Thursday, May 23, 2013

From igloo to castle

She opted for Peckforton Castle in Cheshire, England, the only intact medieval castle in the U.K. She told NBC News, “I wanted to get married there and feel like a proper princess!” But the medieval structure offers something for the non-matrimonial as well: it’s also a fully functioning hotel that operates year-round. 

From its sandstone walls to its suits of armor lining the hallways to, yes, its falconry and archery lessons, the Gothic chateau features antique touches that visitors can’t get at any other hotel. 

Co-owner of Peckforton Castle Chris Naylor told NBC News, “We have quite a number of rooms with four poster beds. You get the feeling of waking up as a princess.” 

Peckforton Castle isn’t alone. A growing handful of unusual accommodations await guests who seek alternatives to plain vanilla hotel chains, from igloos to treehouses, to tepees, and even former jails. 

Located in Alta, Norway, this winter wonderland hotel is crafted out of snow and ice. Due to the weather-sensitive nature of the structure, Sorrisniva Igloo Hotel is closed for the season but reopens on January 6, 2014. 

Guests flock to this igloo hotel not only for the once-in-a-lifetime ice hotel experience but also to glimpse arctic Norway and the northern lights. 

While temperatures of the rooms themselves dip below freezing, visitors stay toasty with reindeer leather sleeping pads and hefty sleeping bags. The hotel also suggests that guests wear thermal sleeping attire to bed. 

But not all of Sorrisniva Igloo Hotel is frosty.Check out our solar panel ground mount system at a home in Pvsolver. Visitors can warm up in the sauna and the outdoor hot bathtubs. And outdoorsmen and women, can venture out on a snowmobile safari, riverboat excursions, and dog sledding. 

Treehotel's sleek and luxurious rooms, designed by leading Scandinavian architects, are held aloft in the trees and offer visitors gorgeous views of the Lule River in Harads, Sweden. 

The individual rooms are as diverse as the nature that surrounds them. The Mirrorcube is an elegant glass cube hideaway that reflects the forest around it, whereas The Bird’s Nest features a bramble-and-twigs exterior to conceal the modern, circular room within. 

Made with the smallest carbon footprint possible, each pod uses green hydroelectric power, LED lights, and water-efficient sinks. 

Opening in June, Utah’s "Moab Under Canvas" offers tepee accommodations against the backdrop of Arches National Park’s red rocks. 

Their basic tepees come with cots, mattresses, and lanterns—an affordable and basic camping experience.Their most luxurious option is their deluxe suite,We have LED downlight, reading lamps and floor lamps and more. which includes a lounge area with a sofa and a bathroom with a rolltop bath. 

“In summer, [our bar] is in the courtyard, right beneath where people would have been dropped down to be hung from the gallows,” HI-Ottawa Jail Hostel’s coordinator Nicole Lévesque told NBC News. 

This former jail in Ottawa,LED ceiling lamp is a kind of led tubes that is installed inside the room. Canada once housed prisoners under inhumane conditions--buckets rather than toilets and no ventilation or lights. 

But in 1972, the jail closed and later reopened as a hostel.We may contact you if more information is needed to locate a solar led light. It retained its Victorian style architecture and some of the original jail doors, but it now offers modern bathrooms, hardwood floors, a kitchen, and a bar. 

For those who want the jail experience, the jail cell rooms do have bars on the doors--but an additional panel of metal provides privacy. For visitors who want something more upscale, the front of the building was formerly the governor’s mansion and now features spacious,A Solar carport is a cost-effective way to install solar at your home. private rooms.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Microsoft talks about Xbox One’s internals

Microsoft says that the Xbox One has five custom-designed pieces of silicon spread between the console and its Kinect sensor. It didn't elaborate on what these are. There's a system-on-chip combining the CPU and GPU, which we presume to be a single piece of silicon, and there's at least one sensor chip in the Kinect, perhaps replacing the PrimeSense processor used in the Xbox 360 Kinect, but what the others might be isn't immediately clear.Books can be as thick as 4 inches and yet the Book scanner 9000 delivers flat. Possibilities include audio processors,Shop online for laundry dryer and washers in a variety of brands and styles. on-chip memory, and USB controllers. 

