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A Virtual Journey into the Universe. As of July 1, 2013 ThinkQuest has been discontinued. We would like to thank everyone for being a part of the ThinkQuest global community: Students - For your limitless creativity and innovation, which inspires us all. Teachers - For your passion in guiding students on their quest. Partners - For your unwavering support and evangelism. Parents - For supporting the use of technology not only as an instrument of learning, but as a means of creating knowledge. We encourage everyone to continue to “Think, Create and Collaborate,” unleashing the power of technology to teach, share, and inspire. Best wishes, The Oracle Education Foundation. Buddhism for Beginners. Zen. Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism[note 1] that developed in China during the Tang dynasty as Chán.

From China, Zen spread south to Vietnam, northeast to Korea and east to Japan. Zen emphasizes rigorous meditation-practice, insight into Buddha-nature, and the personal expression of this insight in daily life, especially for the benefit of others. As such, it deemphasizes mere knowledge of sutras and doctrine and favors direct understanding through zazen and interaction with an accomplished teacher. The teachings of Zen include various sources of Mahāyāna thought, especially Yogācāra, the Tathāgatagarbha Sutras and Huayan, with their emphasis on Buddha-nature, totality, and the Bodhisattva-ideal. Etymology[edit] The word Zen is derived from the Japanese pronunciation of the Middle Chinese word 禪 (dʑjen) (pinyin: Chán), which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "absorption" or "meditative state".

Zen practice[edit] Lay services[edit] KDE. Free software community Origins[edit] KDE (back then called the K(ool) Desktop Environment) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University of Tübingen.[3] In the beginning Matthias Ettrich chose to use Trolltech's Qt framework for the KDE project.[6] Other programmers quickly started developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, a few applications were being released. On 12 July 1998 the first version of the desktop environment, called KDE 1.0, was released. The KDE Marketing Team announced a rebranding of the KDE project components on 24 November 2009.

What was previously known as KDE 4 was split into KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and KDE Platform (now KDE Frameworks) bundled as KDE Software Compilation 4.[8] Since 2014, the name KDE no longer stands for K Desktop Environment, but for the community that produces the software.[9] Software releases[edit] K Desktop Environment 1.0 KDE Software Compilation 4 KDE Projects[edit] Other projects[edit] Mascot[edit] GNU Project. The GNU logo, by Etienne Suvasa The GNU Project i/ɡnuː/[1] is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on 27 September 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. Its aim is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices, by collaboratively developing and providing software that is based on the following freedom rights: users are free to run the software, share it (copy, distribute), study it and modify it.

GNU software guarantees these freedom-rights legally (via its license), and is therefore free software; the use of the word "free" always being taken to refer to freedom. In order to ensure that the entire software of a computer grants its users all freedom rights (use, share, study, modify), even the most fundamental and important part, the operating system (including all its numerous utility programs), needed to be written. Origins[edit] GNU Manifesto[edit] Philosophy and activism[edit] Participation[edit] Free software[edit] Welcome. Berkeley Software Distribution. Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995. Today the term "BSD" is often used non-specifically to refer to any of the BSD descendants which together form a branch of the family of Unix-like operating systems.

Operating systems derived from the original BSD code remain actively developed and widely used. Historically, BSD has been considered a branch of UNIX—"BSD UNIX", because it shared the initial codebase and design with the original AT&T UNIX operating system. In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by vendors of workstation-class systems in the form of proprietary UNIX variants such as DEC ULTRIX and Sun Microsystems SunOS. This can be attributed to the ease with which it could be licensed, and the familiarity the founders of many technology companies of the time had with it.

History[edit] Conway's Game of Life. "Conway game" redirects here. For Conway's surreal number game theory, see surreal number. The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.[1] The "game" is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves or, for advanced players, by creating patterns with particular properties.

Rules[edit] The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead. The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. Origins[edit] The game made Conway instantly famous, but it also opened up a whole new field of mathematical research, the field of cellular automata ... Conway chose his rules carefully, after considerable experimentation, to meet these criteria: