The Splash screens are annoying and overly loud. Just select game.. play game. No other steps required. All menus to accessible from within the game. Stop holding up my SSD with other crap.
The problem is that the people actually develop games nowadays are often not the people who own the licence to the franchise.
So you have a small development house who want their company logo to feature prominently in the game so they make a name for themselves. Thats one splash screen added to the startup sequence.
Then you have nvidia or ati who need to provide a sample of their upcomming cards or drivers to the development house. They want to charge a fortune for this since these pre-production jobs are damn expensive to produce. If you are producing a game for a well known franchise though that is guaranteed to sell a few copies even if it is utter shit (people are sheeple after all) then you can ask for a discount on your development samples or get them free if you are willing to jump into bed with one of them exclusively, that's another slash screen that cant be skipped (allowing a user to skip it would probably be breach of contract)
Then you have the huge company that bought the franchise. They definitely get to slap a splash screen on the front since they effectively "own" the product.
Then, there is you. You get no choice in the matter as you are only the consumer. You might be annoyed by the extra few seconds you have to wait while these splash screens all show but unless you are annoyed enough to not purchase the game in the first place or boycott all their titles in future then your opinion is worthless.
Thus endeth today's lesson from the course Capitalism 101.
Yes, but my situation is not normal, since I write code for a company that sells jailbroken devices directly to corporate customers.
Surely that is illegal?
I can't believe Apple would miss a trick and actually allow that to happen unless you buy them direct from Apple under some special licence agreement that costs 10 times as much as a normal device.
If they went after PsyStar you can be dam sure they are coming after you guys:)
People who think that programming is just a 9-5 job where you punch in, turn on your brain, do work, punch out, turn off your brain, are the bane of this industry. They'd be just as happy washing cars for 18 hours a day, and aren't necessarily interested in solving an annoying problem once and for all. They're just interested in a job, any job, so long as it's doing rote work and getting paid an hourly wage. No passion for technology.
I think that is a little overstated to be honest.
I have worked with truly amazing developers who had that mindset to be honest, they had spent years learning their craft and simply felt they had nothing to prove any more. They turned up on time everyday, did the hours asked of them but no more, took absolute pride in their work but also did not overly object if they had to do something in code they did not like the idea of.
This last part is very important, sometimes as developers we are required to implement things we do not like, but we just have to get on with it. We can explain why we think it is bad form to do it in that manner, but if the alternative takes 10 times as long then commercially it may make sense. The obsessives you put on such a pedestal often throw such a hissy fit when asked to do this it can make them a pain in the arse. They might be right from the perspective of a pure academic looking at the code, but there are some times other priorities.
There is one thing that correlates with code quality: unit tests.
Good unit tests. Remember, just as there's good code and bad code, there's good unit tests, and there's bad unit tests.
Exactly, I have submitted to bug to open source frameworks and had them sent back to me simply because the overly simple unit tests they were using could not replicate the issue. Unit tests are not a panacea and certainly not a replacement for decent functional testing.
For example, with.NET you can use Visual Studio and with Java you can use IntelliJ IDEA. Both of them will give you powerful refactoring capabilities and help you navigate unfamiliar code.
That one sentence hits the most important nail on the head for me. Many people subconsciously tend towards considering all code they did not create themselves to be bad code. That is not to say bad code does not exist but there is a string preference that most of us have for things being done in the manner we would do it. Once you get beyond this you often realise that the code is not so bad after all or that we have written code just as bad ourselves in order to get something done.
If you are forced into taking a horrible shortcut due to a looming deadline or to work round an issue somewhere else in the system you probably do not consider that to be bad code but a pair of new eyes looking at it for the first time would, especially as the big somewhere else you were having to work round may well have been fixed by then so you hack no longer has a reason to exist anyway.
But then again, I am currently employed maintaining a legacy ASP system that runs on SunOne ASP (ex Chillisoft) so I know a fair bit about truly bad code. Thankfully we are throwing it in the bin and replacing it with Zend Framework and PHP. This is far from a perfect platform but it is far better than what I am used to.
I'm a systems engineer for a fortune 500, and I spend a significant amount of time developing. Now, am I making fancy OOP code using an IDE? Nope, not really. I am however making python/perl/awk/expect/tcl/shell scripts with a heck of a lot of frequency. I don't think I could do my job effectively if I didn't.
Firstly, let me say I have worked as system admin and programmer, currently I am a technical lead for a small business so do a fair bit of both since our full time system admin left a month or so ago.
The big difference between throwing together few perl or shell scripts and learning to be a full time developer is the complexity of the problems you have to solve using code. Maybe the scripts you write are more complicated than I am giving you credit for, but when I put together scripts I never had to create any longer than 50 or so lines.
Out system admin once told me as a developer that we should not ever give our servers ip address to a partner company so they could lock a webservice down to only being called by us. He did not want this to make it harder for him to do his job and he needed to make some fairly big infrastructure changes to our application servers.
He had a point but the problem is that he didn't appreciate that by us locking down something by IP it made the integration between our to system simpler to implement and far more secure. It might not have been the most flexible solution, but since it saved a great deal of time and hence cost it was the best fit.
By being able to wear both hats it makes you better at both roles in my opinion as you can see ways to simplify a solution via the system admin route that may not have been possible by just looking at it from a coders perspective, and vice versa.
As to whether this justifies the cost of keeping a system admin's coding skills up to date is another matter, I think it can be justified though by instead trying to split the system admin role between more that one staff member even if it is exactly a one person job. By doing this you end up with a number of advantages:
1) Increased resilience to staff turnover. If one of the people job sharing the system admin role leaves then the other person can still be relied upon so covering absolutely every detail during a handover period is not so critical. Obviously this does not mean that no handover is needed though apart from in the simplest of setups.
2) More flexible approach to scheduling. If you have more than once person in a team who can do a given piece of work then it make it easier to schedule in a new task even if you have something similar already.
3) Better oversight. If you happen to have one empire building nut job who is building back doors in left right and centre, he will most likely be caught and reported by the person job sharing with them. If you have two people who work together to screw you over then you have more serious problems than just them. Even assuming you do not have staff trying to do such things having two people who can provide mutual oversight of each others work often helps produce far better solutions.
This will not apply to every company out there since some businesses probably have no need for any software development resource but if you work in a company that does, it makes sense to job share as much as possible between the two roles.
