This whole thing seems like a fucking hassle. I have a doorbell. It was like $30 and I can hear it ring no matter where I am in or on my property. If I'm expecting you or expecting a delivery, I'll come answer the door. If I'm not expecting anyone, I will sleep through it or just ignore it, entirely.
Chances are that if you are showing up at my doorstep unannounced, I don't want to talk to you. You're probably selling something, scamming something, preaching something, have the wrong address, are from the city or otherwise simply are just showing up to bother me.
One amusing incident, I had ordered about $10,000 worth of equipment from the Apple online store. I was eagerly awaiting it, for fucking obvious reasons. I was waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Hours were ticking by. The end of the day was coming. I was getting worried. Eventually, I checked online again. It claimed it had been delivered. It had not. It wasn't outside and nobody had knocked or rung a door bell or called my phone or anything.
I called the leasing office to see if it had been left there (often UPS or FedEX will claim I wasn't at my apartment, so that they could just dump the package in the leasing office and skip delivering it to me). Nope, nothing there.
So, I called FedEX. They looked into their information. Confirmed - yep, we delivered it!
Um . . . . no, you didn't. You definitely did not deliver a bunch of shiny expensive stuff to my door.
They said they would have to look into it and call me back, later.
In the meantime, I took a wild fucking hung and called up the physical Apple Store at the local mall. I asked if they had received a delivery today. They confirmed that it was delivery day and they'd received pallets of stuff. I explained my situation and asked if they could look for any out of place deliveries with my name on them.
Yep, they found them.
I went to the store with my ID and receipt to prove that it was my stuff and they gave it to me.
Two days later, I got a call from FedEX to let me know that they believed they might have delivered the items I bought from the Apple Store to the Apple Store.
I told them that I knew that and that I'd already driven there and picked it up earlier in the week.
The "major fuckwad" is only that, because he is using poor discretion. I would be *more* pissed if my delivery guy refused to leave packages simply because I didn't answer the door. If you live in an area where theft is a concern, then you'd be pissed because it'll get stolen. If you live in an area where theft is unlikely, you'd be pissed if they didn't leave it, because it means you either have to wait another day and be awake and near the door to hear and respond quickly to it and/or make a long trip to the UPS office to pick it up, negating the entire fucking reason that you had it shipped in the first place.
I order stuff from Amazon all the time and if I order it on Thursday or Friday, it often arrives Saturday.
Anyway, as to ringing door bells and leaving packages - I think a lot of that is at the driver's discretion. Whether it's an apartment or a home. The kind of neighborhood. Whether it can be hidden out of the way or not. The experience I've had with UPS and FedEX as a home owner is entirely different than the hassle it was living in an apartment.
When I lived in an apartment, I would be waiting for important packages all day long. When I looked online, the history for delivery would say that they attempted to deliver the package, but nobody was home and they left a note on the door to attempt redelivery the next day. Only thing is, they often did no such thing. It was easier for them to claim I wasn't home and deliver when they had more time than to actually show up, knock, and give me the package. And, of course, there's not really any way you can prove that they didn't come to your door (only your word against theirs).
When I lived in an apartment, couriers would knock and if I didn't answer, they'd just leave and put a note on the door (except all the times when they wouldn't knock of even come at all, but when I call the local office, they'd claim that the driver attempted to deliver and said I wasn't home, even though there wasn't a note on the door and it turned out the drivers did this all the time when they were running behind and just skipped apartments).
Now that I have a house, the driver finds a safe place to put it (often just inside the screen door or behind something on the porch, to obscure it from the street), rings the bell, then leaves. Sort of like a ding-dong-ditch, but I end up with cool shit that I ordered.
Thank you for aptly demonstrating my point, that there were only imbecilic responses from "both sides" devoid of any abstract thought or critical thinking.
You notice that engineers are never the ones being sent by the company on a two week annual retreat to a tropical resort to celebrate and reward having done their job while the sales guys put in weeks of extra long days, nights, and weekends to make important milestones.
What they should do is find out why their sales guys have no credibility and aren't trusted. Chances are, it's because they're like a lot of sales people that end up pissing engineering people off. What they're doing here is saying "our sales guys are fucking us over, so how can we not blame our sales guys while making our engineers pick up the slack?".
Chances are, the sales guys are the typical "promise the customer all sorts of shit and let the engineers be the ones to uncomfortably explain six months down the road that the product doesn't do seven of the forty two things that the sales person claimed it did".
