Alko is the national alcoholic beverage retailing monopoly in Finland. It is the only store in the country which retails beer over 4.7% ABV, wine (except in vineyards) and spirits. Alcoholic beverages are also sold in licensed restaurants and bars but only for consumption on the premises. Alko is required by law to sell drinks with lower alcohol content than 4.7% and non-alcoholic alternatives, but in practice carries a very limited stock of low alcohol beer, cider and non-alcoholic drinks and mixers as supermarkets sell the same products at a lower price. By law, alcoholic drinks may only be sold to those aged 18 or above.
As the only retailer of strong alcoholic beverages in Finland, Alko has an extensive range of products ranging from rare wines to bulk vodka. Its wine selection has grown in recent decades as there has been an increase in consumption and a government drive to change Finnish drinking habits to a more "European" style, which means a move from hard liquor to wine and beer. While wine consumption has increased, this has not replaced consumption of other alcoholic beverages, negating the "Europeanization" argument. Nowadays wines occupy most of the shelf space in an Alko shop. Its beer selection is concentrated on stronger versions of the domestic bulk lagers and some high-quality strong beers from major beer-producing countries as well as traditional Sahti at some locations. Hard spirits include several Finnish brands of vodka and all major types of hard liquor. Alko also sells brands of drinks produced by the Finnish state-owned company Altia, which are traditional products and not sold abroad. Many of these date back to the first products launched after the end of the Prohibition. These are usually for mixing drinks.
UPS may refer to:
Ups is an open source source-level debugger developed in the late 1980s for Unix and Unix-like systems, originally developed at the University of Kent by Mark Russell. It supports C and C++, and Fortran on some platforms. The last beta release was in 2003.
Unlike more popular debugger stacks for modern Unix platforms, ups is completely self-contained — not merely a graphical front-end to lower-level debuggers like gdb (although some work has been done to make ups usable in that way). The ups user interface is built directly upon the X Window System and SunView, i.e. it does not use an intermediate widget toolkit such as Motif or GTK+.
An uninterruptible power supply, also uninterruptible power source, UPS or battery/flywheel backup, is an electrical apparatus that provides emergency power to a load when the input power source, typically mains power, fails. A UPS differs from an auxiliary or emergency power system or standby generator in that it will provide near-instantaneous protection from input power interruptions, by supplying energy stored in batteries, supercapacitors, or flywheels. The on-battery runtime of most uninterruptible power sources is relatively short (only a few minutes) but sufficient to start a standby power source or properly shut down the protected equipment.
A UPS is typically used to protect hardware such as computers, data centers, telecommunication equipment or other electrical equipment where an unexpected power disruption could cause injuries, fatalities, serious business disruption or data loss. UPS units range in size from units designed to protect a single computer without a video monitor (around 200 volt-ampere rating) to large units powering entire data centers or buildings. The world's largest UPS, the 46-megawatt Battery Electric Storage System (BESS), in Fairbanks, Alaska, powers the entire city and nearby rural communities during outages.