In America, we're working on alternatives, we keep building electric cars, and they get cheaper and cheaper. The world will have electric cars available long before oil runs out, and we'll have fusion power plants long before coal runs out. Energy is not our problem (although cheaper electricity always makes things better).
Are you sure enough to bet the entire future of your nation on it?
Fusion has been talked about for decades and it still isn't here. Even when it gets here think how many people will object to having a fusion plant anywhere near them, they will simply associate it with fission anyway.
As to coal you are living in a dream world. If you try generating enough electricity to power an electric car for everyone using coal you will generate a stupendous amount of CO2. You guys may not believe in global warming but everyone else in the world does. It really does exist and if you even try that you can be fairly sure you can kiss Florida and every other low lieing area of the country good bye.
This would also involve building a huge number of coal fired power plants and nobody will want one of those next door either so unless you can solve nimbyism somehow your plan has a few flaws.
I don't know what is going to happen 10-15 years from now, let alone 100, but what you describe sounds awful, like one of the worst types of dystopia.
Do you at least recognise that at some point in the future the oil will run out? We are using oil far more quickly that it forms underground so the simple reality we all have to deal with is that it will run out sooner or later and the changes this will necessitate will take a great many years to put in place.
This year I ate grapes from my own grape vines, peaches from my own peach trees, asian pears from my own trees, and citrus from my own tree and a vegetable garden. It isn't huge, but I can see the sky above my head.
That is actually still possible in the city I live in (London). I work in the centre where everything is bunched together like I describe but where I live in the suburbs things are a little more spread out. We do have to make do with a far smaller plot though to grow stuff on. You do have to earn more though to enable this so I do understand your point.
The funny thing is that the first thing most Europeans do when they get here is buy the biggest Buick or Mercury Grand Marquis they can find.
That is probably because they are crying out to enjoy the differences between the US where where they have lived before. I would probably do the same along with buying a M4 assault rifle or something similar as that as something else I cannot own here legally. I understand most brits who move to the US do the same but there is no movement over here for more relaxed gun control to speak of so I think a great many people just take advantage of things being legal even though they do not necessarily agree with them.
I see a bunch of name-calling here. What I don't see is a sane reason to build high speed rail.
That is probably just because your american and you whole way of life and cultural identity revolves around car use. It makes it far more difficult to see a world where cars simply cease to exist in their current form.
Sorry, but every other developed country recognises that us all having our own, incredibly energy hungry tin box that goes where we tell it is just not sustainable after the oil runs out and even before then is just not the most efficient way of doing things. It might take 100 years for us to run out of oil completely but how long is it before it simply becomes too expensive for a large part of the population to afford to drive to work every day?
You guys in the states have spent decades building cities that are just too spread out for their own good. Sooner or later you are going to have to build more cities like New York where you have an incredibly high population density. Then you can build a decent mass transit system that takes people most of the way, then lets them walk the remaining few hundred yards.
The alternative is to cope with fuel costs that constantly spiral upward until it runs out, this has already started. Even if you build an entire countries worth of electric cars in order to power them all you would need a nuclear plant on every street corner to generate that much power.
The simple fact is that in the decades to come mass transit and densely populated cities where most of the population live is simply going to become more and more like the only option unless someone cracks a way of getting energy for nothing without drilling it up out of the ground like we do currently.
China might be throwing money at their high speed rail industry now, but sooner or later they might end up selling the expertise they gain to every other country in the world.
I held my son for the first time a few months ago, and I can tell you now first hand that the only difference between a fetus and a baby is which end of the vagina you're looking at.
That really depends on the age of the fetus though doesn't it. No country in the world allows abortions after about 30 weeks and I don't know of any considering it.
The debate is really about whether it is ok to abort a fetus that is still only a very small clump of cells less than a cm across as at that point there is a very big difference between that and a full term baby. This debate is made all the more complicated by contraceptive devices such as a coil where it can act up to a week after conception has occurred. Should that be illegal too just because it can work after conception even though most women have it fitted before hand.
These organisations should be held accountable for privacy breaches, but taking money away from residents and patients is not the answer.
No, the answer is clearly to fire someone over this and make sure they also forfeit their pension. Fat chance of that happening though since the coppers in the UK operate completely above the law, any attempt to chastise them via the IPCC or whatever is really just window dressing.
In the US you don't have to send your kid to school, though state laws differ as to how to handle they want homeschooling handled. in Idaho, they don't care. If they can get a GED or diploma, wonderful. If not, guess the parent screwed up
Holy crap. I always wondered how you created rednecks, now I know:)
The thing is though that just strikes me as utterly bonkers since a kid who cant read in the world stands almost no chance. They just have an entire deck stacked against them from day one and unless they have some sort of miracle, they are pretty much fucked. This is especially true now that the manual labour, building stuff type jobs have gone to China or Taiwan.
I know you guys have this thing in the states where you fear government (seeing some of the governments you elect this is not surprising. Sorry, my crap humour) but sometimes government should get more involved in peoples lives. A society without government or law is basically anarchy.
The government can just stay the hell out of my home, if I want a doctor's opinion I will seek it.
In the US that is fine. Over here in the UK where the study pertains to though (you already have the guidelines they are calling for in the US incidentally) we have this thing called the NHS. It basically means that if your kid needs glasses before the age of 18 or after you retire then the government pays for them. So why shouldn't the government try and prevent you from needing glasses in later life by giving your parents some gentle advice, even though they didn't ask for it.
After all, if you really want to you can still ignore and just plonk your little sprog two inches in front of a TV all day and let them destroy their own sight through eye strain.
I have spent years doing 18 hour days in front of computer monitors and still have pretty good eyesight at nearly 40. I think a large part of that is thanks to some advice I got when I started getting chronic eye aches at 16 or so. I went to an ophthalmologists thinking I needed glasses and found out that I actually had spot on vision, but the pain was probably due to me not blinking as the refresh rate of monitors tricked your subconscious into thinking you had so didn't need to. This caused my eyes to dry out and seemed to be the root of my problem as the eye aches went away when I started consciously blinking regularly.
Even now we still give advice to adults about not staring at monitors all day without taking a break. Surely then it is even more important to give the same advice to children only being far more cautious since their eyes are still growing and developing.
