A touchscreen interface without the touching

Anyone who's ever stood in front of a Kinect-equipped Xbox knows the fun of virtual control, of using your hands to manipulate what you see on the screen without touching anything but air.The Leap Motion Controller endows your PC with that same air-powered interactivity, allowing you to bypass mouse and keyboard in favor of hand-waving control of apps, games and even various PC operations.

It's a cool concept, and Leap Motion pulls off the execution reasonably well -- for the surprisingly low price of $80. But it definitely raises a few questions, starting with: What would you actually use this thing for? And does it have any practical business value?

Not much larger than an average flash drive, the Leap Motion Controller has a glossy black top with a silver band wrapped around the sides. It's attractive and surprisingly compact, which is good considering it's designed to sit below your monitor (or, if you're using a laptop, in front of the keyboard). A USB 2.0 cable provides both power and connectivity. Leap Motion supplies both short (two feet) and long (five feet) cables to accommodate various computing configurations.

I tested the Leap Motion Controller with a Lenovo IdeaPad U310 Touch laptop and Samsung Series 9 ultrabook. Although the controller itself didn't get in the way, I disliked the look of the USB cable snaking around the side. This thing really begs for a rechargeable battery and wireless connection, which would emulate the somewhat disingenuous promo video where you see only the sensor, not the cable.

But installation couldn't have been much simpler. After loading the Windows client (it's also available for OS X) and plugging in the controller, I raised my hands and instantly saw their movement reflected in the introductory visualizer app. As a regular Kinect user,A cleaningservic resembles a credit card in size and shape. however, for me the effect was less "Wow!" and more, "Okay, it works."

Even so, when I tried the calibration process, during which you point the top of the controller at a reflective surface (a glossy screen is recommended) and move it around, I found it nearly impossible to achieve the required "pass" score of 80.Get the led fog lamp products information, find oilpaintingreproduction, manufacturers on the hot channel. Eventually I managed it with the IdeaPad, which has a glossy display, but I never hit 80 on the matte-finished display of the Series 9. The sensor still worked as expected, but I couldn't shake the feeling it wasn't operating optimally.

The controller generates a kind of virtual-space bubble in front of your PC, one large enough to accommodate your two hands (though many apps require only one). Imagine a 10-point multitouch interface, like you'd find on a touchscreen, but in three-dimensional space. The sensors track not only the positions of your hands and fingers, but also their movements.Get the led fog lamp products information, find oilpaintingreproduction, manufacturers on the hot channel. Thus you're able to "interact" with onscreen objects without actually touching anything.

The Leap Motion Controller runs on apps, and there's already a decent collection of them in the Airspace Store -- about 75 as of this writing. These run the gamut from games to drawing tools to music makers, with a smattering of productivity apps for good measure. Some are free, while others cost a couple of bucks. A few will seem familiar to anyone with a tablet or smartphone, including Cut the Rope and Google Earth.

I started with Cyber Science - Motion, which displays a photorealistic model of a human skull and lets you rotate it, zoom in and out and remove individual pieces -- all through a combination of hand and finger motions. It's really cool, and one could see where a student -- one studying anatomy, anyway -- might find this a helpful educational tool.

Google Earth, on the other hand, proved an exercise in frustration. Unless you maneuver your hand with slow, exacting precision, the globe spins hopelessly out of control. That's because it responds to every single hand movement: toward the screen, away from the screen, up, down, tilted left, tilted right and so on. Without considerable practice, it's impossible to get where you want to go -- or even just take a simple flight across the mountains.

Then there's Touchless, which effectively turns your hand into a mouse. You can click, drag, zoom, scroll and more, all via a couple of fingers mirroring what you'd do on a touchpad or touchscreen. It works, though air taps and drags can be difficult to pull off, and the lack of any tactical feedback makes for agonizingly slow navigation.