One of the key questions about the AMD-built, 64-bit, 8-core SoC is "how fast is it?" At the moment that's unknown. Microsoft claims that the new console has "eight times" the graphics power of the old one, though some aspects of the new system are even more improved; for example, it has 16 times the amount of RAM. 

The SoC has a PC processor heritage. It includes features that have become standard in PC processors, like power gating to allow idle cores to be powered down,Does any one know what should be the best degre of humidity in a dry cabinet? and dynamic frequency scaling to allow light loads to use a lower clock speed. Like AMD's forthcoming codename Kaveri processors that are shipping in PCs later this year, the CPU and GPU share coherent access to the system's memory,These industrial extractor are fabricated as per clients needs in various specifications. making it easier to develop software that splits workloads between the two processors. 

Some performance numbers were given for the CPU and GPU themselves but these cast more shadow than they do light. Microsoft claimed that each CPU core can perform six operations per cycle. The CPU is believed to be using AMD's Jaguar core, but typically this would only be described as able to handle four operations per cycle; two each of integer and floating point (though even here counting operations is complicated; the floating point operations could use vector instructions such as SSE2, in which case one operation would result in four actual computations, potentially giving eight per cycle for floating point alone). 

This arguably leaves a shortfall of two operations per cycle. One possibility is that the cores have been customized somewhat, which allows more instructions to be issued per cycle. On the face of it, this seems a little unlikely; it'd be a significant change that would have considerable implications on the design of the rest of the chip. Another possibility is simply that the counting is a little unusual and that the extra two operations are one store and one load. This would be consistent with how leaked documents (or, if one prefers, unsubstantiated but apparently accurate rumors) described the processor: two integer operations, two floating point operations, and two memory operations per cycle, which may well be the same number and mix of operations as handled by the standard Jaguar core. 

Brief details were also given of the software side of things. The Xbox One is described as running three operating systems. There's a long-running Windows 8-based operating system used for running applications, browsing the Web, Skype, and similar roles; a second operating system for running games; and a hypervisor that virtualizes the hardware and switches between the two. The long-running partition is also used for some system management tasks, such as running the Kinect software portions and performing matchmaking while you watch a video. 

This hypervisor is based on Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform but simplified to remove extraneous features that are irrelevant to a games console; the software is specialized because it runs fixed-role, fixed operating system virtual machines. 

The application partition boots when the system is turned on and runs persistently, even when in-game. This is what enables things like Snap view, where apps and games or TV run side-by-side. The game partition, in contrast, gets rebooted each time a new game is started. 

To ensure high-speed switching between the operating systems, each virtual machine draws to its own (virtual) screen all the time. The hypervisor can switch between screens essentially instantly, allowing fast task-switching.

Console Gaming Is Dying

When Microsoft unveiled its latest console,These designer hanging paper Parking Lot Lighting are excellent for wedding ideas, the Xbox One (don't let the name throw you; this is the third console to bear the Xbox moniker), online observers couldn't help but notice that a vast majority of the conference discussed everything but video games. 

By pitching its latest game machine as a comprehensive entertainment experience, Microsoft may be neglecting its core gamer audience — and that might be exactly the right move. Nintendo launched its Wii U to a resounding "meh," and Sony's PlayStation 4 announcement failed to make waves among increasingly jaded console gamers. 

The current confusion in the console market is not really anyone's fault. Console manufacturers are eager to implement advanced and novel technology in their products. Developers want to make use of the most sophisticated gameplay and graphics engines. Consumers want the cheapest games with the most efficient delivery system. 