On a similar note what about school? I believe it is mandatory for you to send your little sproglet to school still in the states? Should we just leave that up to the parents entirely as well even though a child getting to 16 and being unable to read and write is pretty much guaranteed to be a grade A fuckup who can't earn a living and will therefore cost society a fortune in prison fees (prisons are expensive btw)? Here in the UK you children will be taken into care and brought up by the state unless you can prove that they are being educated, either by a school or a private tutor of some kind and are keeping pace their peers.
The reality is that when it comes to bringing up your children their are times when society has to steer you in the right direction as if your screw it up completely society has to pick up the pieces, not you. We in the UK actually recognise that society has a far greater role than you in the US seem to and so are far more accepting of this sort of thing. Laws are just the codification of societies rules.
Actually, yes it is in my book but it probably depends on how you define the word "better".
In my case I consider something "better" if it contains as few man made toxic chemicals as possible. In some parts of the world it is perfectly legal to use things like DDT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT) then export the fruit / vegetable or whatever it was sprayed on to the US or Europe where it's use is banned. Buying something that is certified as organic helps avoid this, the alternative would be trying to remember every country where DDT and similar crap is legal every time you went shopping and avoiding their imports. I am also to lazy to wash things thoroughly to clean off residual pesticides so not having to do this is "better" in my book to.
There is also the fact that crap that has been genetically modified is not required to be labelled where I live. If I want to avoid things like that my only option is to go with organic certified stuff. I consider this better as things are not modified to make them taste better, they are modified to make them resistant to certain pesticides like roundup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_(herbicide)#Genetically_modified_crops). I do not care about a crop being resistant to some crap someone wants to spray on it to maximise their yield, I care about things like taste instead. Roundup Ready stuff might be cheaper due to the increased yield, but I do not that to be the same as better by any stretch.
Decided I want a big slunker gaming computer. Bought the Asus G73 when it came out.
edited: summary is it broke and and I would have send it back to them to fix.
I sold it for a steep discount to a buddy and bought a mac.
Is that story true or a load of made up rubbish? Points I think indicate it to not entirely true as follows:
Firstly why would you replace a gaming computer with any sort of Mac? Replacing it with a PS3 or something would be believable but why would you spend the amount of money needed on a mac that can play modern games? You could buy 2 gaming PC's for that amount so you could just swap them out if you had any problems. Ok, it is inconvenient to have to send a PC back but of the amount an equivalent mac would cost you could buy 2 PCs and have the same options open to you.
Next issue, I cannot see any equivalent to a G3 from Apple. All their laptops seem to be 11 or 13 inch screens so not great for gaming. Unless you want to buy a separate keyboard, mouse and monitor in which case why not just buy a gaming desktop as that is pretty much what you ended up with.
Finally, some might say most importantly: You sold it at a discount. Damn right you did, you broke the fucker. Even if it had been returned to them and fixed first you are still basically talking about a second hand PC so you might as well have thrown it in the bin. Second hand items are immediately worth half the list value at most in my world, one that had already been sent back to the manufacturer for warranty repair is half again.
I could understand it if you put up with using it for a year or two but made a decision to not buy one again but that is not what you said. The only way you would do what you did is if you already had far too much money at the start, in which case you probably should have bought a Mac all along.
I can understand people buying Macs, I have been damn near buying one myself but not to run games on. I would buy it for the OS, the rugged design, the warranty, and everything else great about them. Who the hell even considers one as a gaming box though?
Windows 8 is DOA, everyone hates it. Gamers wont use it, Businesses wont use it. The average user will hate it.
I am not so sure about this. The machine he describes is actually a perfect fit for Windows 8 (I have been using the preview edition solidly since it came out so have a vague idea). You can stick to the metro interface when using the laptop as a touchscreen tablet but then use a trackpad or mouse and keyboard if you need to.
Don't get me wrong I am not saying that Windows 8 is sterling example of a desktop OS (lol, I can't even type that without laughing my ass off) but in the case of convertible tablet / laptops maybe it will be a half decent niche player. It will offer a far smoother transition than a windows7 / android dual boot which would be its main competitor one these machines.
Or course it may be that I am the only person interested in a top notch laptop that can double as tablet in which case Win8 is doomed. I like the idea though as I am currently on a 12inch lenovo laptop and now cannot be tempted back to a full size 15inch laptop for love nor money. I also have a 10 inch tablet and really like the idea of rolling both devices into one. I have a sneaky suspicion that there may be other people like me who are crying out for one size fits all device.
I would really like slightly larger screen on my tablet so I can watch movies. I do not always want the hassle of a keyboard though so if I can have it folded against the back of screen somehow like on my old tytn ii (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_TyTN_II) that would be perfect. I have often thought about the idea of a detachable keyboard but the problem there is the one time you need it is the one time you leave it at home. The only thing of concern with a device like this to my mind is the weight.
I know devices like this have been tried before but the reason I have never bothered with one is that neither OS is a great fit for when the device is being used in the other form factor. My ideal device would be one that instantly changed between android and windows7 when you opened the keyboard but had a way of telling the running applications to be aware of the new form factor and their layouts changed accordingly, kind of like my tablet does but on steroids.
If Windows 8 can bridge these two gaps by the time of SP1 or whatever then it might actually get some users, especially if the next generation of ultrabooks are as he predicts. Neither of these things is beyond realms of possibility in my mind.
I'm guilty of going through red lights on my bike when I deem it safe to do so, but I think the problem kind of fixes itself. People who cycle dangerously tend to learn quickly by their mistakes or are no longer around to repeat their mistakes.
The part of the problem that does not fix itself though is that other road users who actually stop at red lights think why the hell you should you get away with that when they can't as they have number plates. This build up a general resentment of cyclists that I believe contributes to the "bikes don't belong on the road" attitude of many car drivers.
Also, my hatred of cyclists running red lights comes from them almost hitting me when I am on pedestrian crossings and they fly through on red dodging people. They might not actually hit anyone, but it is still a shock to most pedestrians and it annoys the shit out of them to have a fast moving bike fly past you while you have the right of way.
In short; if you want to be treated with respect as a responsible road user as a cyclist then first behave like one. Running red lights is above all illegal but it also shows you to be an utter twat who thinks the rules of road only apply to other people.
Now about the German Autobahn: nationwide there is no mandatory speed limit. There is a "recommended" speed limit of 130 km/h, but you are free to go over that if you like. Now as the population has been increasing and the roads were getting busier and cities larger, some parts of some roads did get a speed limit. That's mainly near large cities, on roads with heavy traffic or on roads with poor far-field vision (lots of bends and hills). Also limits may apply in certain conditions, such as when it rains and the roads are wet. But in general, all Autobahns are still completely speed unlimited.
