Don Edwards

There are systems for water-cooling computers. This gets the heat away from the critical spots to places where there is more room for bigger radiators - get big enough and you don't need fans on them. I have never had a computer hot enough to need such a thing.

Raven said that Wolf is one of the most powerful wizards in the midwest. Arthur has dressed in a stereotypical medieval-wizard costume in public. It's likely that Cranium and Mr. Verres are also wizards, and there may be more (locally) in DGB.

Near the city of Port Angeles, Washington, two roads intersect: Woodcock and Kitchen Dick.

The easiest cure for the white text is to click on where text ought to be (NOT in a quote box - if you click there then this only works on the contents of that quote box), hit Ctrl-A, and then change the text color (that's the underlined "A" in the row of tool buttons) from "Automatic" to, well, pretty much anything other than white. I go with the black square at the left of the first full row. This has been complained about, both in the forum and in feedback to the admins, several times.

I could see it making them collapse into abject laughter...

In Tedd's case, it may be that his male body doesn't age when he's transformed-by-enchantment to female. (Leaving room for base-form transformations to work differently.) Or it could be natural. Grace, it's natural... or whatever is the closest equivalent for multi-species hybrids grown in Uryuom eggs.

As I recall, when the 80286 first came and and we learned about a number of people observed that the second most salient feature of protected mode (behind the fact that DOS wasn't compatible with it) was that nothing was protected.

I'm sure the 150+ companies selling mutually-compatible computers and hardware based on the S-100 (aka IEEE 696) bus, most of said computers running some version of CP/M, would have been amazed to learn that they were company-centric ecosystems. The S-100 bus began with 8-bit Intel 8080 processors, but did okay with 16-bit processors such as the 8086 and 68000, and there was even a 32-bit processor board using a 68020. (Note: internally the 68000 is a 32-bit processor and the 68020 is a 64-bit processor. They had half-width paths to RAM. Just like the 8088 that IBM put in the first PC is a 16-bit processor internally with an 8-bit path to RAM.) The S-100 bus, by the way, had 24 address lines and 16 data lines. For the IBM PC it was 20 and 8. At the time IBM came out with the PC and "legitimized" the microcomputer industry - yes some clown said that - said industry was already as big (total revenues) as the pantyhose industry and coming up on rivalling the dog-food industry. Some big companies, including the US Air Force, had server farms clustering racks of S-100-bus computers. MS-DOS version 1 (aka PC-DOS, originally QDOS) was not nearly good enough to qualify as a CP/M clone. CP/M had years of service on a variety of hardware platforms behind it, and was much more robust and stable. CP/M-86 was further along in development than QDOS, until the guy who wrote QDOS decided to throw intended functionality out while the people doing CP/M-86 insisted on getting it to actually work. There were also multi-user and single-user multi-tasking versions of CP/M, and later of CP/M-86. MS-DOS version 2 was almost entirely developed in-house by Microsoft. Version 1 was that bad, they basically threw it out - and replaced it with something that users would swear at for the next 17+ years.

And (according to legend) IBM went with Microsoft because the junior vice president in front of the PC project called up the company that owned CP/M - an OS with several years of history and a significant-for-the-time stock of applications - and said "I'm coming to talk with your president tomorrow about this project" and the reply was "well, he's on vacation in Europe with his wife and children, so he won't be here tomorrow. The vice president will be available tomorrow. Or we can make an appointment for two weeks from now."

They certainly would look odd on her elbows.

Isn't that the point of a fair amount of fashion? Along with a few specific items of clothing? I once read that the purpose of a negligee is to be seen for a short time - if it's seen for a long time, it isn't doing its job.

Yep. The acronym stands for File Access Table. WARNING: lots of technical stuff follows. For the rest of this post. That is also the name of a particular component of the structure - which even a floppy contains two copies of, it's that important. A directory entry contains all the meta-information and the block number of the first block in the file. If that happens to be block #143, then entry #143 in the FAT on disk will contain the block number of the second block in the file (with special values for "this is the last block in the file" and "this block is officially empty") - and absolutely nothing else. Originally (and possibly still, on floppies) each entry in the FAT took 12 bits - a byte and a half. They put two entries in three bytes. There's a trade-off: with a larger block size the same size block-number can handle a larger disk, BUT, the disk space will be used less efficiently. For most purposes, even a 16K block is just silly - a huge majority of files are smaller than 8K. A larger block number, of course, means the FAT itself is larger and possibly slower to process; however, processor speed and RAM capacity grew. So eventually FAT entries were expanded to 16 bits and then to 32 bits. The FAT file system also assumes that each block is in only one file. So if a file is deleted, every block that was in it is marked (in the FAT on disk) as empty. That's why the file system does not support what Unix/Linux folks call "hard links", and why Windows "shortcuts" were originally such a bad kludge supported by practically nothing except the desktop and the file explorer. (Note: Microsoft could have written "symlink" capability - I'll explain what that is in a bit - into the FAT file system. A symlink is less efficient than a hard link, but it gets the job done, with both advantages and disadvantages in behavior. And if it were in the file system, effectively everything would have supported it. But they didn't do that, ever, and neither has anyone else. Even on Android, the newest major OS, a FAT partition cannot contain a symlink.) The NTFS file system that is preferred for WinNT and its descendants is more similar to Unix file systems. I don't know the details. On Unix-like OSes I'm most familiar with the internals of the ext3 file system (and actually I really only know ext2 - ext3 is backward compatible with it and adds journaling to protect the file system structure from damage, but I don't know the details of how that works). But other Unix file systems are written with the same capabilities, and mostly similar in general design (precise details, of course, vary). In ext3, a directory contains nothing but hard links. A hard link consists of a filename and an inode number pointing at an inode in the same partition. That's all. The real identity of a file consists of what computer, device, and partition it's on, and the number of its top inode. The top inode of a file does not contain a filename, but does contain all other metainformation, including a count of how many directory entries are hard links to it. After that, for the top inode, there are several types. One type is a symlink - so the rest of the inode will contain the complete path to another directory entry somewhere, and access to the contents of this file is automatically redirected - by the file system - to that other file. A program normally won't even be told it's going through a symlink. The advantages of a symlink (as compared to a hard link) are that it can point to other partitions, devices, even computers, and that the ownership and rights on a symlink can be different from those on the file it's pointing at; the disadvantages are that symlinks consume more resources (an extra inode and the time to access it), and since they aren't counted - they cannot reliably be counted - it's possible to get broken symlinks pointing at files that no longer exist. The next type, useful for small files, is "here are the contents of the file". Right there in the inode itself. Consuming no data blocks. Next up is a list of data blocks numbers, for files that don't fit in the inode but occupy no more blocks than can be listed in the inode. And then, for larger files, a list of secondary inode numbers. The secondary inodes themselves can be either lists of data block numbers or lists of next-level-down inode numbers, forming a tree structure.

