Jinn

Jinn (Arabic: الجن‎, al-jinn), also romanized as djinn or anglicized as genies, are supernatural creatures in early Arabian and later Islamic mythology and theology. An individual member of the jinn is known as a jinni, djinni, or genie (الجني, al-jinnī). They are mentioned frequently in the Quran (the 72nd sura is titled Sūrat al-Jinn) and other Islamic texts and inhabit an unseen world, another universe beyond the known universe. The Quran says that the jinn are made of a smokeless and "scorching fire", but are also physical in nature, being able to interact in a tactile manner with people and objects and likewise be acted upon. The jinn, humans, and angels make up the three known sapient creations of God. Like human beings, the jinn can be good, evil, or neutrally benevolent and hence have free will like humans. The shaytan jinn are akin to demons in Christian tradition, but the jinn are not angels and the Quran draws a clear distinction between the two creations. The Quran states in Sūrat al-Kahf (The Cave), Ayah 50, that Iblis (Azazel) is one of the jinn.

Genie (Dungeons & Dragons)

In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, genies are outsiders composed in part of the element of their native Elemental Planes.

Publication history

Dungeons & Dragons (1974-1976)

The djinn and the efreet first appeared in the original Dungeons & Dragons "white box" set (1974).

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition (1977-1988)

The djinn and efreet appeared in first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the original Monster Manual (1977). The word "genie" was not yet used to classify them, although it is mentioned under each race's entry that they are each other's enemies. The dao, the jann and the marid first appeared in Dragon #66 (October 1982). "Featured Creatures" was an ongoing series of articles where Gary Gygax released information on official creatures before their release in the upcoming Monster Manual II. The dao and marid then appeared in the adventure module The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (1982), and the dao, jann, and marid appeared in the original Monster Manual II (1983). The Pasha of the Efreet, Vizier of the Fire Sultan appeared in the adventure module Pharaoh (1982), and appeared with Aeraldoth, Vizier to the Caliph of the Djinn in Oasis of the White Palm (1983).

Genie (disambiguation)

A genie or jinn is a spiritual creature mentioned in Islamic theology. The English word derives from the Latin genius and is also used for this kind of guardian spirit from ancient Roman religion.

Genie may also refer to:

Companies

Fictional characters

People

Technology

Unix

Unix (trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, developed in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties from the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial variants of Unix from vendors such as the University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), IBM (AIX) and Sun Microsystems (Solaris). AT&T finally sold its rights in Unix to Novell in the early 1990s, which then sold its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in 1995, but the UNIX trademark passed to the industry standards consortium The Open Group, which allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems compliant with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). Among these is Apple's OS X, which is the Unix version with the largest installed base as of 2014.

From the power user's or programmer's perspective, Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the "Unix philosophy", meaning that the operating system provides a set of simple tools that each perform a limited, well-defined function, with a unified filesystem as the main means of communication and a shell scripting and command language to combine the tools to perform complex workflows. Aside from the modular design, Unix also distinguishes itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language that allowed Unix to reach numerous platforms.

Single UNIX Specification

The Single UNIX Specification (SUS) is the collective name of a family of standards for computer operating systems, compliance with which is required to qualify for to use the "UNIX" trademark. The core specifications of the SUS are developed and maintained by the Austin Group, which is a joint working group of IEEE, ISO JTC 1 SC22 and The Open Group. If an operating system is submitted to The Open Group for certification, and passes conformance tests, then it is termed to be compliant with a UNIX standard such as UNIX 98 or UNIX 03.

Very few BSD and Linux-based operating systems are submitted for compliance with the Single UNIX Specification, although system developers generally aim for compliance with POSIX standards, which form the core of the Single UNIX Specification.

History

1980s: Motivation

The SUS emerged from a mid-1980s project to standardize operating system interfaces for software designed for variants of the Unix operating system. The need for standardization arose because enterprises using computers wanted to be able to develop programs that could be used on the computer systems of different manufacturers without reimplementing the programs. Unix was selected as the basis for a standard system interface partly because it was manufacturer-neutral.

Year 2038 problem

The Year 2038 problem is an issue for computing and data storage situations in which time values are stored or calculated as a signed 32-bit integer, and this number is interpreted as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 ("the epoch"). Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038 (21 years' time), a problem similar to but not entirely analogous to the "Y2K problem" (also known as the "Millennium Bug"), in which 2-digit values representing the number of years since 1900 could not encode the year 2000 or later. Most 32-bit Unix-like systems store and manipulate time in this "Unix time" format, so the year 2038 problem is sometimes referred to as the "Unix Millennium Bug" by association.

Technical cause

The latest time that can be represented in Unix's signed 32-bit integer time format is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 (2,147,483,647 seconds after 1 January 1970). Times beyond that will "wrap around" and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems will interpret as having occurred on 13 December 1901 rather than 19 January 2038. This is caused by integer overflow. The counter "runs out" of usable bits, "increments" the sign bit instead, and reports a maximally negative number (continuing to count up, toward zero). Resulting erroneous calculations on such systems are likely to cause problems for users and other relying parties.