Rexfeng

When Wastelands Interactive head Leszek Lisowski found a Steam key he thought he'd given to a successful YouTuber on a resale site, he knew something was wrong.

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Russell Ivanovic:

Tim Cook keeps telling us that “Only Apple” could do the amazing things it does. I just wish that Apple would slow down their breakneck pace and spend the time required to build stable software that their hardware so desperately needs. The yearly release cycles of OS X, iOS, iPhone & iPad are resulting in too many things seeing the light of day that aren’t finished yet. Perhaps the world wouldn’t let them, perhaps the expectations are now too high, but I’d kill for Snow iOS 8 and Snow Yosemite next year. I’m fairly confident I’m not alone in that feeling.

From the outside, it seems like Apple’s software teams can’t keep up with the pace of the hardware teams. Major new versions of iOS aren’t released “when they’re ready”, they’re released when the new iPhone hardware ships. On Twitter the other day, I suggested that perhaps Apple should decouple major iOS feature releases from the iPhone hardware schedule. That’s probably untenable from a marketing perspective, and it might just make things more complex from a QA perspective. But something has to give.

(Just today: My iPhone 6 rebooted after I changed the home screen wallpaper. Tapped a new image in the wallpaper settings, and poof, it rebooted. Worse, it never stopped rebooting. Endless reboot cycle. Now I’m doing a full restore with iTunes. After changing my wallpaper to a different image.)

What happens if you take one of the most futuristic production cars ever made and tweak it just a little bit to turn it into a beast?

Volkswagen knows the answer: it took its ultra-efficient XL1 and swapped out the 47-horsepower diesel engine for the fire-breathing 1,199cc V-twin out of the Ducati 1199 Superleggera superbike. (Volkswagen Group's Audi acquired Ducati a couple years ago, so this is the best kind of corporate synergy we're seeing here.) The car, which weighs under 2,000 pounds,...

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Koreatown's essential dumpling shack, popularized by Anthony Bourdain, has a third location down in Torrance. Their second spot is located in OC's Garden Grove.

In need of some quick Korean snacks but stuck in the South Bay? Well there's the new Myung In Dumplings to the rescue in the form of huge "king" buns chock full of veggies and meat, or hand made steamed dumplings stuffed like beggars purses now open in Torrance inside S-Mart. Anthony Bourdain stopped by with artist David Choe at the Koreatown shop, with this shop sporting a similar menu of beef noodle soups, pickled veggies, and dumplings galore. Cash only at the moment.

Myung In Dumplings
2515 W. Torrance Blvd
Torrance, CA 90503

The phrases "plug-in hybrid" and "bone-crushing power" don't typically go together, but Lamborghini's Asterion — which just broke cover at the Paris Motor Show — is doing its best to put them in the same sentence.

The car's full name is actually Asterion LPI 910-4: LPI stands for "longitudinale posteriore ibrido," a reference to the location of the 610-horsepower V10 and the hybrid drivetrain. 910-4 refers to the all-wheel-drive configuration and the 910 total horsepower, 300 of which comes...

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Dinner — now a lesson in supply and demand.

New food-delivery start-up Sprig has been the talk of Silicon Valley. It's apparently swimming in money and packing serious culinary star power, but the endeavor sure turned heads today by announcing it's rolling out the nefarious system of "dynamic delivery fees." Co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani tells Fast Company prices "will go lower," too, "depending on the situation," which means, theoretically, "you may even see free delivery," but this is better translated as: When you're hungriest, it's highly likely food's going to cost the most.

In a lengthy defense over at Medium, Biyani writes the fees are necessary for Sprig "to continue to evolve." The company blames California's drought for high food prices and offers the usual twofold rationale: to "provide fair compensation for our hard-working Sprig Servers" and "so you can get a Sprig meal right when you want it, straight to your desk or door." The idea of surge pricing works the other way, too, though Uber's shown to how greatly diminished of an effect, considering prices can climb eightfold and having dinner isn't quite the same as a car service that wheels you home in a dry pair of Uggs.