The results have been consoles that are almost indistinguishable from midrange gaming PCs,Books can be as thick as 4 inches and yet the Book scanner 9000 delivers flat. bloated development costs for often-subpar software and incredible confusion regarding extra downloadable content, used games and digital distribution. 

Although it will take a few days to determine what the everyman thinks of the Xbox One (or if it will even be on his radar before it launches later this year), core gamers posted damning commentary on Twitter, and games journalists took to the Web to critique the system. 

"I seriously feel like going out right now and buying EVERY Wii U game — even the 90 percent I don't want — out of some weird spite," wrote Bob "MovieBob" Chipman, content creator for The Escapist magazine and host of The Game Overthinker Web show. 

Game enthusiasts have expressed dismay over the Xbox One's lack of compatibility with existing 360 games, its restrictive policies about used titles (short version: you may have to pay full price anyway) and Microsoft's focus on TV (such as Steven Spielberg's upcoming "Halo" TV series) and sports (as evidenced by Microsoft's partnership with the NFL to broadcast exclusive Xbox One content) over exciting new game franchises. 

If core gamers value unique games over all else, then one might expect Nintendo to be the top dog in the console market right now.Shop online for laundry dryer and washers in a variety of brands and styles. Not so: Wii U sales have tanked since its initial release. Although Nintendo has a large number of system-exclusive titles, few of them have elicited more than mild enthusiasm, and the companyhas yet to announce a major system-seller (a new "Super Mario Bros." or "Legend of Zelda" title, for example). 

Gamers were also apathetic about Sony's PlayStation 4 reveal event back in February. Although the event was much more game-centric, most of the titles showcased had either already been announced (like Ubisoft's "Watch Dogs") or were simply new entries in long-running series (such as "Killzone" and "inFamous").Does any one know what should be the best degre of humidity in a dry cabinet? In fact, Sony did not even show the PS4 console itself; potential buyers still have no idea what the system will look like. 

Although Microsoft takes the cake for marketing a game console as an entertainment center, Nintendo and Sony also tried to portray their machines as multitaskers. The Wii U's "TVii" app allows users to watch TV shows through their consoles (provided that they already have a cable subscription) and share their viewing habits via social media.These industrial extractor are fabricated as per clients needs in various specifications.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Citi to Enhance Its Investment in Its Commercial Cards Offering

Citi, through its Treasury and Trade Solutions division, announces a significant investment in its Commercial Card issuing business through the launch of its Global Issuing platform in the Latin America region. Puerto Rico will be the first to adopt this new technology, positioning Citi as the first local Commercial Card Issuer to deliver a chip card solution into that market.

As Citi’s clients continue to expand internationally, this proprietary operating environment offers a unified global platform that facilitates truly consistent and cutting edge card programs.

Citi Commercial Cards’ award winning,Purchase quality USB flash drives wholesale, branded USB drives, custom USB flash drives, and promotional USB flash memory. single, unified processing platform aims to drive a consistent experience for cardholders and program administrators regardless of the country in which they are based.

“Latin America is a key region for our global clients, and this significant investment represents our continued commitment to enhancing our solutions across the region which will ensure that cardholders and clients have access to consistent functionality,Find the perfect luggage tag and you'll always find your luggage! wherever they are in the world,” commented Citi’s Global Commercial Cards Head, Manish Kohli.

Carlos Castro, Citi’s Cash Head for Latin America, added: “This innovative technology platform for Puerto Rico will deliver benefits to both local and multinational organizations.A full spectrum of vertically integrated products and services to the plastic card printing industry. We will now be able to offer our clients a global market leading reporting solution, delivered through a highly secure and widely accepted chip card.”

Further countries will be announced in due course as part of this investment in Citi’s global issuance capabilities.

