Jury Duty and EA Games
(Crossposted from 360 by request from redqueenofevil)
Rants on two completely unrelated topics:
Jury duty. I have been summoned. Unfortunately, they sent the summons to my old address and not my current one (where I've been for almost 2 years!), where it bounced back to them. They managed to find my current address (from the post office, rather than, say, something obvious like the DMV records or my tax forms or...) and re-sent the same exact summons to me. The problem is that this process must have taken several months, because I got the form today and the start date on my jury duty was ... Oct. 31. You would think that they would have bothered to fix the start date before resending it. They managed to enclose a letter dated Nov. 18 saying that it had bounced and all. So I go through the automated registration process with their 800 number and it tells me that I am registering late and that I need to pick a new start date but it won't work if its past the date I was originally scheduled for (why bother letting me try then?). I attempted to do so twice and it told me that both dates that I picked are invalid and then told me to call the local court number during the hours listed and just hung up on me. The local court number listed? Same as the automated 800 number. The hours listed? Weekdays 10-12 PM and 2-4 PM (what, do govt. employees only work 4 hours a day? With a 2 hour lunch?).
They also claim that their process for choosing jurors is random. Yet both Jill and I have received a jury summons within a week of each other (hers went to the correct address, go figure) and have never received one before this. This is either a huge coincidence or their random number generator has some serious issues.
EA Games. The rant is shorter. Their new Need for Speed: Most Wanted racing game for PC doesn't support widescreen monitors. Despite such monitors being very common these days. Despite their Need for Speed Underground (1) game supporting such monitors over two years ago. Despite Neverwinter Nights and many other games supporting such monitors in 2002! Also despite the fact that their Xbox360 version of the same game supports widescreen monitors (HDTVs). Some enterprising folks had written a patch for Need for Speed Underground 2 last year to get it to support widescreen monitors, and that patch works fine on the demo of Most Wanted, but not on the full game because the game executable is encrypted for copy protection purposes. So the only way to fix this is to wait until some hacker (illegally, thanks to the DMCA) breaks the copy protection and gets the patch to work (probably trivial, since it was with the demo). Way to go EA, you just lost a sale, at least until that oh-so-horrible hacker fixes your game for you.
Rants on two completely unrelated topics:
Jury duty. I have been summoned. Unfortunately, they sent the summons to my old address and not my current one (where I've been for almost 2 years!), where it bounced back to them. They managed to find my current address (from the post office, rather than, say, something obvious like the DMV records or my tax forms or...) and re-sent the same exact summons to me. The problem is that this process must have taken several months, because I got the form today and the start date on my jury duty was ... Oct. 31. You would think that they would have bothered to fix the start date before resending it. They managed to enclose a letter dated Nov. 18 saying that it had bounced and all. So I go through the automated registration process with their 800 number and it tells me that I am registering late and that I need to pick a new start date but it won't work if its past the date I was originally scheduled for (why bother letting me try then?). I attempted to do so twice and it told me that both dates that I picked are invalid and then told me to call the local court number during the hours listed and just hung up on me. The local court number listed? Same as the automated 800 number. The hours listed? Weekdays 10-12 PM and 2-4 PM (what, do govt. employees only work 4 hours a day? With a 2 hour lunch?).
They also claim that their process for choosing jurors is random. Yet both Jill and I have received a jury summons within a week of each other (hers went to the correct address, go figure) and have never received one before this. This is either a huge coincidence or their random number generator has some serious issues.
EA Games. The rant is shorter. Their new Need for Speed: Most Wanted racing game for PC doesn't support widescreen monitors. Despite such monitors being very common these days. Despite their Need for Speed Underground (1) game supporting such monitors over two years ago. Despite Neverwinter Nights and many other games supporting such monitors in 2002! Also despite the fact that their Xbox360 version of the same game supports widescreen monitors (HDTVs). Some enterprising folks had written a patch for Need for Speed Underground 2 last year to get it to support widescreen monitors, and that patch works fine on the demo of Most Wanted, but not on the full game because the game executable is encrypted for copy protection purposes. So the only way to fix this is to wait until some hacker (illegally, thanks to the DMCA) breaks the copy protection and gets the patch to work (probably trivial, since it was with the demo). Way to go EA, you just lost a sale, at least until that oh-so-horrible hacker fixes your game for you.