Financial & Travel Musings

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When it gets hot just about everyone starts thinking of getting the credit card out and buying an airconditioner but that’s not necessarily the best approach.

For one think, airconditioners are both expensive and expensive to run. You’re going to take a major hit on the electic charge if you fire it up all summer.

However, it’s usually not the heat as such that gets to you but the humidity that really does you in. So, you can get a major improvement in your living environment by considering the likes of Ebac dehumidifiers which are both cheaper for comparable “cooling” effects and much cheaper to run too.

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If you fancy a holiday on the water there are oodles of options these days.

For the less active amongst us there’s the long established cruising holidays although you don’t need to limit yourself to cruises on the open sea on massive cruise liners as you’ve also the option of crewed trips down a whole host of canals. Moving up the activity scale a little you can drive your own canal boat (very simple) or even learn to sail a yacht either by yourself or as part of a flotilla.

More active still and you can look into the many options in terms of inflatable boats which range from crewed trips down various white-water rivers through to doing your own thing and buying one for yourself (they’re, of course, one of the cheaper ways into acquiring your own boat).

One things for sure: there are a great number of options for you to consider and one is bound to suit both your budget and temperament.

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One of the really big changes in computers over the years has been the amount of memory that’s available and the technology that it uses.

The very first computer used clockwork (really: it was built in 1850) but in modern times things began with vacuum tubes before moving on to magnetic drums, then tapes and finally the magnetic discs that we still use today. Actual internal memory went through a similar cycle moving from clockwork to vacuum tubes to magnetic drums then magnetic cores and then on to solid-state or integrated circuits as we’d call them today.

That continual change and improvement in the technology meant that the need to limit memory has all but disappeared. As recently as 1976 for instance it was commonplace to have 11 users sharing all of 48k of memory yet within a few years a single personal computer had a great deal more memory and these days even 2GB of memory rarely seems enough yet that’s 87,000 times the amount that eleven users shared just over 30 years earlier.

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