To be fair, my average fellow American didn't stick around to listen long enough to updated reports. At "Osama was killed", they spent the next week flopping their dicks in the air and smashing beer cans on their heads while running around in public with giant foam fingers chanting "USA USA USA" like retards.
Yeah, in my PC, it probably would have been instantaneous as their porting to consoles seems to be an obscene fucking failure. Dragon Age II and Witcher 2 have around five second load times, primarily thanks to the SSD. Of course, most people are going to buy this on the console, so that's the impression that they'll get. And, really, I use my PC for strategy, RTS, and MMO and console for everything else. I'm too old to spend all of my free time hunched over a desk in front of giant monitors and a keyboard anymore.:/
Stop giving so much weight to this idea that they have concluded that cell phones may cause cancer. It's listed with a ton of other things under the "maybe" level. It's only based on repost that they've read. There was no independent study involved. They read a bunch of reports and based on those, concluded that it falls under the "may cause cancer" classification. As in, they can't state that it does or that it doesn't. Prior to this, they hadn't even gotten around to classifying it. This is a non-news story, except by twats trying to sensationalize it.
Calling it a "boys game" because of the Duke character and his sense of self and humor is like calling Idiocracy a movie for idiots, because the movie itself is filled with idiots. Duke Nukem is a parody of its time (though it hardly really fits into the pop-culture of this century). The Duke Nukem humor itself has never particularly done anything for me, though it occasionally gets a slight chuckle. In 2011, it's only really relevant in the sense of "oh man, remember when all the action movies and stars were really like this back in the 80s?".
The problem is that this game could have done something with itself using the same style of humor and retarded juvenile style, if the mechanics and look (and performance) of the game matched other modern games. Instead, it feels like an XBLA title that someone would release for $15. It feels every bit like a game that would have been made and released in 1999, but with a graphical update (that makes it look perhaps around 2005-ish).
It's really unfortunate that Gearbox's good intentions didn't pan out, here. I guess there's only so much you could have expected from their attempt to rescue the title. I hope that Pritchford's spending of good karma (built up from the success of Borderlands) wasn't entirely wasted on convincing the company to let him at DNF. There are a lot of better ways, in retrospect, that he could have burned that karma.
I pre-ordered Duke Nukem Forever quite awhile ago. I hoped for a lot, but didn't expect it. I mostly just wanted to buy a copy so I could play through it and have it on my shelf for purposes of nostalgia. The hope was just that maybe after all that time, Gearbox's intervention to save the title last year might have done some amazing magic on it. After all, they do have a good record and a lot of love for the franchise (Randy Pitchford originally worked on Duke back in the day).
Some of the videos out there promoting the game made it look like a very competent modern shooter. Lots of stuff going on, nice graphics, big destroyed cities with enormous monsters and all that. Pretty much everything you'd expect, in 2011.
The demo? It's like they made it with the intention of making you cancel your pre-order (which I did -- I'll buy it again for the shelf when it's $20 or less).
First, the loading times are awful. They're about 75 seconds and you have to sit through a load screen even if all you did was die.
Second, the framerate is bad. It is sometimes smooth and looks fine, but then it'll suddenly hitch for half a second. And more times than not, you hitch again when you are hit (melee or a bullet) by an enemy. Sometimes it's enough that you'll die before you can respond to what's going on. Or even be knocked off a cliff and die before you can react to being hit.
Third, the graphics. The best of the demo is in the beginning, when it looks competent. Not setting new standards, but not a turn off. Unfortunately, everything after that is flat and fairly simple. The interface is pretty boring and uninspired, too.
Fourth, the audio. Man, the audio is a disappointment. The sounds of the weapons. The repetitive sayings of Duke. The grunt every time he jumps. It sounds like they haven't recorded anything new since 1999.
Fifth, it is SHORT. And BORING. Like I said above, the videos make it look like you'll be engaged in these huge fights with massive monsters in big bustling destroyed cities with all sorts of things going on in the sky and the background. But what was the demo? The following is the demo:
The game opens on you pissing in a urinal (press RT to piss). Then you leave the urinal and find you're in a locker room at a stadium. You go out to the playing field and fight a giant monster. After killing him, the camera pulls out and you find out that you are actually Duke playing Duke in one of Duke's games on a console. Two chicks are blowing you and sit back to converse with you. Then, you're in a shitty looking 4x4 driving through a bland canyon dodging rocks for about 90 seconds. Then you shoot your way through a bland canyon for about two minutes, until you reach a cave that you walk around fir about two minutes to find some gas for your truck. You fight a ship by shooting it about 20 times with a weapon handily placed nearby. Then you run back to your truck and fill it up with the gas that you found. Then the demo is over.