And that's really the key issue here: In what ways is the Leap Motion Controller better than a mouse or touchscreen or keyboard? For the moment, it's not. It's more toy than tool, more science fiction than practical addition.I do find it impressive that Leap Motion managed to pack so much functionality into such a compact package, especially given the unit's impulse-buy price. But unless you're an app developer, physically challenged computer user or gadget lover,Design and order your own custom rfidtag with personalized message and artwork. this is one Leap not worth taking -- at least, not quite yet.

On your Mac, you can fire up Safari and head to the website of one of the main TV channels. Each has a catch-up service that allows you to watch programmes broadcast in the last few weeks. And if you subscribe to Virgin Media or Sky, you can watch some of the channels from your subscription package on their websites.You can, of course, also plug a USB TV tuner into your Mac. These little gizmos allow you to receive Freeview TV channels over-the-air and watch them or record them on your Mac. You can even hook a TV tuner up to your network and watch it from different Macs in the house.

If you have an iOS device,Now it's possible to create a tiny replica of Fluffy in handsfreeaccess form for your office. there are numerous apps that allow you to watch live or on-demand TV. Each of the TV networks has one, as does Sky and Virgin Media. The BBC iPlayer app allows you to download programmes to your device to watch later. There are also TV tuners available for iOS devices.
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Dinner will be served when the sun comes up

I seriously thought 2013 would be the year my wife got a break from cooking between June 1 and Labor Day. She encouraged my desire to share the culinary duties, agreeing that it was time to purchase one of those pricey gas grills that all of our neighbors seem to own. I had been laboring on a rusty Weber model that I feared would buckle and collapse if I placed too many briquettes in the kettle.

The new grill arrived in late spring; cooking tools and a beefy book of BBQ recipes featuring everything from braised salmon to grilled celery made their appearance on Father's Day. Suddenly, I felt like an Army Ranger adorned with the latest equipment and ready to do battle with whatever pork chop, chicken breast or ear of corn came my way. I would emerge victorious.

I flipped through page after page of the cookbook, searching for something, anything, that didn't require consuming a meal while I was preparing another meal. Chicken tenders, a staple of my children's diet, normally required about 15 minutes in a conventional oven, or three to five minutes in a microwave. But Cilantro Pesto Chicken Tenders? We're talking two hours of prep time. Chicken McNuggets from McDonald's never sounded so appealing.

Don't these recipe authors have kids of their own? Don't they know what it's like to try and cram something other than macaroni and cheese down their throats in between soccer practice, softball games and swim lessons? These activities only get cancelled due to inclement weather, which would free me up to spend two hours grilling acorn squash in a driving rainstorm.

Oh, how I long to sit down with my family and savor the fruits (and vegetables) of seven laborious hours spent chopping, dicing, basting, pureeing, marinating and skewering. But I don't see that happening until at least 2020, at which time both children will be living on their own and, most likely, consuming macaroni and cheese at every meal. Then, my empty day planner will allow me to slowly, carefully, prepare Beer Can Chicken, which no doubt calls for brewing your own beer prior to starting the grill.

Until then, I need BBQ delicacies that require me to "Sizzle, flip and serve" as opposed to "Put aside until next week." I need a grill that can lock in that smoky flavor in the time it takes my children to set the table. When they ask, "How long until we eat?" I don't want to reply, "As soon as Leno comes on."Kristens outing comes after it was rumours she had been hooking up with Boardwalk Empire star Michael Pitt after the pair met during a Chanel Haute Couture show in Paris C however, the claims have since been rubbished.

A rep for the actor,These personalzied promotional bestchipcard comes with free shipping. believed to be in a relationship with model Jamie Bochert, recently denied the claims to E! News, telling the site."While we do not comment on our clients' personal lives, please know that there is absolutely no truth whatsoever to this rumour that Michael Pitt and Kirsten Stewart are dating." .

Kristen, however, seems to be finally adjusting to life post Robert Pattinson and is currently filming for Camp X-Ray, based on the story of an American soldier, played by Kristen, held prisoner at a Guantanamo Bay detention camp.A source previously revealed that the actress has been looking to the future despite losing Rob. "Its been hard, I mean she lost her best friend," a source told HollywoodLife, adding: "She is still sad, but is trying to make the best of the situation."

