. Leary" series is more Napoleonic-era naval combat; until Leary came up with the idea of using micro-jumps to reposition his ships in the middle of combat, it was very much a 'line up and slug at each other' sort of affair, with ships using the High Drive to escape battle, not to maneuver during battle. And he does have the advantage of having opponents largely mired in antiquated combat practices; it would be interesting to see how much of an advantage he retained if he had to face the same opponents six months or a year later, after they've had the chance to develop similar tactics on his own. But the RCN seems to be in the 'England' role, with better-trained personnel than the 'French' of the Alliance, despite their bigger and better-manned ships.
Also, presumably this material won't require the tanning process, so one will get material equivalent to vegetable tanned w/o the nasty chemicals of chrome tanned.
If you don't tan it, what you have is rawhide, not leather; tanning preserves the flexibility, softness, and stretchability of the material. It wouldn't be necessary to unhair the material, and since you'd be able to control what layers of the skin are grown, you would reduce or eliminate the need for fleshing it, and could control the fiber growth to reduce or eliminate the need for liming it, but you'd still have the tanning process itself, whether vegetable or mineral.
The original author's mistake is thinking that's a fundamental design feature of QR codes - you scan them, it takes you to a website. Which, if it were true, would indeed be a glaring security hole. Which is why nobody would do such a thing.
Reading the original article about using QR codes on bills, my first thought was that a validation device could read the serial number off the bill, the denomination of the bill, and put them through a hash function, then compare the hashed value against the value encoded in the QR tag. The validator would be entirely standalone -- it could, for example, be embedded in a new model of the machine banks use now for counting stacks of bills, kicking bills that failed validation into a second bin for a manual check.
"...can't hold Blizzard reliable..."
Somehow, I think that's even more appropriate a comment than the "...can't hold Blizzard liable..." that I think you intended to write.
I suspect, though, that Blizzard will make a response to this news... and the response will consist solely of pushing the data through an encryption function before it is used to watermark the screenshot so that it's no longer plaintext.
Zwillinger denied the rumor, and Back Alley Brawler, who left Paragon Studios to return to work at Cryptic, posted that he'd asked Jack Emmert about it, and Jack was surprised that this would come up. NCSoft received a license in perpetuity to use the game engine behind City of Heroes for CoH and any derivative products when they bought the game from Cryptic back in 2007.
This is just ugly, horrid programming practice. I remember a project I worked on years ago that managed training documents with a built-in tree structure to the contents (1, 1.1, 1.2. 1.2.1, 1.2.1.1, etc.), and the first thing I did was write a library to manage a generic double-linked tree structure with a generic pointer to the actual content block, so I could use the same list manipulation functions for all the document types.
Neither of the two subsequent superhero MMOs, Champions Online and DC Universe Online, even came close in character creation.
I wonder why? That was what lead to alt-itis for me, filling at least 6 servers' worth of characters.
It's such a fun, seductive part of the game, why does no other game pick it up and go with it?
City of Heroes, and the other superhero MMOs, are probably unique among MMOs in that your character's abilities don't have to have any relationship to your character's appearance; this makes everything about the character's appearance open to customization, and you can retain that appearance all the way through the character's career, binding it up in what makes the character what they are. Fantasy MMOs, in contrast, are locked into what I call "you are what you wear" -- you may have all sorts of sliders and choices to customize the person of your character, but when that person is hidden by chest armor, gloves, helmet, leg armor, boots, capes, belts, amulets, et al., and carrying their weapon -- and each of these will change again and again over time as the character finds, makes, or buys better gear -- there is ultimately little you can do in character creation to make each character unique. Aion tried to give players some control over their characters' appearance by creating a mechanism where you could pay to have a piece of armor destroyed to give its appearance to another piece of armor, but that didn't change the fact that you can only choose to copy existing armor pieces, or that each visual 'design' is re-used over and over again for different levels of gear.
Auto Assault, Exteel, Dungeon Runner -- NCSoft has had a poor track record in the 'casual games' market, which led them to buy the casual-gaming company Ntreev for a reported $97.5 million. As a result of this purchase, the marketing costs associated with the rollout of the MMORPG Blade and Soul in Korea, "increased labor costs", and "disappointing performance" by Aion (a lower-than-expected number of microtransactions), NCSoft posted a $6 million loss for the second quarter of 2012, with a 12% decrease in revenue. City of Heroes, at the time of the announcement of its shutdown, was still running in the black, making a profit for NCSoft.