You must not do much gaming, recently. I believe I have actually seen demos that required you to *PAY* for the demos. Demos are no longer just a tool to get people to buy the game. *sigh*
Typing *is* taught in elementary schools. I was taught to type on Commodore 64s. In first grade. In 1984. I have nothing against home schooling, but if you're waiting until high school to teach typing, you are doing it wrong. You may as well also be touching reading and writing as a "pre-CS course".
The Internet is a specific network. It is this network. That we're communicating on right now. They're not making "their own internet" any more than Android made "their own iPhone".
Yeah, because what I want is more homophobia, racism, and inane noise-making in my life. The good news about this is that this goes a step beyond even DLC and finally reaches the point where I just won't bother. I enjoy COD/MW for a good kick and I usually play the hell out of it for about six weeks (I played 300 hours of Black Ops in six weeks before shelving it and never touching it again). This time, I just wont' bother at all. This also sounds like a way that they're screwing people out of sharing content. Imagine if you're a kid and you have a brother. It used to be that you could buy a game and play it. Both of you. Now, you can buy a game for $60. Then $5 tax. Then $10 for the "online" pass for the second person (even though it's the same copy of the game). And now, apparently, a regular fee.
On the other hand, they've done a great handing Battlefield 3 a much larger player base than ever before!
You count your postman and butcher and 50 people at work that significantly? If they count against that number, then it seems you're probably investing FAR too much in these people who are essentially on the fringe of your life.
As for Twitter... nobody on there should count toward anything. Twiter is about whoring yourself out just like all the other social networks. It's about spreading yourself around to boost your ego (or your business). It's not about listening or having a bi-directional friendship.
Slashdot Mirror
This whole thing seems like a fucking hassle. I have a doorbell. It was like $30 and I can hear it ring no matter where I am in or on my property. If I'm expecting you or expecting a delivery, I'll come answer the door. If I'm not expecting anyone, I will sleep through it or just ignore it, entirely.
Chances are that if you are showing up at my doorstep unannounced, I don't want to talk to you. You're probably selling something, scamming something, preaching something, have the wrong address, are from the city or otherwise simply are just showing up to bother me.
This used to happen to me all the time.
One amusing incident, I had ordered about $10,000 worth of equipment from the Apple online store. I was eagerly awaiting it, for fucking obvious reasons. I was waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Hours were ticking by. The end of the day was coming. I was getting worried. Eventually, I checked online again. It claimed it had been delivered. It had not. It wasn't outside and nobody had knocked or rung a door bell or called my phone or anything.
I called the leasing office to see if it had been left there (often UPS or FedEX will claim I wasn't at my apartment, so that they could just dump the package in the leasing office and skip delivering it to me). Nope, nothing there.
So, I called FedEX. They looked into their information. Confirmed - yep, we delivered it!
Um . . . . no, you didn't. You definitely did not deliver a bunch of shiny expensive stuff to my door.
They said they would have to look into it and call me back, later.
In the meantime, I took a wild fucking hung and called up the physical Apple Store at the local mall. I asked if they had received a delivery today. They confirmed that it was delivery day and they'd received pallets of stuff. I explained my situation and asked if they could look for any out of place deliveries with my name on them.
Yep, they found them.
I went to the store with my ID and receipt to prove that it was my stuff and they gave it to me.
Two days later, I got a call from FedEX to let me know that they believed they might have delivered the items I bought from the Apple Store to the Apple Store.
I told them that I knew that and that I'd already driven there and picked it up earlier in the week.
The "major fuckwad" is only that, because he is using poor discretion. I would be *more* pissed if my delivery guy refused to leave packages simply because I didn't answer the door. If you live in an area where theft is a concern, then you'd be pissed because it'll get stolen. If you live in an area where theft is unlikely, you'd be pissed if they didn't leave it, because it means you either have to wait another day and be awake and near the door to hear and respond quickly to it and/or make a long trip to the UPS office to pick it up, negating the entire fucking reason that you had it shipped in the first place.
I order stuff from Amazon all the time and if I order it on Thursday or Friday, it often arrives Saturday.
