Almquist shell

The Almquist shell (also known as A Shell, ash and sh) is a lightweight Unix shell originally written by Kenneth Almquist in the late 1980s. Initially a clone of the System V.4 variant of the Bourne shell, it replaced the original Bourne shell in the BSD versions of Unix released in the early 1990s. Derivative versions of ash are still installed as the default shell (/bin/sh) on FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, MINIX, and Android, and in some Linux distributions.

Debian and derived Linux distributions such as Ubuntu ship a version of ash, known as dash (Debian Almquist shell), as the default /bin/sh, although Bash is the default login shell for interactive use. The reason for using dash is faster shell script execution, especially during startup of the operating system, compared to previous versions of Debian and Ubuntu that used Bash for this purpose.

Ash is also fairly popular in embedded Linux systems; its code was incorporated into the BusyBox catch-all executable often employed in this area.

Ash (deity)

Ash was the ancient Egyptian god of oases, as well as the vineyards of the western Nile Delta and thus was viewed as a benign deity. Flinders Petrie in his 1923 expedition to the Saqqara (also spelt Sakkara) found several references to Ash in Old Kingdom wine jar seals: "I am refreshed by this Ash" was a common inscription.

In particular, he was identified by the Ancient Egyptians as the god of the Libu and Tinhu tribes, known as the "people of the oasis". Consequently Ash was known as the "lord of Libya", the western border areas occupied by the Libu and Tinhu tribes, corresponds roughly with the area of modern Libya. It is also possible that he was worshiped in Ombos, as their original chief deity.

In Egyptian mythology, as god of the oases, Ash was associated with Set, who was originally god of the desert, and was seen as protector of the Sahara. The first known reference to Ash dates to the Protodynastic Period, but by the late 2nd Dynasty, his importance had grown, and he was seen as protector of the royal estates, since the related god Set, in Lower Egypt, was regarded as the patron deity of royalty itself. Ash's importance was such that he was mentioned even until the 26th Dynasty.

Volcanic ash

Volcanic ash consists of fragments of pulverized rock, minerals and volcanic glass, created during volcanic eruptions and measuring less than 2 mm (0.079 inches) in diameter. The term volcanic ash is also often loosely used to refer to all explosive eruption products (correctly referred to as tephra), including particles larger than 2mm. Volcanic ash is formed during explosive volcanic eruptions when dissolved gases in magma expand and escape violently into the atmosphere. The force of the escaping gas shatters the magma and propels it into the atmosphere where it solidifies into fragments of volcanic rock and glass. Ash is also produced when magma comes into contact with water during phreatomagmatic eruptions, causing the water to explosively flash to steam leading to shattering of magma. Once in the air, ash is transported by wind up to thousands of kilometers away.

Due to its wide dispersal, ash can have a number of impacts on society, including human and animal health, disruption to aviation, disruption to critical infrastructure (e.g., electric power supply systems, telecommunications, water and waste-water networks, transportation), primary industries (e.g., agriculture), buildings and structures.

Transformation

Transformation may refer to:

Mathematics

Linear algebra

Geometry

Statistics

Combinatorics

Other

Physics

Chemistry

Biology and medicine

Computing

Fiction

Machine-or-transformation test

In United States patent law, the machine-or-transformation test is a test of patent eligibility under which a claim to a process qualifies for consideration if it (1) is implemented by a particular machine in a non-conventional and non-trivial manner or (2) transforms an article from one state to another.

The test was first articulated under its present form in the government's brief in Gottschalk v. Benson, In its reply brief on the merits in that case, the government said that “we submit that the cases follow such a rule––implicitly or explicitly––and that they cannot be rationalized otherwise.”. The court declined to adopt the proposed rule as categorical and as an exclusive test. It opined that future cases might present fact patterns calling for a different rule from that applicable to past cases, and therefore the machine-or-transformation test was just a "clue" to eligibility for a patent.

The test has been recently articulated in Bilski, but dates back to the nineteenth century. The test is articulated also in the patent-eligibility trilogy—Gottschalk v. Benson,Parker v. Flook, and Diamond v. Diehr. In the wake of the Supreme Court's opinion in Bilski v. Kappos, rejecting machine-or-transformation as the sole test of patent eligibility, and confirming that it is only a "useful clue," it is now clear that this test is only a way to measure whether the patent claim in issue preempts substantially all applications of the underlying idea or principle on which a patent is based—such preemption being a far more basic and general test of patent eligibility or ineligibility.

Transformation (law)

In United States copyright law, transformation is a possible justification that use of a copyrighted work may qualify as fair use, i.e., that a certain use of a work does not infringe its holder's copyright due to the public interest in the usage. Transformation is an important issue in deciding whether a use meets the first factor of the fair-use test, and is generally critical for determining whether a use is in fact fair, although no one factor is dispositive.

In United States patent law the term also refers to the test set in In re Bilski: that a patent-eligible invention must “transform a particular article into a different state or thing.”

Basis

Like most of the modern fair use doctrine, the doctrine of transformation was heavily influenced by the 1841 circuit court case Folsom v. Marsh. In that case, Justice Story ruled that

The standard of "supersed[ing] the use of the original work" would be widely cited as a standard for the degree to which a work was transformative when fair use had become more clearly fixed as a legal principle.