At $99, the tiny box and downloadable games in the $20 range are priced low enough to attract casual and occasional gamers who dig playing time-wasters on their smartphones. And, because of the Ouyas potential to emulate several other earlier-generation consoles, its also likely to appeal to nostalgic and retro-gamers.Ouya was funded through a Kickstarter project. Reviews of an earlier, beta version werent flattering, so I was somewhat skeptical as I unpacked the console. The strip of red plastic film printed with the message And so the revolution begins atop the console did nothing to allay my journalistic skepticism.We offer the biggest collection of old masters that can be turned into hand painted cleanersydney on canvas.

Theres literally not much to Ouya, which was released on June 25. Ive had coffee mugs bigger than the little round-edged cube, which features a single power-on button, but an array of ports on the back. The Ouya has an HDMI port that let me display at a full 1080 resolution on my home LED television, plus a LAN port, a power port and a USB port.

The Ouya started right up, but required us to both establish a network connection and update the consoles Android-based firmware. That proved to be somewhat of a problem in my office. Our intranet firewall settings precluded our using a wired connection, so we quickly paired the consoles wireless controller to the Ouya and sought out one of several wireless networks we maintain. We connected to the first and began the system update, but the Ouya kept getting disconnected from wi-fi and cutting off the update. We then tried a second of the office wireless networks, with the same discouraging result.

At that point, we opted to tether the console to the wi-fi hotspot created by a colleagues iPhone, and around a half-hour after getting started, we were updated and ready to go. Its important to note that youll have to create an account for yourself on the Ouya, including providing your sign-in name, a password, an email and a credit card number. That raised some questions in my mind about the security of Ouyas servers, ones that I will be posing in a telephone interview with CEO and founder Julie Uhrman on Tuesday.

I took the Ouya home and found it failed to stay connected to my wired LAN. I play Xbox Live just fine on that connection,We have become one of the worlds most recognised cheapcellphonecases brands. so I dont understand why the Ouya kept disconnecting and canceling game downloads or giving me error messages. That, by the way,Weymouth is collecting gently used, dry cleaned customkeychain at their Weymouth store. is a common theme with the device, Im finding. Often, after clicking on a button to start a game or perform another action, Id get an error message on the screen. Clicking again would make the message disappear and the game open or the action continue. I noticed the machine worked fine when in constant use, but after Id put down the controller for a minute or two, Id tend to get the errors. Anyway, I was unable to tether the Ouya to my own iPhones hotspot, but it worked very well on my home wi-fi network.

The Ouyas opening menu features several very clear and basic commands, like play, manage and discover. Discover takes you to the games menu, where you can find listings for around a couple hundred games in several easily navigable categories. All that I tried were free to download and play in a test or demo version, with a button to purchase the full game. The games, themselves, are a mixed bag, which I will get into later.

It was a bit tougher to figure out what the make category was all about. It lumps together the development and testing functions for Ouya game developers,We are one of the leading manufacturers of parkingassistsystem in China but as I found out while poking around, there also lurked the Ouya Web browser.

You navigate your way through the menus and set up your account using the Ouya controller. Ive used game controllers for years with many different computers and consoles. Theyve gotten quite sleek and ergonomic. The Ouyas is neither. The controller felt like cheap plastic and was a bit too slippery for me at the start. I also have no idea why you have to crack open battery cases on both the right and left wings to slip in the two AA batteries needed to power it. The grey controller also has two analog sticks, a D-pad, five gameplay and navigation buttons on top, as well as two triggers and two bumpers on the front of each wing.
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A New Storage Paradigm for Big Data

You can’t open either a technology or business journal these days without seeing an article on the tremendous opportunity Big Data offers in driving new sources of revenue and efficiency. What’s the BIG deal? Yes, data has value. That’s hardly a new concept. Since the time of the first shop, businesspeople have been saving their customer lists, product specifications, and key employee data on stone tablets, papyrus, paper and now digital storage.