There is something else though that I remember about Germany from when I was there a few years ago. I was in a car with a German friend and we were driving down the autobahn when it started to rain, heavily. It was so heavy in fact that it started to make it difficult to see where you were going. Note however that I say difficult, not impossible. I have certainly been in heavy rain storms in the UK where we carried driving. As it was we quickly pulled off the autobahn and found somewhere out of the rain to stop. What surprised me was how many other people did the same. It seemed that the vast majority of people pulled off the road (quite sensibly) and delayed their journey a bit.
Where I am from in the UK hardly anyone would do this, we would all just carry on and accept the vastly increased chances of having an accident. I know lots of people will now just reply that in the UK it is because our weather is always shit, but we have recently seen different freak whether in terms of snow as well yet people still try and drive in that without snow chains.
The difference is that we are far more likely to just accept that accidents sometimes happen and somehow think this mitigates any responsibility to try and avoid them whenever possible. I have heard this argument coming from motorists quite a lot with regard to occasional low speed collisions and the problem is that in those cases if the collision involves a cyclist he always comes off worse, maybe even fatally so.
I think the solution is simple: A zero tolerance approach to people not following the rules of the road. (This applies to bikes too btw, no running red lights)
I would rather see every cyclist that jumped a red light get fined than a few of them killed. Maybe crush their bike if they get caught more than a few times too. I would like to see them banned but since their is no licence requirement that is tricky. I am not totally against the idea that cyclists should do a cycling test though.
This way bad drivers would be removed from the road (by being banned from driving) once they demonstrated they ignored the relevant rules in front of the police a few times. This would do a great deal to encourage very careful driving and hence would do vastly reduce the amount of deaths on our roads. In my country road deaths are four times more common than murders so please don't make the argument that driving like a moron is not a real crime and enforcing traffic laws is not a good use of police time.
About 30 years back, long before there were helmet laws I was in a serious bicycle accident, suffered serious head injury. I've long since recovered, though the facial scars remain, and I'll always have a titanium wire keeping one piece of my skull connected to the other part. And no other vehicle was involved, on a dark road my 10 speed bikes tire got caught in a sewer grating, propelling me forward and off the bike.
Wow. About 10 years ago I had an identical accident.
I was riding flat out through a car park near where I lived at night (no lights, no helmet). Unfortunately the car park had newly installed a chain that went across the entrance at about 6 inches from the ground. The first I knew of the chain was when I heard slight clank as my front wheel hit it, half a second later I was doing a superman impression over the handlebars. Thankfully I remember the clank as I looked down at it just in time so that when I flew over the handlbars I was already bent slightly forward. This meant I did not go face first into the tarmac and instead landed on the back of my skull, before rolling onto my back and cracking a rib or two.
Your story just reminded me how lucky I was that I looked down and so didn't plant my face.
It might have had support for multi monitors, but it was far more awkward to setup and was never quite as good.
I have been hooked on multi monitor setups since I had a Matrix g550 a few years back. Newly released Windows XP as it was in those days just dealt with it all beautifully.
Linux on the other hand used to be a bit more quirky, certainly under Gnome. You could use both monitors as a single desktop but if you did the maximise button would insist on maximising everything across both monitors instead of just the one the application was running on. It also centered every new application launched on the join between the two monitors instead of letting you designate one as a primary monitor.
If you chose to keep them as separate desktops then they ended up completely separate and there was no way to drag an application between them using the mouse.
The fact is that while Linux might have had multi-monitor support first Windows XP actually made it useful.
Americans always love to say how great freedom of speech is, but when I started making jokes about 9-11 they got all offended when I was there.
Even if you try and make the serious point that is quite widely believed in some parts of the world that the US government knew 9-11 was going to happen and quite happily let it in order to get public support for a war on terror there are many people in the US who immediately want to resort to violence (in the punching your face in way). This is not exactly basking in freedom of speech is it?
I was very happy to see the recent bunch of cartoons that came from Egypt taking the piss out of us back as that was at least a sign that some muslims are realising that the best way to counter distasteful jokes is to just fire some back in our direction. That helps us see things in a different light if we can at least see the hypocrisy in us defending the freedom to offend others while not recognising others right to offend us as well.
In my experience we have a greater percentage of people with a sense of humour with regard to these things but I think that is just a symptom of our higher general levels of education.
This is mental. HFCS is, metabolically, no better and no worse than cane sugar or fructose you get from fruits.
It is very different chemically. It contains an entirely different ratio of fructose, sucrose and glucose. Instead of sucrose you get primarily in cane or beet sugar it contains fructose. HFCS actually contains almost no sucrose.
As to whether it is worse or better the issue I was describing is that we have no idea as nobody ever tried to find out when it was first invented. The FDA just checked it was not poisonous then approved it for sale en mass. Recently there have been studies but they have been inconclusive.
Crap like that is stuff that has been recently invented to help the food industry. It is not entirely natural so is not something our bodies have evolved to deal with over time. It does however trigger the correct taste bud response as that was a large part of the criteria in its design. It was also designed to be cheap as chips to produce, help american corn production and avoid US dependence on importing sugar although I have no idea why the US can't just grow it's own sugar like everyone else. There must be some reason why corn is easier to grow than sugar but I am not a farmer.
The reality of this stuff and many other recent inventions by the food industry is that they are not tested to the level that would be needed to measure their long term effects. We might test them to make sure they are not poisonous but that only means it's safe to consume on the level we now do. Almost every food factory in the US now uses a process based on things like HFCS as a replacement for sugar. This means we consume tons of the stuff each year whereas our grand parents would never have consumed it at all.
Interestingly most of Europe never adopted HFCS so we use sugar for most industrial food production and we don't have the same obesity problem. That is far from conclusive evidence though but I do think that HFCS is just one of many things that the US food industry adopted that are contributing.
There are also no doubt other causes some of which are social issues. Things like football in the US where short sprints and bulk are more important than aerobic fitness and stamina are also a big factor.
Slashdot Mirror
The Splash screens are annoying and overly loud. Just select game .. play game. No other steps required. All menus to accessible from within the game. Stop holding up my SSD with other crap.
The problem is that the people actually develop games nowadays are often not the people who own the licence to the franchise.