Anyway, as to ringing door bells and leaving packages - I think a lot of that is at the driver's discretion. Whether it's an apartment or a home. The kind of neighborhood. Whether it can be hidden out of the way or not. The experience I've had with UPS and FedEX as a home owner is entirely different than the hassle it was living in an apartment.
When I lived in an apartment, I would be waiting for important packages all day long. When I looked online, the history for delivery would say that they attempted to deliver the package, but nobody was home and they left a note on the door to attempt redelivery the next day. Only thing is, they often did no such thing. It was easier for them to claim I wasn't home and deliver when they had more time than to actually show up, knock, and give me the package. And, of course, there's not really any way you can prove that they didn't come to your door (only your word against theirs).
When I lived in an apartment, couriers would knock and if I didn't answer, they'd just leave and put a note on the door (except all the times when they wouldn't knock of even come at all, but when I call the local office, they'd claim that the driver attempted to deliver and said I wasn't home, even though there wasn't a note on the door and it turned out the drivers did this all the time when they were running behind and just skipped apartments).
Now that I have a house, the driver finds a safe place to put it (often just inside the screen door or behind something on the porch, to obscure it from the street), rings the bell, then leaves. Sort of like a ding-dong-ditch, but I end up with cool shit that I ordered.
In Soviet Russia, reddit fucks off back to you with this shit.
Thank you for aptly demonstrating my point, that there were only imbecilic responses from "both sides" devoid of any abstract thought or critical thinking.
Yes, I'll get right on the SSD XBOX modification, stat.
Of course, the PC version still has horrible framerate drops with DNF.
You notice that engineers are never the ones being sent by the company on a two week annual retreat to a tropical resort to celebrate and reward having done their job while the sales guys put in weeks of extra long days, nights, and weekends to make important milestones.
What they should do is find out why their sales guys have no credibility and aren't trusted. Chances are, it's because they're like a lot of sales people that end up pissing engineering people off. What they're doing here is saying "our sales guys are fucking us over, so how can we not blame our sales guys while making our engineers pick up the slack?".
Chances are, the sales guys are the typical "promise the customer all sorts of shit and let the engineers be the ones to uncomfortably explain six months down the road that the product doesn't do seven of the forty two things that the sales person claimed it did".
Wow, way to stereotype. Where do you work that all your engineers lack social skills?
Also remember, most companies see sales guys as their lifeblood and engineers as a financial liability.
To be fair, my average fellow American didn't stick around to listen long enough to updated reports. At "Osama was killed", they spent the next week flopping their dicks in the air and smashing beer cans on their heads while running around in public with giant foam fingers chanting "USA USA USA" like retards.
Yeah, in my PC, it probably would have been instantaneous as their porting to consoles seems to be an obscene fucking failure. Dragon Age II and Witcher 2 have around five second load times, primarily thanks to the SSD. Of course, most people are going to buy this on the console, so that's the impression that they'll get. And, really, I use my PC for strategy, RTS, and MMO and console for everything else. I'm too old to spend all of my free time hunched over a desk in front of giant monitors and a keyboard anymore. :/
It was the console version, which is what most of the sales will be on, hence the version I registered for a demo code for.
Stop giving so much weight to this idea that they have concluded that cell phones may cause cancer. It's listed with a ton of other things under the "maybe" level. It's only based on repost that they've read. There was no independent study involved. They read a bunch of reports and based on those, concluded that it falls under the "may cause cancer" classification. As in, they can't state that it does or that it doesn't. Prior to this, they hadn't even gotten around to classifying it. This is a non-news story, except by twats trying to sensationalize it.
Calling it a "boys game" because of the Duke character and his sense of self and humor is like calling Idiocracy a movie for idiots, because the movie itself is filled with idiots. Duke Nukem is a parody of its time (though it hardly really fits into the pop-culture of this century). The Duke Nukem humor itself has never particularly done anything for me, though it occasionally gets a slight chuckle. In 2011, it's only really relevant in the sense of "oh man, remember when all the action movies and stars were really like this back in the 80s?".
The problem is that this game could have done something with itself using the same style of humor and retarded juvenile style, if the mechanics and look (and performance) of the game matched other modern games. Instead, it feels like an XBLA title that someone would release for $15. It feels every bit like a game that would have been made and released in 1999, but with a graphical update (that makes it look perhaps around 2005-ish).
