eros

Orbit was attained on February 14, 2000 - Valentine's Day. Hence the name.

She was a king's daughter, and most beautiful, so much so that Aphrodite became jealous of her, and sent Cupid to inflame her heart with love for some common man. But the god of love was himself struck by the beauty of Psyche, and carried her off to a secret place, where they spent happy hours together, with the proviso that Psyche was not allowed to look upon her lover with her mortal eyes. However, her sisters ribbed her about this, stirring up curiosity in the young princess's breast, and one night she finally gave in to temptation, taking a lamp and stealing into the god's sleeping chamber. In leaning over to see him, she dropped a hot drip of oil onto his shoulder, and Cupid, awakening and angry that she had disobeyed him, left her. Psyche searched everywhere in vain for her lover, until finally she arrived at the palace of Aphrodite, who charged her to descend to Hades and obtain a vial of beauty ointment from Persephone. Bringing this back, she became overpowered by its odour, sank to her knees and died. Cupid could resist no longer, and intervened, bringing her back to life, and thereafter marrying her, obtaining for her immortality.

Eros was originally represented as a figure of youth and beauty, but in later times became more well-known as the chubby, angelic boylike being, with his mass of curly hair and armed with his bow and arrow, the shafts of which when piercing a human (or divine) heart infused that person with unremitting love for the first person they saw.

To Eros belongs libido, the life energy that generates sexuality. Eros is the life instinct and to spread life, to procreate, we need to have sex, thus Libido.

The intent of the EROS project is to create an OS that is both extremely secure and extremely reliable i.e. failure-resistant.

The security aspect of EROS is done by creating an object-oriented 'capability' system in which all system components (programs, files, users) are given capabilities to perform certain actions (read, write, delete, move) on other objects. This is more fine-grained than the UNIX system of permission-based access.

The reliability aspect includes a highly efficient snapshot system in which the state of the machine is maintained on the filesystem in a way that can be easily extrapolated. The idea being that if the machine running EROS loses power, it will resume its operation from the state it was in at power loss, something analagous to a laptop's 'hibernation' feature.

More detailed (and accurate) information is available at www.eros-os.org.

The Greek word for romantic love, as distinct from philos and agape. It is love in the sexual sense, a physical and desirable attraction between two people.

It's not the same as infatuation, which is temporary and easily forgotten when a distraction arrives. Rather, it speaks of the physical and emotional attraction between two people. It could be considered synonymous with "lust", but that's a negative term and not used in the same spirit. Lust is just wanting to have sex with someone. Eros is more like making love, which, as anyone who has known both will tell you, is like the difference between night and day.

Eros masc. (skipping declension info) :-love, used in the Tragedy :-love of a thing, desire for it, cum genetivus, used by Herodotus, Aeschylus etc. :-in plural loves, amoures, used by Euripides; in Sophocles, of passionate joy II. as proper name the god of love, Eros, Amor, ld., used by Euripides.

The verb is:

Eramai (skipping conjugation info), to love, to be in love with, cum genetivus personale, used by Homer, Euripides. II. of things, to love passionately, long for, lust after, used in the Iliad, and by Herodotus, common in Att. 2. cum infinitivus to desire eagerly, used in the Theogony, and by Sophocles etc.

E"ros (?), n. [L., fr. Gr. love, (personified) Eros, fr. to love.] Greek Myth.

Love; the god of love; -- by earlier writers represented as one of the first and creative gods, by later writers as the son of Aphrodite, equivalent to the Latin god Cupid.

© Webster 1913.