[Medium via Fast Company]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: the future, food delivery, sprig, surge pricing, tech

In a nice little example of what happens when there's actually some competition in a market, Verizon has become the third carrier to double the data it offers in many of its largest family plans. Verizon is now offering 30GB for $130, 40GB for $150, and 60GB for $225, though you'll also have to pay a per-line fee. That's identical to what AT&T is now offering, while Sprint's offerings are currently twice those for nearly the same prices. The promotion runs through the end of October, like those from Sprint and AT&T.

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Joshua Wong, a 17-year-old student, has been at the center of the democracy movement as young activists represent a troubling confirmation for officials that their generation is the one most alienated from Beijing.

Strasbourg-based photographer Julien Douvier utlilizes a variety of techniques to create these beautifully meditative cinemagraphs of urban life and nature. He films and edits every image with an obsessive attention to detail, a fact not lost on several fashion clients that have commissioned Douvier to bring their brands to life recently. You can follow more of his personal and commerical work on Tumblr and on Behance. (via Designtaxi, Ignant)

This is kind of a tough exercise, but look at the image above, which displays every currently shipping iPhone, and try if you can to momentarily disregard the size of each, as well as their respective technical specifications. If you can pull that off, then ask yourself which of these four models looks the newest,…

Advertise on Subtraction.com.

 As the mobile messaging company Kakao Corp. gets ready to celebrate the culmination of its long-awaited initial public offering on the Korean stock exchange, a world away, on Sand Hill Road, the partners at venture capital firm DCM are probably getting ready to do some celebrating of their own. Three years after its initial investment in Kakao, the venture firm will be able to harvest the… Read More

Character transformations in this year's Super Smash Bros. were nixed due to Nintendo 3DS hardware limitations, director Masahiro Sakurai told Famitsu this week (via Siliconera). Previous series entries featured characters that could switch outfits...

Eleanor Lutz has a degree in molecular biology, works as a designer, and loves to combine the two interests by making these wonderful information graphics on her site, Tabletop Whale. Her most recent post is an animated graphic showing how several animals (birds, bats, insects) move their wings while flying.

I love love love Lutz's animated chart of North American butterflies. So playful!

There are only four posts on the site so far, but she's done other stuff as well; this woodcut map for instance. Prints are available...I'm getting one of the butterflies for sure.

Tags: design   Eleanor Lutz   infoviz   science

Science illustrator and animator Eleanor Lutz has created these cool animated technical drawings of flying animals in motion. I would love to paths the wings draw in 3D.

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We have covered Robert Bösch's photos featuring a hundred alpinists doing crazy things before. but here are the complete series because they are simply beautiful and amazing. Some are pretty damn crazy too, like the one above.

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A bar for people who love Michael Jackson and Street Fighter II.

The retro arcade game-filled Barcade is opening its fifth location and first bar focused on 90's era video games next week in the old Kim's Video space, which it took over back in May. Classics games like "Rampage: World Tour" and "Street Fighter II" will be there, and so will "Moonwalker" (a game featuring Michael Jackson).

To fuel all of that gaming there will be pub fare, similar to what they serve at the Chelsea location. Dishes include a chicken banh mi and a "fat sandwich" called the Fat St. Mark's, stuffed with fried chicken, pulled pork, fries, cheese sauce, and a fried egg (perhaps not the best thing to eat mid-DDR-ing). To drink there will be 24 American beers on tap and a few wines. The crew opted not to serve hard liquor after a community board meeting where neighbors voiced concerns over a noisy crowd coming from the bar late at night. 6 St. Marks Place, East Village

Filed under: Mazda, Design/Style

Brands like Porsche and Ferrari make a mint every year by selling branded lifestyle goods like shoes, hats and even wilder items. Bugatti takes things to the extremes with things like its $84,000 belt buckle. These products not only make their respective companies some extra money, but they reaffirm their high-end design aspirations to wealthy buyers. However, the next firm possibly dipping its toe into this upscale pool is a bit more mass-market - Mazda.