Citi’s commercial card programs have proven their value as an effective means for enhancing bottom-line profitability. Treasury departments of corporations and public sector entities can streamline their procurement processes, while cashing in on critical costing savings, increasing staff productivity, as well as improving their purchasing power and cash management efficiencies.Agesteeljewelry offers tungsten wedding rings, tungsten wedding bands and tungsten jewelry for men's and women's. Citi’s program also provides increased transparency and control over travel & entertainment expenses.We deal with various silicone jewelry wholesale especially the silicone bracelet.

Every new commercial card country expansion leverages the same innovative proprietary infrastructure, providing a sophisticated yet configurable solution into all new territories. Citi has rapidly expanded its geographic footprint and new offers local currency issuing capability in more than 65 countries around the globe.

Citi Commercial Cards, with proprietary issuance capabilities in 100 countries including local-currency programs in 65 countries, has long been considered a leading commercial card provider to large and multi-national organizations globally. Citi Commercial Cards’ products form the core of the expense management strategies for nearly 500 multinational corporations, making Citi a premier card issuer in terms of technology, innovation and volume.

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.

E Ink Delivers New

E Ink Holdings, “E Ink” (8069.TW), an ePaper and Electronic Shelf Label visionary, today introduced E Ink Spectra, the world’s first three pigment electronic paper display (EPD),Find the perfect luggage tag and you'll always find your luggage! featuring black, white and red pigments. Spectra is currently being shown at SID Display Week 2013 in Vancouver, CA.

Price optimization strategies and adaptable technology are vital to ensuring retailers’ competitive advantage, success and growth. By using electronic shelf labels (ESL) with E Ink’s technology, retailers have the ability to change pricing strategies as needed in real time, allowing them to stay one step ahead of competitors while attracting consumers based on changing market conditions. Spectra allows retailers to elevate the impact of their ESLs, by adding color to logos and quickly directing consumers’ attention to important information, such as product sales and promotions.

“The three pigment system is a major achievement for E Ink, and a technological accomplishment in our industry,” explained Giovanni Mancini, director of product management, E Ink. “As the first product line to feature this advanced ink, Spectra provides retailers with the same visual and power savings attributes of our black and white ESL products, with the option of adding a third color to highlight promotions or other relevant information.”

“We are excited to see the addition of color, something requested by many of our customers,” said Niclas Qvist, Head of Marketing and Global Partner Management at Pricer,Agesteeljewelry offers tungsten wedding rings, tungsten wedding bands and tungsten jewelry for men's and women's. the leading Electronic Shelf Label (ESL) solution provider. “Pricer use E Ink’s e-paper in all our graphic products today. E Ink and Pricer are leading the way by giving shoppers the best in-store experience with clear and easy to read price tags. Product development is guided by market feedback and the first products will be developed in close cooperation with both E Ink and selected customers.”

“Pervasive Displays is committed to delivering innovative electronic paper enhancements and solutions that enable revolutionary commercial industrial electronic paper display applications,” said Scott Soong, CEO of Pervasive Displays. “Adding color to electronic paper is an effective advancement to this technology. Color adds the benefit of being able to quickly draw attention to specific messages – in retail, red is prevalent for promotions; in other industries red is used for exception management. The ability to quickly discern the importance of a message is critical in any environment.”

Spectra will support both active matrix and segmented format ESLs, making it the ideal product for a range of retail applications.We deal with various silicone jewelry wholesale especially the silicone bracelet. The three pigment EPD is also appropriate for industrial, smart card and medical market applications, where Spectra can be used to display information on electronic identification badges.Purchase quality USB flash drives wholesale, branded USB drives, custom USB flash drives, and promotional USB flash memory.

While the eReader market continues to be an important part of E Ink’s business and the company remains committed to the eReader product line, over the past few years E Ink has invested resources into supporting different applications across markets.

“We have always been fortunate to have high customer demand for our electronic paper displays for non-eReader applications,A full spectrum of vertically integrated products and services to the plastic card printing industry.” stated Mancini. “The results of our investments will be evident in 2013 as more non-eReader products using E Ink EPDs are released into the market.”