So you have a small development house who want their company logo to feature prominently in the game so they make a name for themselves. Thats one splash screen added to the startup sequence.
Then you have nvidia or ati who need to provide a sample of their upcomming cards or drivers to the development house. They want to charge a fortune for this since these pre-production jobs are damn expensive to produce. If you are producing a game for a well known franchise though that is guaranteed to sell a few copies even if it is utter shit (people are sheeple after all) then you can ask for a discount on your development samples or get them free if you are willing to jump into bed with one of them exclusively, that's another slash screen that cant be skipped (allowing a user to skip it would probably be breach of contract)
Then you have the huge company that bought the franchise. They definitely get to slap a splash screen on the front since they effectively "own" the product.
Then, there is you. You get no choice in the matter as you are only the consumer. You might be annoyed by the extra few seconds you have to wait while these splash screens all show but unless you are annoyed enough to not purchase the game in the first place or boycott all their titles in future then your opinion is worthless.
Thus endeth today's lesson from the course Capitalism 101.
Yes, but my situation is not normal, since I write code for a company that sells jailbroken devices directly to corporate customers.
Surely that is illegal?
I can't believe Apple would miss a trick and actually allow that to happen unless you buy them direct from Apple under some special licence agreement that costs 10 times as much as a normal device.
If they went after PsyStar you can be dam sure they are coming after you guys :)
People who think that programming is just a 9-5 job where you punch in, turn on your brain, do work, punch out, turn off your brain, are the bane of this industry. They'd be just as happy washing cars for 18 hours a day, and aren't necessarily interested in solving an annoying problem once and for all. They're just interested in a job, any job, so long as it's doing rote work and getting paid an hourly wage. No passion for technology.
I think that is a little overstated to be honest.
I have worked with truly amazing developers who had that mindset to be honest, they had spent years learning their craft and simply felt they had nothing to prove any more. They turned up on time everyday, did the hours asked of them but no more, took absolute pride in their work but also did not overly object if they had to do something in code they did not like the idea of.
This last part is very important, sometimes as developers we are required to implement things we do not like, but we just have to get on with it. We can explain why we think it is bad form to do it in that manner, but if the alternative takes 10 times as long then commercially it may make sense. The obsessives you put on such a pedestal often throw such a hissy fit when asked to do this it can make them a pain in the arse. They might be right from the perspective of a pure academic looking at the code, but there are some times other priorities.
There is one thing that correlates with code quality: unit tests.
Good unit tests. Remember, just as there's good code and bad code, there's good unit tests, and there's bad unit tests.
Exactly, I have submitted to bug to open source frameworks and had them sent back to me simply because the overly simple unit tests they were using could not replicate the issue. Unit tests are not a panacea and certainly not a replacement for decent functional testing.
For example, with .NET you can use Visual Studio and with Java you can use IntelliJ IDEA. Both of them will give you powerful refactoring capabilities and help you navigate unfamiliar code.
That one sentence hits the most important nail on the head for me. Many people subconsciously tend towards considering all code they did not create themselves to be bad code. That is not to say bad code does not exist but there is a string preference that most of us have for things being done in the manner we would do it. Once you get beyond this you often realise that the code is not so bad after all or that we have written code just as bad ourselves in order to get something done.
If you are forced into taking a horrible shortcut due to a looming deadline or to work round an issue somewhere else in the system you probably do not consider that to be bad code but a pair of new eyes looking at it for the first time would, especially as the big somewhere else you were having to work round may well have been fixed by then so you hack no longer has a reason to exist anyway.
But then again, I am currently employed maintaining a legacy ASP system that runs on SunOne ASP (ex Chillisoft) so I know a fair bit about truly bad code. Thankfully we are throwing it in the bin and replacing it with Zend Framework and PHP. This is far from a perfect platform but it is far better than what I am used to.
I'm a systems engineer for a fortune 500, and I spend a significant amount of time developing. Now, am I making fancy OOP code using an IDE? Nope, not really. I am however making python/perl/awk/expect/tcl/shell scripts with a heck of a lot of frequency. I don't think I could do my job effectively if I didn't.
Firstly, let me say I have worked as system admin and programmer, currently I am a technical lead for a small business so do a fair bit of both since our full time system admin left a month or so ago.
The big difference between throwing together few perl or shell scripts and learning to be a full time developer is the complexity of the problems you have to solve using code. Maybe the scripts you write are more complicated than I am giving you credit for, but when I put together scripts I never had to create any longer than 50 or so lines.
Out system admin once told me as a developer that we should not ever give our servers ip address to a partner company so they could lock a webservice down to only being called by us. He did not want this to make it harder for him to do his job and he needed to make some fairly big infrastructure changes to our application servers.
He had a point but the problem is that he didn't appreciate that by us locking down something by IP it made the integration between our to system simpler to implement and far more secure. It might not have been the most flexible solution, but since it saved a great deal of time and hence cost it was the best fit.
By being able to wear both hats it makes you better at both roles in my opinion as you can see ways to simplify a solution via the system admin route that may not have been possible by just looking at it from a coders perspective, and vice versa.
As to whether this justifies the cost of keeping a system admin's coding skills up to date is another matter, I think it can be justified though by instead trying to split the system admin role between more that one staff member even if it is exactly a one person job. By doing this you end up with a number of advantages:
1) Increased resilience to staff turnover. If one of the people job sharing the system admin role leaves then the other person can still be relied upon so covering absolutely every detail during a handover period is not so critical. Obviously this does not mean that no handover is needed though apart from in the simplest of setups.
2) More flexible approach to scheduling. If you have more than once person in a team who can do a given piece of work then it make it easier to schedule in a new task even if you have something similar already.
3) Better oversight. If you happen to have one empire building nut job who is building back doors in left right and centre, he will most likely be caught and reported by the person job sharing with them. If you have two people who work together to screw you over then you have more serious problems than just them. Even assuming you do not have staff trying to do such things having two people who can provide mutual oversight of each others work often helps produce far better solutions.
This will not apply to every company out there since some businesses probably have no need for any software development resource but if you work in a company that does, it makes sense to job share as much as possible between the two roles.
In America, we're working on alternatives, we keep building electric cars, and they get cheaper and cheaper. The world will have electric cars available long before oil runs out, and we'll have fusion power plants long before coal runs out. Energy is not our problem (although cheaper electricity always makes things better).
Are you sure enough to bet the entire future of your nation on it?