That's right. The Japanese automaker best known among enthusiasts for its segment-defining Miata and rotary engines is considering its own line of luxury goods in the coming years called Mazda Design. The project is the brainchild of styling boss Ikuo Maeda, and according to Automotive News, he has backing from company CEO Masamichi Kogai. Although the green light isn't quite on yet, Maeda is already brainstorming. "Not only furniture, but I'd like to build a Mazda Design brand. That's my dream," he said to Automotive News.

The possible project is just one aspect of Mazda's move to become a near-premium brand. According to Automotive News, it wants to see higher transaction prices partially by offering more stylish design than its rivals. Launching a line of luxury goods is meant to communicate this new focus to customers.

The Mazda Design line was previewed with the Kodo Chair (pictured above) at last year's Milan Design Week. Named after the brand's current, swoopy styling language, the seat mixed metal and leather in a reclined position to conjure up something out of a futuristic racecar.

Still, the move could be a gamble. Bugatti, Porsche and Ferrari sell vehicles to a wealthy clientele for whom dropping a few grand on something frivolous doesn't matter match. Mazda buyers might not have that luxury.

Mazda mulling furniture, designer goods in bid to command higher prices originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 01 Oct 2014 08:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft is launching Sway today, a new app that’s part of the company’s Office family of products. It will sit alongside the regular Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote apps as a rich content creation tool. In its most basic form, Sway allows anyone to create a beautiful website from just images and text without any effort, and it’s all what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) — a modern and simple version of FrontPage. Despite that, Microsoft is taking an interesting approach with Sway, using the company’s powerful Azure cloud servers to suggest page layouts and quickly render content on the fly.

Sway will format pictures and text in a way that its algorithm feels is appropriate, even picking colors from photos to apply to the site....

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Remember that Pokémon iPad game that was teased not too long ago? Well, if the mere mention of it stoked a fire inside that made you want to abandon Blizzard's Hearthstone forever, Joystiq has spotted that the pocket monster trading card game is...

Clay Shirky:

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider is useful here. In Haidt’s telling, the mind is like an elephant (the emotions) with a rider (the intellect) on top. The rider can see and plan ahead, but the elephant is far more powerful. Sometimes the rider and the elephant work together (the ideal in classroom settings), but if they conflict, the elephant usually wins.

After reading Haidt, I’ve stopped thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of them as people trying to pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional reaction. (This is even harder for young people, the elephant so strong, the rider still a novice.)

Interesting comparison to second-hand smoking, too:

The final realization — the one that firmly tipped me over into the “No devices in class” camp — was this: screens generate distraction in a manner akin to second-hand smoke. A paper with the blunt title Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers says it all.

This week saw a truly bizarre twitter fight between two image-mashing bots. In the red corner, there was @pixelsorter, designed to create relaxed, fuzzy remixes of photos, like the one above. In the blue corner, @badpng was running every image through a broken PNG encoding algorithm, resulting in harsh compression and jarring color shifts. Pixelsorter's creator, Way Spurr-Chen, sent the same photo to both bots, locking them in a potentially endless back-and-forth, chewing on the same image over and over until it disintegrated into a mess of pixels.

It started with this...

@badpng @pixelsorter pic.twitter.com/rb4tJNVDss

— Way Spurr-Chen (@wayspurrchen) September 23, 2014

...which turned into this.

@wayspurrchen @pixelsorter p...

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Dan Provost, Studio Neat:

On Apple’s website, they claim that in time-lapse mode, “iOS 8 does all the work, snapping photos at dynamically selected intervals.” When I first read this, I thought they were doing something super fancy, like monitoring the frame for movement and only snapping a picture when something changes. On deeper reflection, this would be a bad idea. Time-lapse videos look best when they are buttery smooth, and dynamically selecting intervals in this fashion would create a jittery and jerky video. So what does Apple mean by “dynamically selected intervals”?