City of Heroes has been an outlier in the games NCSoft ran; it didn't push you out into the game world to grind materials to grind skills to keep your gear from falling behind the power curve, it didn't keep you coming back to the in-game store again and again to buy stuff to help keep you from falling behind the power curve, and it was perfectly possible to go from start to level cap without ever having to team up. As such, it is the antithesis of the type of game that is NCSoft's bread and butter -- and while those games do well in the Asian market, where NCSoft makes more than 99% of its money, bringing that type of game to Western markets has been much less successful, as the failure of the above three games, and the 'disappointing performance' of Aion has shown -- while, City of Heroes flopped in the Korean market because its play style was so foreign to the Korean gaming culture. City of Heroes' admittedly moderate success in the Western market, while NCSoft's 'traditional' MMOs fail there, creates a conflict of image for the company, and eliminating City of Heroes returns NCSoft to being a provider of one style of MMO wrapped in different cosmetic shells, so the company can convince itself that it's the shell, and not the play style, that is making its games fail.
Second, as mentioned in the summary, traveling by air is a giant PINA.
I think that if done right, rail travel could be cheaper than air travel and much more pleasant.
Much more pleasant... right up until TSA makes its VIPR program mandatory for trains and buses nationwide, at which point it loses the cachet of not subjecting you to a cavity search to travel.
Second, as mentioned in the summary, traveling by air is a giant PINA.
I think that if done right, rail travel could be cheaper than air travel and much more pleasant.
Much more pleasant... right up until TSA makes its VIPR program mandatory for trains and buses nationwide, at which point it loses the cachet of not subjecting you to a cavity search to travel.
And thinking about people climbing up the billboard stand and then trying to figure out where the rectenna is on the billboard so they can wave their smartphone over it makes for an entertaining mental image. The whole point of NFC is that it is near -- you have to get your device close to the other device or rectenna for it to work, while you can point your smartphone's camera up at a billboard and capture the QR code on it from tens of feet away. This technology isn't going to be useful anyplace where your audience isn't going to be able to wave their smartphones across the rectenna.
These rectennas can be covered by advertisement without impairing their function.
No, you just impair the company using them. If you're an executive with a large corporation, and you want to put an ad in a magazine that includes a link to an online presentation of your new product line, which type of link are you going to choose -- A QR code in the ad art, which reduces the usable space on the ad somewhat, but can be worked into the design, and for which all the cost is a few cents of the graphics departments time modifying the artwork delivered to the magazine's publisher, or an NFC rectenna, which is going to cost a penny per rectenna, and is going to require that the publisher have a machine that will be capable of gluing those rectennae -- and the rectennae of every other advertiser doing this -- to precisely-positioned spots on a roll of paper moving at high speed through a web press, and pay the additional costs that the publisher will charge (setup, tear-down, and a per-unit cost) for them to use the machine (look at how, for example, publisher charge for 'spot color' or 'full color' space)? Not to mention that the ad with the QR code will be accessible to any reader with a camera-equipped smartphone, but the ad with the NFC rectenna requires that the reader have an NFC-capable smartphone -- which may be a good bet in Japan or Korea or China, but is a great deal less so in the US.
Oh, and while you're going on about how the space for the QR code takes away from the space available for the advertisement, you might want to take a closer look at your examples. I expect it's going to be a long, long time before anyone comes up with a way to put an NFC rectenna in a TV image... but it's easy enough to image a QR code right off the screen.
I'd say that the reason usage QR codes has greatly increased in the last few years is because they are not so limited or inconvenient as the article asserts.
Not to mention the fact that it's a lot easier to download a QR scanner app to your smartphone and process the QR captured with its the smartphone's camera code than it will be for people to download an app to process the NFC signals... on smartphones lacking NFC functionality.
I thought the film was about as faithful to the book as Jurassic Park (film) was to Jurassic Park (novel).
I tend to refer to it as the 'Nutri-Matic Tea' version -- a film almost, but not quite, completely unlike the novel.
During WWII, they cranked planes out by the 1,000's if not 10's of 1,000's.
Just for some perspective, Russia built more than 40,000 Il-2 Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft during WWII; Germany built almost 30,000 Bf 109 fighters; the US produced more than 15,000 each of the P-51 Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt, and more than 12,000 each of the F6F Hellcat and F4U Corsair. From 1939 through 1945, the various combatants produced more than 750,000 military aircraft of all types. Just like the combat records of the Luftwaffe pilots who were kept in battle year after year, we're never going to see that level of production again.
I don't doubt this report. However, my understanding is that the point of F-22 is to conduct its engagements at long-range and avoid these close-range knife fights. If the threat gets to dog-fighting range, the F-22s have screwed up and lost their greatest advantages.
That was the point of the F-14 Tomcat, too -- an airframe designed around carrying the AIM-54 Phoenix long-range missile to engage and destroy incoming Soviet bombers at ranges that would force them to launch their anti-ship missiles before acquiring good targeting information; while the swing-wing gave it an increased flexibility in maneuver, it was still a large, relatively unmaneuverable fighter. You will note that, despite upgrades like the Super Tomcat, the F-14 has been phased out, replaced by the much smaller F-18 and variants, plus the increasingly late and over-budget F-35C.