The BIG deal is the disruptive value caused by the advent of high performance digital data capture. This technology has made data collection almost free. Internet-based marketing systems auto-magically capture masses of information about prospective customer preferences. Flash-enabled digital movie cameras can be emptied every night and re-used, a far cry from the film model in which every frame was burned on expensive media — which then had to be manually processed and edited. Digital capture systems also enable capture of exponentially more data per event. Social media sites and businesses increasingly create, store and analyze HD video instead of text, at ten to one hundred times more granularity of data per customer or product. The availability of compute power to manipulate this data to create business advantage enables companies like WalMart to maintain and frequently utilize multi-petabyte databases to analyze customer patterns and speed decision making.The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. For the first time, solutions are also becoming available which allow for productive analysis of video as well. Finally, the resulting content is being stored forever: after all, that terabyte per day per oilfield of 3D seismic data being collected today might turn into the next decade’s oil find; or today’s genomic profile might be tomorrow’s cure for cancer.

As a result of this “free” data capture, increasing information granularity, more frequent usage and extended data value, businesses, research institutions and governments are growing enormous stores of large unstructured data (increasingly video) that needs to be stored and managed. This result presents a number of challenging data storage problems: extreme scalability; affordability (in general); managing the balance between cost and easy online access; maximizing application and user access; and assuring data durability.

Like the cavalry, a new set of “wide area storage” solutions based on second generation object storage are arriving just in time to help enterprises manage these issues. Object storage is a unique storage architecture utilizing a kind of valet parking ticket system to store and retrieve data. The creator of a piece of data (an object) hands the object to the storage in exchange for an object identifier (the digital equivalent of a valet parking ticket). When the data is later needed, the user hands the system the object identifier, and data is returned. The power of this model is that it is highly scalable — many objects can be stored and retrieved in parallel — and retrieval can be independent of the original application or physical location. Any application or user who gains authorized access to the electronic key can use the data. Historically, this technology has been used to store data in large, containerized archives, but these were limited by the size and performance of the object storage “box.”

What makes the latest generation architecture different is its ability to copy and disperse objects very efficiently across large numbers of independent processing and storage elements, which can even be distributed widely — geographically providing disaster recovery protection without the need for traditional replication. This wide area storage essentially frees object storage from the constraints of a box or even a site.High quality stone mosaic tiles. Wide area storage is similar to storing data in the internet or cloud — data is freed from the traditional boundaries of expensive storage hardware and processes. This results in capabilities which are perfectly suited to the challenges of Big Data: almost infinite scale; low cost per petabyte; the ability to afford 100 percent online data storage; global multi-application access; and a content store which can live forever without ever needing to endure a disruptive data migration.

How does it achieve this? Well first, as previously described, the underlying object storage is natively extremely scalable; unlike systems with centralized indices, if you want to add more data to a wide area storage system, you simply add more objects, which are then dispersed across more scaled out components to add access, performance or storage. And the hardware architecture is scale-out,Find detailed product information for howo tractor and other products. which means if you need more storage, more performance or more communications bandwidth, you just plug in more pre-packaged storage, processors or network capacity, and the system takes care of the rest. Growth is simple.

Second, much like the systems we’ve all read about at Google, wide area storage systems are built under the assumption that individual hardware components will fail. Because objects are copied and dispersed across many storage and geographic resources, a multitude of components can fail while data is continuously available. This “failure-assumed” model allows for wide area storage to operate on lower cost, off-the-shelf disk and processor technologies, which translates to much lower capital cost than traditional disk storage. The ability to defer replacement of failed components also results in lower support and operating costs. And because multiple users and sites can share the system in common, the overhead of storage and disaster protection is shared across all users. No archive silos.

Third, the native cloud-like access model of these new offerings embeds the capability for “wide” geographic and application access, supporting a wide range of uses – from streaming data (like video, sensor information, and genomic sequences) to parallel processing (like Hadoop for analytics). Some solution vendors are also providing easier access for existing applications, including policy-based tiering from traditional disk or the ability to appear like a NAS archive.