Fusion has been talked about for decades and it still isn't here. Even when it gets here think how many people will object to having a fusion plant anywhere near them, they will simply associate it with fission anyway.
As to coal you are living in a dream world. If you try generating enough electricity to power an electric car for everyone using coal you will generate a stupendous amount of CO2. You guys may not believe in global warming but everyone else in the world does. It really does exist and if you even try that you can be fairly sure you can kiss Florida and every other low lieing area of the country good bye.
This would also involve building a huge number of coal fired power plants and nobody will want one of those next door either so unless you can solve nimbyism somehow your plan has a few flaws.
I don't know what is going to happen 10-15 years from now, let alone 100, but what you describe sounds awful, like one of the worst types of dystopia.
Do you at least recognise that at some point in the future the oil will run out? We are using oil far more quickly that it forms underground so the simple reality we all have to deal with is that it will run out sooner or later and the changes this will necessitate will take a great many years to put in place.
This year I ate grapes from my own grape vines, peaches from my own peach trees, asian pears from my own trees, and citrus from my own tree and a vegetable garden. It isn't huge, but I can see the sky above my head.
That is actually still possible in the city I live in (London). I work in the centre where everything is bunched together like I describe but where I live in the suburbs things are a little more spread out. We do have to make do with a far smaller plot though to grow stuff on. You do have to earn more though to enable this so I do understand your point.
The funny thing is that the first thing most Europeans do when they get here is buy the biggest Buick or Mercury Grand Marquis they can find.
That is probably because they are crying out to enjoy the differences between the US where where they have lived before. I would probably do the same along with buying a M4 assault rifle or something similar as that as something else I cannot own here legally. I understand most brits who move to the US do the same but there is no movement over here for more relaxed gun control to speak of so I think a great many people just take advantage of things being legal even though they do not necessarily agree with them.
I see a bunch of name-calling here. What I don't see is a sane reason to build high speed rail.
That is probably just because your american and you whole way of life and cultural identity revolves around car use. It makes it far more difficult to see a world where cars simply cease to exist in their current form.
Sorry, but every other developed country recognises that us all having our own, incredibly energy hungry tin box that goes where we tell it is just not sustainable after the oil runs out and even before then is just not the most efficient way of doing things. It might take 100 years for us to run out of oil completely but how long is it before it simply becomes too expensive for a large part of the population to afford to drive to work every day?
You guys in the states have spent decades building cities that are just too spread out for their own good. Sooner or later you are going to have to build more cities like New York where you have an incredibly high population density. Then you can build a decent mass transit system that takes people most of the way, then lets them walk the remaining few hundred yards.
The alternative is to cope with fuel costs that constantly spiral upward until it runs out, this has already started. Even if you build an entire countries worth of electric cars in order to power them all you would need a nuclear plant on every street corner to generate that much power.
The simple fact is that in the decades to come mass transit and densely populated cities where most of the population live is simply going to become more and more like the only option unless someone cracks a way of getting energy for nothing without drilling it up out of the ground like we do currently.
China might be throwing money at their high speed rail industry now, but sooner or later they might end up selling the expertise they gain to every other country in the world.
I held my son for the first time a few months ago, and I can tell you now first hand that the only difference between a fetus and a baby is which end of the vagina you're looking at.
That really depends on the age of the fetus though doesn't it. No country in the world allows abortions after about 30 weeks and I don't know of any considering it.
The debate is really about whether it is ok to abort a fetus that is still only a very small clump of cells less than a cm across as at that point there is a very big difference between that and a full term baby. This debate is made all the more complicated by contraceptive devices such as a coil where it can act up to a week after conception has occurred. Should that be illegal too just because it can work after conception even though most women have it fitted before hand.
I hope you lose that job. LibreOffice was clearly the better choice.
Not for me. I tried it but unfortunately the install routine fell on it's arse at the end of the install and just left me with a mangled installation.
At that point I walked away. Hopefully Apache will be able to dedicate the testing resource that seemed to be missing from LibreOffice.
These organisations should be held accountable for privacy breaches, but taking money away from residents and patients is not the answer.
No, the answer is clearly to fire someone over this and make sure they also forfeit their pension. Fat chance of that happening though since the coppers in the UK operate completely above the law, any attempt to chastise them via the IPCC or whatever is really just window dressing.
In the US you don't have to send your kid to school, though state laws differ as to how to handle they want homeschooling handled. in Idaho, they don't care. If they can get a GED or diploma, wonderful. If not, guess the parent screwed up
Holy crap. I always wondered how you created rednecks, now I know :)
The thing is though that just strikes me as utterly bonkers since a kid who cant read in the world stands almost no chance. They just have an entire deck stacked against them from day one and unless they have some sort of miracle, they are pretty much fucked. This is especially true now that the manual labour, building stuff type jobs have gone to China or Taiwan.
I know you guys have this thing in the states where you fear government (seeing some of the governments you elect this is not surprising. Sorry, my crap humour) but sometimes government should get more involved in peoples lives. A society without government or law is basically anarchy.
The government can just stay the hell out of my home, if I want a doctor's opinion I will seek it.
In the US that is fine. Over here in the UK where the study pertains to though (you already have the guidelines they are calling for in the US incidentally) we have this thing called the NHS. It basically means that if your kid needs glasses before the age of 18 or after you retire then the government pays for them. So why shouldn't the government try and prevent you from needing glasses in later life by giving your parents some gentle advice, even though they didn't ask for it.
After all, if you really want to you can still ignore and just plonk your little sprog two inches in front of a TV all day and let them destroy their own sight through eye strain.
I have spent years doing 18 hour days in front of computer monitors and still have pretty good eyesight at nearly 40. I think a large part of that is thanks to some advice I got when I started getting chronic eye aches at 16 or so. I went to an ophthalmologists thinking I needed glasses and found out that I actually had spot on vision, but the pain was probably due to me not blinking as the refresh rate of monitors tricked your subconscious into thinking you had so didn't need to. This caused my eyes to dry out and seemed to be the root of my problem as the eye aches went away when I started consciously blinking regularly.
Even now we still give advice to adults about not staring at monitors all day without taking a break. Surely then it is even more important to give the same advice to children only being far more cautious since their eyes are still growing and developing.