Turns out, what Apple is doing is quite simple, and indeed, pretty clever.

California has become the first US state to sign into law a ban on single-use plastic bags, including those used for bagging up purchases at grocery stores. The legislation is meant to cut down on waste throughout the state and to help protect its land from pollution. The ban will begin this coming July in grocery stores and pharmacies, and it'll expand to convenience stores and liquor stores one year later. "This bill is a step in the right direction," California Governor Jerry Brown says in a statement. "It reduces the torrent of plastic polluting our beaches, parks, and even the vast ocean itself.

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 Another day, another -Gate. This time the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, the latest phablet to enamor the Android crowd, has been reported shipping with a thin gap between the screen and the walls of the case. The issue, reported on iTToday in South Korea, seems to affect a small number of devices. According to the piece, two pieces of paper or a business card can fit snugly into the gap. This… Read More

Google wants to make backpacks a thing of the past by letting students store all of their files online, and it's going to start giving students enough space to actually do that. Students, teachers, and anyone else using a Google Apps for Education account will soon be given unlimited storage and the ability to keep files of up to a whopping 5TB in size on Google Drive. Unfortunately, just being a student isn't enough to get this account — you'll have to attend an institution that supports Google's education suite. But it should be a pretty compelling offer for many, especially given that it's free to nonprofit educational institutions.

These same features were introduced to users of Google's business suite back in June, so it isn't...

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Snap, crackle, and pop.

Right now in some windowless PepsiCo food lab, scientists are doing crazy and secret things to everybody's favorite exploding candy — enough, at least, to convince the Quaker Oats parent company it's time to go after a patent. Sure, companies file preemptively for all kinds oft-trademarked things, all the time, but a healthy-ish granola bar sold with some sugary, carbonated land mines embedded right in there seems so trashy it's destined to become a reality.

"Bite-size pieces, orbs, donuts, and other three dimensional geometric shapes are [also] contemplated within the scope of the invention," the patent — for a "particulate mixture either therein or as a coating to the chewy granola product base," specifically — says. There goes that "all-natural" label.

[Food Navigator]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: poor mikey, carbonated candy, frankenfood, granola bars, pepsico, pop rocks

The story of how Eataly landed in Century City after years of speculation that it was going to land at various hot spots around Los Angeles.

Despite an internal confirmation that Eataly would be opening inside Westfield Century City, today Mario Batali affirmed to the LA Times that his massive Italian food emporium would indeed be landing at the outdoor mall in 2017. Coinciding with the Westfield's complete remodel, Batali says that this location will have approximately the same 50,000 square feet as the New York and Chicago outlets, though with rooftop and outdoor seating here in LA that wouldn't be possible in colder cities.

Eataly is known for its numerous food court-style restaurants that feature the best from Italy's food canon from seafood and cheese to meats and pasta. In addition, the emporium serves gelato, rotisseries, paninis, baked goods, salumi, and even produce. Insisting that the concept isn't a "chain," Batali tells the Times that LA's Eataly will draw from nearby purveyors and sources to reflect a local flavor.

This marks the third Eataly location in the U.S., though the Oscar Farinetti-founded concept has plans to open everywhere from Moscow, Japan, and Istanbul in the next few years.
· All Eataly Coverage [~ELA~]

The front page of the internet has a lot more money in the bank, with Reddit confirming $50 million in new funding. More interesting than the amount raised, however, was that investors promised 10 percent of their new equity in the company will be shared with community members, a highly unusual move. While the exact mechanics of how these shares will be distributed to users is not yet clear, lead investor Sam Altman told The Verge that it will most likely use a block chain method similar to the systems used to create and distribute Bitcoin.

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