It's really unfortunate that Gearbox's good intentions didn't pan out, here. I guess there's only so much you could have expected from their attempt to rescue the title. I hope that Pritchford's spending of good karma (built up from the success of Borderlands) wasn't entirely wasted on convincing the company to let him at DNF. There are a lot of better ways, in retrospect, that he could have burned that karma.
I pre-ordered Duke Nukem Forever quite awhile ago. I hoped for a lot, but didn't expect it. I mostly just wanted to buy a copy so I could play through it and have it on my shelf for purposes of nostalgia. The hope was just that maybe after all that time, Gearbox's intervention to save the title last year might have done some amazing magic on it. After all, they do have a good record and a lot of love for the franchise (Randy Pitchford originally worked on Duke back in the day).
Some of the videos out there promoting the game made it look like a very competent modern shooter. Lots of stuff going on, nice graphics, big destroyed cities with enormous monsters and all that. Pretty much everything you'd expect, in 2011.
The demo? It's like they made it with the intention of making you cancel your pre-order (which I did -- I'll buy it again for the shelf when it's $20 or less).
First, the loading times are awful. They're about 75 seconds and you have to sit through a load screen even if all you did was die.
Second, the framerate is bad. It is sometimes smooth and looks fine, but then it'll suddenly hitch for half a second. And more times than not, you hitch again when you are hit (melee or a bullet) by an enemy. Sometimes it's enough that you'll die before you can respond to what's going on. Or even be knocked off a cliff and die before you can react to being hit.
Third, the graphics. The best of the demo is in the beginning, when it looks competent. Not setting new standards, but not a turn off. Unfortunately, everything after that is flat and fairly simple. The interface is pretty boring and uninspired, too.
Fourth, the audio. Man, the audio is a disappointment. The sounds of the weapons. The repetitive sayings of Duke. The grunt every time he jumps. It sounds like they haven't recorded anything new since 1999.
Fifth, it is SHORT. And BORING. Like I said above, the videos make it look like you'll be engaged in these huge fights with massive monsters in big bustling destroyed cities with all sorts of things going on in the sky and the background. But what was the demo? The following is the demo:
The game opens on you pissing in a urinal (press RT to piss). Then you leave the urinal and find you're in a locker room at a stadium. You go out to the playing field and fight a giant monster. After killing him, the camera pulls out and you find out that you are actually Duke playing Duke in one of Duke's games on a console. Two chicks are blowing you and sit back to converse with you. Then, you're in a shitty looking 4x4 driving through a bland canyon dodging rocks for about 90 seconds. Then you shoot your way through a bland canyon for about two minutes, until you reach a cave that you walk around fir about two minutes to find some gas for your truck. You fight a ship by shooting it about 20 times with a weapon handily placed nearby. Then you run back to your truck and fill it up with the gas that you found. Then the demo is over.
You must not do much gaming, recently. I believe I have actually seen demos that required you to *PAY* for the demos. Demos are no longer just a tool to get people to buy the game. *sigh*
Unfortunately, they don't apparently understand it well enough to use it properly. :)
Typing *is* taught in elementary schools. I was taught to type on Commodore 64s. In first grade. In 1984. I have nothing against home schooling, but if you're waiting until high school to teach typing, you are doing it wrong. You may as well also be touching reading and writing as a "pre-CS course".
The Internet is a specific network. It is this network. That we're communicating on right now. They're not making "their own internet" any more than Android made "their own iPhone".
Yeah, because what I want is more homophobia, racism, and inane noise-making in my life. The good news about this is that this goes a step beyond even DLC and finally reaches the point where I just won't bother. I enjoy COD/MW for a good kick and I usually play the hell out of it for about six weeks (I played 300 hours of Black Ops in six weeks before shelving it and never touching it again). This time, I just wont' bother at all. This also sounds like a way that they're screwing people out of sharing content. Imagine if you're a kid and you have a brother. It used to be that you could buy a game and play it. Both of you. Now, you can buy a game for $60. Then $5 tax. Then $10 for the "online" pass for the second person (even though it's the same copy of the game). And now, apparently, a regular fee.
On the other hand, they've done a great handing Battlefield 3 a much larger player base than ever before!
You count your postman and butcher and 50 people at work that significantly? If they count against that number, then it seems you're probably investing FAR too much in these people who are essentially on the fringe of your life.
As for Twitter... nobody on there should count toward anything. Twiter is about whoring yourself out just like all the other social networks. It's about spreading yourself around to boost your ego (or your business). It's not about listening or having a bi-directional friendship.