Finally, and perhaps most intriguing, these new solutions offer the capability for content, once stored, to never need to be migrated again. This may be the most critical element of all. For any user or technology manager who has endured the pain of unloading a broken, filled or obsolescent NAS or traditional block storage array in order to migrate to the next big thing, with next generation object storage, you never need do this again. This is going to be critical when your Big Data store is holding hundreds of petabytes of high value data.The MaxSonar ultrasonic sensor offers very short to long-range detection and ranging. Forever.

Last June's derecho storm left thousands of travelers stranded along West Virginia highways, due to a lack of power to pump gasoline from filling stations.

In late October, thousands more were stranded when superstorm Sandy swept through the state, dumping heavy snow and toppling trees.

On Tuesday, thousands of additional travelers spent hours winding their way through a series of detours after a natural gas pipeline exploded along Interstate 77 near Sissonville, sending a wall of flame across the freeway.

A free new information system designed to held travelers cope with such extreme scenarios, as well as more routine encounters with traffic congestion, accidents and severe weather, was unveiled Wednesday by Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and state Transportation Secretary Paul Mattox.

The new 511 Traveler Information System is accessible by phone by dialing 511, via the Internet at www.WV511.org,This document provides a guide to using the ventilation system in your house to provide adequate fresh air to residents. by downloading the free WV 511 Drive Safe mobile app for Android and iPhone, or by following WV 511 on Twitter.

By dialing 511 from any landline or mobile phone, travelers can receive traffic information, reports on road and weather conditions, and connect with 511 systems in neighboring states. They can also connect with the state Department of Tourism, and be updated on public safety alerts.

The www.WV511.org website allows users to navigate an interactive map posting the locations of traffic incidents, construction projects and weather advisories. Images from the 20 traffic cameras located across the state can also be viewed, along with the messages and alerts posted on electronic roadboard signs.

The new WV 511 Drive Safe mobile application uses the speakers and GPS capabilities of smartphones to provide audible travel advisories for areas in the traveler's vicinity, allowing drivers to keep both hands on the steering wheel.

The new 511 system makes use of roadway moisture and temperature sensors, traffic cameras, State Police incident reports, reports from DOH maintenance crews and Courtesy Patrol drivers, and data from roadside meteorological stations to provide information to drivers. By having immediate access to such information, drivers can "save time, save money, and maybe even save lives," Mattox said.

"The theme of this system is to 'Know Before You Go,'" Tomblin said. "Having access to real-time information on traffic and road conditions provides advanced warning of road conditions and congestion that can be crucial in increasing safety."

Trawling for no-strings sex

I’d never heard of the website Plenty of Fish until this week. I was talking to a girlfriend, Sandra, who was telling me about her experiences on the site.

“I signed up, uploaded some photos and within 10 minutes I had 70 messages in my Inbox,” she said. “It was gross. Nearly all of them were after sex.”

Sounded a bit like Oasis to me, another dating website that another girlfriend, Nadine, had told me was more of a meat market.Find detailed product information for howo tractor 6x4 and other products. Wanting to have some fun after splitting up with her ex, Nadine would log onto Oasis whenever she felt like having sex. It was never hard to hook up, she said.

With some of the more established dating websites now charging users to make contact and send each other virtual “kisses”, a lot of online daters are starting to migrate to newer, free dating sites - some of which have better reputations than others.
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None of them promote themselves as hook-up sites – except for the more obvious, location-based Blendr, Grindr or Skout, more commonly used as smartphone apps, where immediacy and convenience is paramount.

Instead, sites like OkCupid!,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , Oasis and Plenty of Fish market themselves as matching people based on compatibility. That seemed at odds with my friends’ stories, so I decided to check out Plenty of Fish for myself. In order to access the site, I had to create an account,This document provides a guide to using the ventilation system in your house to provide adequate fresh air to residents. which involved answering a series of questions about my physical appearance, income, education, drinking and smoking habits, and whether I had any kids.

Next, I had to fill out a description of myself.

Being a bogus account, I couldn’t be bothered with all of that, so I just said: "Naonaljq;/lamo" and "qna;ma".

Unlike my friend, I provided hardly any other information about myself – no photos, no interests, no political or religious views, in short, nothing to indicate what sort of person I was.