On a similar note what about school? I believe it is mandatory for you to send your little sproglet to school still in the states? Should we just leave that up to the parents entirely as well even though a child getting to 16 and being unable to read and write is pretty much guaranteed to be a grade A fuckup who can't earn a living and will therefore cost society a fortune in prison fees (prisons are expensive btw)? Here in the UK you children will be taken into care and brought up by the state unless you can prove that they are being educated, either by a school or a private tutor of some kind and are keeping pace their peers.
The reality is that when it comes to bringing up your children their are times when society has to steer you in the right direction as if your screw it up completely society has to pick up the pieces, not you. We in the UK actually recognise that society has a far greater role than you in the US seem to and so are far more accepting of this sort of thing. Laws are just the codification of societies rules.
But "organic" was never about better products!!!
Actually, yes it is in my book but it probably depends on how you define the word "better".
In my case I consider something "better" if it contains as few man made toxic chemicals as possible. In some parts of the world it is perfectly legal to use things like DDT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT) then export the fruit / vegetable or whatever it was sprayed on to the US or Europe where it's use is banned. Buying something that is certified as organic helps avoid this, the alternative would be trying to remember every country where DDT and similar crap is legal every time you went shopping and avoiding their imports. I am also to lazy to wash things thoroughly to clean off residual pesticides so not having to do this is "better" in my book to.
There is also the fact that crap that has been genetically modified is not required to be labelled where I live. If I want to avoid things like that my only option is to go with organic certified stuff. I consider this better as things are not modified to make them taste better, they are modified to make them resistant to certain pesticides like roundup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_(herbicide)#Genetically_modified_crops). I do not care about a crop being resistant to some crap someone wants to spray on it to maximise their yield, I care about things like taste instead. Roundup Ready stuff might be cheaper due to the increased yield, but I do not that to be the same as better by any stretch.
Decided I want a big slunker gaming computer. Bought the Asus G73 when it came out.
edited: summary is it broke and and I would have send it back to them to fix.
I sold it for a steep discount to a buddy and bought a mac.
Is that story true or a load of made up rubbish? Points I think indicate it to not entirely true as follows:
Firstly why would you replace a gaming computer with any sort of Mac? Replacing it with a PS3 or something would be believable but why would you spend the amount of money needed on a mac that can play modern games? You could buy 2 gaming PC's for that amount so you could just swap them out if you had any problems. Ok, it is inconvenient to have to send a PC back but of the amount an equivalent mac would cost you could buy 2 PCs and have the same options open to you.
Next issue, I cannot see any equivalent to a G3 from Apple. All their laptops seem to be 11 or 13 inch screens so not great for gaming. Unless you want to buy a separate keyboard, mouse and monitor in which case why not just buy a gaming desktop as that is pretty much what you ended up with.
Finally, some might say most importantly: You sold it at a discount. Damn right you did, you broke the fucker. Even if it had been returned to them and fixed first you are still basically talking about a second hand PC so you might as well have thrown it in the bin. Second hand items are immediately worth half the list value at most in my world, one that had already been sent back to the manufacturer for warranty repair is half again.
I could understand it if you put up with using it for a year or two but made a decision to not buy one again but that is not what you said. The only way you would do what you did is if you already had far too much money at the start, in which case you probably should have bought a Mac all along.
I can understand people buying Macs, I have been damn near buying one myself but not to run games on. I would buy it for the OS, the rugged design, the warranty, and everything else great about them. Who the hell even considers one as a gaming box though?
Windows 8 is DOA, everyone hates it. Gamers wont use it, Businesses wont use it. The average user will hate it.
I am not so sure about this. The machine he describes is actually a perfect fit for Windows 8 (I have been using the preview edition solidly since it came out so have a vague idea). You can stick to the metro interface when using the laptop as a touchscreen tablet but then use a trackpad or mouse and keyboard if you need to.
Don't get me wrong I am not saying that Windows 8 is sterling example of a desktop OS (lol, I can't even type that without laughing my ass off) but in the case of convertible tablet / laptops maybe it will be a half decent niche player. It will offer a far smoother transition than a windows7 / android dual boot which would be its main competitor one these machines.
Or course it may be that I am the only person interested in a top notch laptop that can double as tablet in which case Win8 is doomed. I like the idea though as I am currently on a 12inch lenovo laptop and now cannot be tempted back to a full size 15inch laptop for love nor money. I also have a 10 inch tablet and really like the idea of rolling both devices into one. I have a sneaky suspicion that there may be other people like me who are crying out for one size fits all device.
I would really like slightly larger screen on my tablet so I can watch movies. I do not always want the hassle of a keyboard though so if I can have it folded against the back of screen somehow like on my old tytn ii (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_TyTN_II) that would be perfect. I have often thought about the idea of a detachable keyboard but the problem there is the one time you need it is the one time you leave it at home. The only thing of concern with a device like this to my mind is the weight.
I know devices like this have been tried before but the reason I have never bothered with one is that neither OS is a great fit for when the device is being used in the other form factor. My ideal device would be one that instantly changed between android and windows7 when you opened the keyboard but had a way of telling the running applications to be aware of the new form factor and their layouts changed accordingly, kind of like my tablet does but on steroids.
If Windows 8 can bridge these two gaps by the time of SP1 or whatever then it might actually get some users, especially if the next generation of ultrabooks are as he predicts. Neither of these things is beyond realms of possibility in my mind.
I don't care about "respect as a responsible road user"
Then you do not belong on the road.
I'm guilty of going through red lights on my bike when I deem it safe to do so, but I think the problem kind of fixes itself. People who cycle dangerously tend to learn quickly by their mistakes or are no longer around to repeat their mistakes.
The part of the problem that does not fix itself though is that other road users who actually stop at red lights think why the hell you should you get away with that when they can't as they have number plates. This build up a general resentment of cyclists that I believe contributes to the "bikes don't belong on the road" attitude of many car drivers.
Also, my hatred of cyclists running red lights comes from them almost hitting me when I am on pedestrian crossings and they fly through on red dodging people. They might not actually hit anyone, but it is still a shock to most pedestrians and it annoys the shit out of them to have a fast moving bike fly past you while you have the right of way.
In short; if you want to be treated with respect as a responsible road user as a cyclist then first behave like one. Running red lights is above all illegal but it also shows you to be an utter twat who thinks the rules of road only apply to other people.
