Hour 25

Hour 25 is a radio program focusing on science fiction, fantasy, and science. It was broadcast weekly on Pacifica radio station KPFK in Southern California from 1972 to 2000, and is now produced on an irregularly-scheduled basis (typically two or three episodes a year) and distributed over the Internet via hour25online.com. Hour 25 has featured numerous interviews with famous authors of science fiction and fantasy, in addition to luminaries of the scientific community. The program was hosted by Mike Hodel (working with a series of co-hosts) from 1972 to 1986; Hodel was succeeded by Harlan Ellison, who was the regular host in 1986-87. Notable science fiction authors Steven Barnes, Arthur Byron Cover, David Gerrold and J. Michael Straczynski also hosted the show at various times in the 1980s and 1990s. The show is now hosted by Warren James.

On the website, in addition to new programs, there is an extensive archive of older shows featuring interviews with popular authors, including Terry Pratchett, Larry Niven, Laurie R. King, Frank Kelly Freas, and Neil Gaiman.

Hour

The hour (common symbol: h or hr, h being the international form of the symbol) is a unit of measurement of time. In modern usage, an hour comprises 60 minutes, or 3,600 seconds. It is approximately ¹⁄₂₄ of a mean solar day.

An hour in the Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) time standard can include a negative or positive leap second, and may therefore have a duration of 3,599 or 3,601 seconds for adjustment purposes.

Although it is not a standard defined by the International System of Units, the hour is a unit accepted for use with SI, represented by the symbol h.

Etymology

The Middle English word ure first appears in the 13th century, as a loanword from Old French ure, ore, from Latin hōra.Hora, in turn, derives from Greek ὥρα ("season, time of day, hour"). In terms of the Proto-Indo-European language, ὥρα is a cognate of English year and is derived from the Proto-Indo-European word *i̯ēro- ("year, summer").

The ure of Middle English and the Anglo-French houre gradually supplanted the Old English nouns tīd (which survives in Modern English as tide) and stund. Stund is the progenitor of stound, which remains an archaic synonym for hour. Stund is related to the Old High German stunta (whence German Stunde, "hour, lesson"), from Germanic *stundō ("time, interval, while").

Environment variable

Environment variables are a set of dynamic named values that can affect the way running processes will behave on a computer.

They are part of the environment in which a process runs. For example, a running process can query the value of the TEMP environment variable to discover a suitable location to store temporary files, or the HOME or USERPROFILE variable to find the directory structure owned by the user running the process.

They were introduced in their modern form in 1979 with Version 7 Unix, so are included in all Unix operating system flavors and variants from that point onward including Linux and OS X. From PC DOS 2.0 in 1982, all succeeding Microsoft operating systems including Microsoft Windows, and OS/2 also have included them as a feature, although with somewhat different syntax, usage and standard variable names.

Details

In all Unix and Unix-like systems, each process has its own separate set of environment variables. By default, when a process is created, it inherits a duplicate environment of its parent process, except for explicit changes made by the parent when it creates the child. At the API level, these changes must be done between running fork and exec. Alternatively, from command shells such as bash, a user can change environment variables for a particular command invocation by indirectly invoking it via env or using the ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE=VALUE <command> notation. All Unix operating system flavors, DOS, and Windows have environment variables; however, they do not all use the same variable names. A running program can access the values of environment variables for configuration purposes.

The Hour (newspaper)

The Hour is a daily newspaper published in Norwalk, Connecticut by The Hour Publishing Company. It serves the municipalities of Norwalk, Wilton, Westport, Weston and Stamford.

History

The newspaper was founded in 1871. It was published under the title The Evening Hour from 1895 into the 1900s, at which point it was renamed The Norwalk Hour. Some time after 1971, it became simply The Hour. The newspaper covers local news, business, sports, and entertainment, and as of April 2003, had a circulation of 16,070. In 2000, The Hour shifted from afternoon to morning deliveries.The Hour and its sister weekly newspaper, The Wilton Villager, and the Stamford Times offer three websites with updated news and information 24/7 and is achieving 1.5 million page views per month.

In 2003, competition between The Hour and its much larger Tribune Company–owned rival, The Advocate, came to a head. On May 15, The Stamford-base competitor began circulating a special Norwalk edition with significantly increased local coverage and a price that substantially undercut The Hour. The rivalry escalated to barbs traded on editorial pages.