I did, however, select “intimate encounter” in the “looking for” box – just to see what sort of response I’d get.

I didn’t match Sandra, but within ten minutes I had over 20 responses of my own – ranging from “hi how r u?” to “Hi there wanna chat and have sum fun i live in brunswick to so not that far to cum over.” (Sic, of course).

"I’m 25 and I am clean. I’m a slim build, good body, fairly attractive and over 7 inches cut. Well, if you feel like talking then you know where to find me :) And I have no problem with travel, if that helps ;)".

I quickly changed “looking for” to “dating” – with no real effect on the type of messages I received in the next twenty minutes.

Now, perhaps if I’d uploaded some pictures and filled out my profile properly, I might’ve had an entirely different kind of response, but it got me wondering whether online dating is replacing the bar, not only as a place to meet potential partners, but also as a place to pick up.

Who better to ask than the characters who had messaged me on Plenty of Fish?

One guy had moved here from interstate after splitting from his ex a couple of years ago.Find detailed product information for Sinotruk howo truck. He told me he spends a lot of time working and can’t really be bothered going to bars in order to meet someone. He’s not ready to get into another relationship and sees online dating as both convenient and social. “I think a lot of people just come home after a day at work, maybe go to the gym, watch some TV, go to bed, and I just find that routine so boring,” he says. “I’d rather jump online, talk to some people, meet some people, flirt, maybe arrange a date.”

“Dates” aren’t always necessary, he says.One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. “I was talking to this one girl and it was clear we were both just after sex. We swapped phone numbers and she texted me her address, so I went over, we stood awkwardly in the kitchen for five minutes while she mixed us a drink, then we went upstairs and had amazing sex. We watched some TV for a bit afterwards, I left, and we never spoke again. It was great.”

I wondered what would have happened if the girl he met didn’t quite live up to her profile pics. Judging by the responses to my photo-less, detail-less profile on Plenty of Fish, many people wouldn’t seem to care. And going by the sheer amount of people online at any given time, it wouldn’t be too hard to find someone ready, willing and able.

Which, depending on whether you're a Sandra or a Nadine, is either "gross" or, well, pretty convenient.

Would you use a site like this purely for sex? Has the internet replaced the bar as a place to pick up?

Aspen Gold: Lowering Costs for Stable Owners, Retailers With New Product and Promotion

Aspen Gold Premium Wood Pellet Bedding, being released to market in June 2011, is a pelletized bedding product manufactured by Indeck Ladysmith, LLC of Ladysmith, Wis. The unique cost-reducing advantages of Aspen Gold bedding and the company's first promotion can save stable owners and retailers thousands in 2011.

Specifically formulated to keep horses healthy and comfortable in a low-dust, low-moisture environment, Aspen Gold Premium Wood Pellet Bedding is made of 100 percent aspen wood.

"We are excited about the launch of our new bedding material," said Jeffrey Schultz, Plant Manager, Aspen Gold. "We are committed to providing a superior product that will reduce bedding and disposal costs over the long term; and we are committed to offering that product at a discounted, introductory price."

Aspen Gold Premium Wood Pellet Bedding is offering two tons of its bedding product free with any 20 ton order, for a limited time.

Created to increase efficiency and reduce costs, highly absorbent Aspen Gold Premium Wood Pellet Bedding causes liquid waste to clump together, allowing for easier clean-up. In addition, the product only needs to be removed when it is completely saturated, requiring as few as one to two bags per week to be added to the stall -- saving time and labor.

Additionally, the unique, highly absorbent properties of aspen wood result in less bedding material being contaminated with waste and needing to be discarded during clean-up, causing manure piles grow at a slower pace -- as much as 50 percent slower than with other bedding options.

"When it comes to managing my horses, anything that saves me time is saving me money," said Diane Logue, Tizmar Equine, Cannon Falls, Minn. "Aspen Gold is a new product, different from others that I have tried. During the pilot test program, mucking my stalls was less work. I was raking out less bedding material and my waste pile was growing more slowly."