Now about the German Autobahn: nationwide there is no mandatory speed limit. There is a "recommended" speed limit of 130 km/h, but you are free to go over that if you like. Now as the population has been increasing and the roads were getting busier and cities larger, some parts of some roads did get a speed limit. That's mainly near large cities, on roads with heavy traffic or on roads with poor far-field vision (lots of bends and hills). Also limits may apply in certain conditions, such as when it rains and the roads are wet. But in general, all Autobahns are still completely speed unlimited.
There is something else though that I remember about Germany from when I was there a few years ago. I was in a car with a German friend and we were driving down the autobahn when it started to rain, heavily. It was so heavy in fact that it started to make it difficult to see where you were going. Note however that I say difficult, not impossible. I have certainly been in heavy rain storms in the UK where we carried driving. As it was we quickly pulled off the autobahn and found somewhere out of the rain to stop. What surprised me was how many other people did the same. It seemed that the vast majority of people pulled off the road (quite sensibly) and delayed their journey a bit.
Where I am from in the UK hardly anyone would do this, we would all just carry on and accept the vastly increased chances of having an accident. I know lots of people will now just reply that in the UK it is because our weather is always shit, but we have recently seen different freak whether in terms of snow as well yet people still try and drive in that without snow chains.
The difference is that we are far more likely to just accept that accidents sometimes happen and somehow think this mitigates any responsibility to try and avoid them whenever possible. I have heard this argument coming from motorists quite a lot with regard to occasional low speed collisions and the problem is that in those cases if the collision involves a cyclist he always comes off worse, maybe even fatally so.
I think the solution is simple: A zero tolerance approach to people not following the rules of the road. (This applies to bikes too btw, no running red lights)
I would rather see every cyclist that jumped a red light get fined than a few of them killed. Maybe crush their bike if they get caught more than a few times too. I would like to see them banned but since their is no licence requirement that is tricky. I am not totally against the idea that cyclists should do a cycling test though.
This way bad drivers would be removed from the road (by being banned from driving) once they demonstrated they ignored the relevant rules in front of the police a few times. This would do a great deal to encourage very careful driving and hence would do vastly reduce the amount of deaths on our roads. In my country road deaths are four times more common than murders so please don't make the argument that driving like a moron is not a real crime and enforcing traffic laws is not a good use of police time.
About 30 years back, long before there were helmet laws I was in a serious bicycle accident, suffered serious head injury. I've long since recovered, though the facial scars remain, and I'll always have a titanium wire keeping one piece of my skull connected to the other part. And no other vehicle was involved, on a dark road my 10 speed bikes tire got caught in a sewer grating, propelling me forward and off the bike.
Wow. About 10 years ago I had an identical accident.
I was riding flat out through a car park near where I lived at night (no lights, no helmet). Unfortunately the car park had newly installed a chain that went across the entrance at about 6 inches from the ground. The first I knew of the chain was when I heard slight clank as my front wheel hit it, half a second later I was doing a superman impression over the handlebars. Thankfully I remember the clank as I looked down at it just in time so that when I flew over the handlbars I was already bent slightly forward. This meant I did not go face first into the tarmac and instead landed on the back of my skull, before rolling onto my back and cracking a rib or two.
Your story just reminded me how lucky I was that I looked down and so didn't plant my face.
It might have had support for multi monitors, but it was far more awkward to setup and was never quite as good.
I have been hooked on multi monitor setups since I had a Matrix g550 a few years back. Newly released Windows XP as it was in those days just dealt with it all beautifully.
Linux on the other hand used to be a bit more quirky, certainly under Gnome. You could use both monitors as a single desktop but if you did the maximise button would insist on maximising everything across both monitors instead of just the one the application was running on. It also centered every new application launched on the join between the two monitors instead of letting you designate one as a primary monitor.
If you chose to keep them as separate desktops then they ended up completely separate and there was no way to drag an application between them using the mouse.
The fact is that while Linux might have had multi-monitor support first Windows XP actually made it useful.
Bask in it, motherfuckers.
Americans always love to say how great freedom of speech is, but when I started making jokes about 9-11 they got all offended when I was there.
Even if you try and make the serious point that is quite widely believed in some parts of the world that the US government knew 9-11 was going to happen and quite happily let it in order to get public support for a war on terror there are many people in the US who immediately want to resort to violence (in the punching your face in way). This is not exactly basking in freedom of speech is it?
I was very happy to see the recent bunch of cartoons that came from Egypt taking the piss out of us back as that was at least a sign that some muslims are realising that the best way to counter distasteful jokes is to just fire some back in our direction. That helps us see things in a different light if we can at least see the hypocrisy in us defending the freedom to offend others while not recognising others right to offend us as well.
In my experience we have a greater percentage of people with a sense of humour with regard to these things but I think that is just a symptom of our higher general levels of education.
This is mental. HFCS is, metabolically, no better and no worse than cane sugar or fructose you get from fruits.
It is very different chemically. It contains an entirely different ratio of fructose, sucrose and glucose. Instead of sucrose you get primarily in cane or beet sugar it contains fructose. HFCS actually contains almost no sucrose.
As to whether it is worse or better the issue I was describing is that we have no idea as nobody ever tried to find out when it was first invented. The FDA just checked it was not poisonous then approved it for sale en mass. Recently there have been studies but they have been inconclusive.
Ya, it's mental. Nobody would ever think HFCS is behind any of this. Our secret plan rolls on!
You jest but I think it is a large part of the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
Crap like that is stuff that has been recently invented to help the food industry. It is not entirely natural so is not something our bodies have evolved to deal with over time. It does however trigger the correct taste bud response as that was a large part of the criteria in its design. It was also designed to be cheap as chips to produce, help american corn production and avoid US dependence on importing sugar although I have no idea why the US can't just grow it's own sugar like everyone else. There must be some reason why corn is easier to grow than sugar but I am not a farmer.
The reality of this stuff and many other recent inventions by the food industry is that they are not tested to the level that would be needed to measure their long term effects. We might test them to make sure they are not poisonous but that only means it's safe to consume on the level we now do. Almost every food factory in the US now uses a process based on things like HFCS as a replacement for sugar. This means we consume tons of the stuff each year whereas our grand parents would never have consumed it at all.
Interestingly most of Europe never adopted HFCS so we use sugar for most industrial food production and we don't have the same obesity problem. That is far from conclusive evidence though but I do think that HFCS is just one of many things that the US food industry adopted that are contributing.
There are also no doubt other causes some of which are social issues. Things like football in the US where short sprints and bulk are more important than aerobic fitness and stamina are also a big factor.