D G

submitted by KieranMark [link] [51 comments]

submitted by youruncleteabag [link] [160 comments]

How many managers does it take to change a light bulb?

1) A roomful - they have to hold a meeting to discuss all the ramifications of the change.

2) None, they like to keep employees in the dark.

3) "This topic was resumed from last week's discussion, but is incomplete pending resolution of some action items. It will be continued next week. Meanwhile ..."

4) "We've formed a task-force to study the problem of why light bulbs burn out, and to figure out what, exactly, we as supervisors can do to make the bulbs work smarter, not harder."

[trent perez/via]

godotal:

Arcade Fire

submitted by flacid_pianist
[link] [330 comments]

From Slice

VIEW SLIDESHOW: My Pie Monday: Smoked Oysters, Chinese BBQ Pork, and More!

Spring is in the air, so smell the roses and check out the pies in this weeks new My Pie Monday! Check out all of the pies in their full glory in the slideshow.

As always, if you happen to whip up a pie at home, be sure to send us a shot for next week's My Pie Monday. Just take one snapshot of your homemade pizza, briefly describe your cooking method, and follow these instructions to get it to Slice HQ by 8pm EST on Thursday night. Please title your email "My Pie Monday" and make sure to include your Serious Eats username!

Looking for inspiration? Find dozens of recipes and home kitchen adaptations in our Pizza-Making Guide or peruse our collection of past My Pie Monday contributions.

About the author: Kate Andersen is a Contributing Editor for Slice.

submitted by beet111 [link] [105 comments]

A new Trader Joe’s store has opened in Washington, D.C. in the same neighborhood as an existing Whole Foods. This is causing some confusion in the area, so Dan Zak designed a helpful flow chart for readers of the Washington Post to figure out which store best suits them. They are both foreign to me, as my small town has three groceries (four if you count Walmart), and Kroger is the fanciest of them. But at least they will accept a check. What this chart tells me is that both stores carry foods not normally found at a mom-and-pop grocery, but how they differ from each other is still confusing. The real question for me is: which one is more affordable? -via Laughing Squid

A company called Anki made its public debut last year on one of the best stages any company could hope for — Apple's annual developer conference, WWDC.

It had been operating quietly since February 2012 to refine its product — robotic toy cars that race around a special track, all controlled by an iPhone. It's a bit like a real-life version of Mario Kart: Cars can earn powerups like faster top speeds, or weapons for disabling opponents' cars.

On the surface, it is nothing more than a toy company. But it got the attention of investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Two Sigma, and Index Ventures, who collectively invested $50 million. Marc Andreessen calls it "one of the best robotics startups I've ever seen." The company's chief product officer gave Business Insider an update on their progress recently.

Its $200 starter kit comes with a racetrack and two cars, and customers have so far collectively raced 68 million laps around the track. We asked Anki for sales numbers, but it declined to give out that data.

"The first problem anyone faces in robotics is positioning, or determining where your robot is in its environment," said Mark Palatucci, Anki's Chief Product Officer. "Second is reasoning. You have to give the robot a goal and it needs to determine the sequence of actions it needs to take to accomplish that goal. Last are the controls — this is the nitty-gritty, where you actually execute a task and command voltages to motors that manipulate and move the robot."

The entertainment factor can't be denied — "We eat our own dog food quite often," said Palatucci. "We have weekly tournaments at the office. It's a lot of fun."

Here's a GIF from the WWDC presentation, in which Anki co-founder Boris Sofman demos Anki Drive.

The Anki Drive racetrack is made using a special ink that's transparent in the infrared spectrum even though our eyes register it as black. The bottoms of the cars use special cameras and lights that let them see through the ink to the bits of information encoded there, and this information is sent back wirelessly to phones 500 times per second as a car moves around the track.

Positioning: Solved.

Players are racing against autonomous cars controlled by Anki software. The cars don't have an onboard "brain" that enables them to "think" for themselves; this task is outsourced to the players' phones, which receive positioning data from the cars, then beam instructions back to the cars via Bluetooth LE, a wireless communications standard. Since the phone knows the location of all cars on the track, it can plan routes and attack other vehicles with its cars' weapons.

Implementing users' smartphones this way saves Anki money because it can offload the heavy lifting of "thinking" to a device that users already own. And Anki's software has proven to be a vicious opponent: When set to "hard" mode, the cars will beat a human player nine out of 10 times.

Reasoning: Solved.

When it comes to actually moving around a track, Anki's cars are electronically and mechanically identical. They derive their unique characteristics from Anki's software, which enables things like increased top speeds, the ability to execute 180-degree turns, or the ability to wield some weapons for blasting opponents off the track. "Because so much is driven by software," said Palatucci, "we can easily send updates to the App Store that still expand the gameplay after a single hardware purchase."

Controls: Solved.

Palatucci and Sofman began work on Anki Drive about six years ago while pursuing their PhDs in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. After a lot of night and weekend effort, the company sought out a partnership with Apple, which it's maintained for "the better part of a year." Anki approached Apple because "mobile phones are central to what we are doing," says Palatucci. "We thought their retail stores would be a perfect way for us to distribute, and Apple got behind Bluetooth LE two years before most others."

Since its launch at WWDC, Anki Drive was named one of the best inventions of 2013 by Time, and Anki even got some attention on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. In keeping with the commitment to continue adding to the cars' software, the company released several new upgrades at the beginning of the year to make for an enhanced racing experience (there's even a horn upgrade — "honk" it and opponents' cars move out of your way).

Palatucci kept talk of the future a bit vague, but seems most excited by the fact that simple software updates can continue to make the game a repeatably enjoyable product: "It's really exciting for potential new customers to realize Anki Drive is an evolving experience."

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I wasn’t expecting too much from this at first, but somehow, it was strangely entertaining.

[dfj688 | Via LS]

Oh, did you have something to do today? Well, too bad. This nine-hour video of start screens for hundreds of Super Nintendo Entertainment System games is here to mock your work ethic.

Read more...

Mobile app performance management company Crittercism publish a study on the crash rate for apps on iOS and Android (PDF). Somewhat surprisingly, it says that iOS Apps crash more than Android. Chart via Statista. 

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