I looked at Scrivener and chose oStorybook. It's written in Java and available for Windows, Linux, and OSX. (When I switched from Windows to Linux as my main OS, I initially just put a symlink in my home directory pointing at the appropriate folder in my old Windows home directory. Didn't even have to copy the files. Everything worked.) It has more features than Scrivener, including built-in timeline tracking. One disadvantage is that the main website for it is in French, and the Google Translate version isn't a really great translation. Backup is critical - and the biggest threat to your work, the thing you most need backups to protect your work from, is your own fat fingers. Which means you need frequent backups and several of them going back in time. Preferably on an external drive so it also protects you against hardware failures, and/or in the cloud if you're so inclined (I am not, so have no comment on the relative merits of various services). Strongly recommended for this purpose: Linux: BackInTime (it's free) ; Macintosh: Time Machine (you already have it); Windows: Genie Timeline (commercial, there is a free version but I didn't care for the limitations). I use BackInTime and, for my writing, have it checking for changes every two hours. It keeps every backup for two days, a backup a day for a week, a backup a week for a few months (that actually covers the oldest backup I have), a backup a month for a couple years, and a backup a year for ten years. Other parts of the system are backed up less frequently because they are either less important or less volatile. Time Machine and BackInTime take advantage of a characteristic of Unix file systems to make every incremental backup look exactly like a full backup - no special software needed, not even a plugin to a file manager - without consuming the requisite space or time. Genie Timeline could do the same thing if it insisted that backups be to an NTFS partition, but it's willing to write to FAT which doesn't have the required characteristic (each directory entry must be a completely unique file - Unix file systems and NTFS allow a single file to have multiple directory entries pointing at it), so it has to track stuff in its own database and use a special Windows Explorer plugin to reconstruct the directory structure on the fly. This means that a Genie Timeline backup is more or less useless on a system that doesn't have the software installed - and getting a new software installation to recognize a pre-existing backup set is a bit of a pain.

But, more specifically, it tends to be that writers and directors assume that producers and financier will assume that the audience is bigoted.

Most of the mermaids I've seen had horizontal flukes rather than vertical fins. Scales, however, are unfortunately common. I've also seen a few with vertical fins AND GILLS. Which makes sense. (The issue is that to support a typical mammal metabolism, which is a prerequisite to supporting a human brain, the gills would have to occupy about half of the torso, and they couldn't shove enough water through a human mouth and throat. But then, with magic...) It's thought that the main advantage of horizontal flukes, for aquatic mammals, is that it helps them turn toward the surface faster than vertical fins would; that wouldn't matter much for a water-breather.

But isn't that the satellites' job?

All the functionality you expect of the OS is there - but typically not in the same place, so it takes some getting used to and learning your way around. But then, so did Windows; it's just that you probably learned that a little bit at a time and now know where things are. Also there's a lot of other software that is only available for Windows. However there are approximate Linux equivalents for most of it other than games, and a substantial share of them are free. So far I'm only missing a few games and Quicken, and I'm not missing Quicken much because the company can't be bothered to fix existing problems as it's too busy adding new ones. (There's a Windows emulator, called Wine, that can run a lot of Windows software. But not all of it. Graphic-intensive stuff like commercial games, typically not. Wine is free, and included in many Linux distributions.) MS Office? Most Linux distributions come with LibreOffice, which replaces Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Visio plus has some other features (and can read/write, at least, Word and Excel files). There are also versions of LibreOffice for Windows and OSX, and of it or some other descendant(s) of OpenOffice for BSD Unix, Android, and iOS (and possibly other OSes). On the other hand, the OS is frequently MORE capable. For example: due to my particular situation I want my computer to run a wifi hotspot and NOT connect to some other wifi hotspot (my cell phone does that - or uses the cell network, and my computer doesn't see any difference). Windows 8 makes it easy (assuming suitable hardware) to configure things so the wifi adapter divides its time between connecting to another hotspot and being a hotspot - dividing the bandwidth in half for that computer and by four for any other device - but apparently can't be persuaded for the wifi adapter to JUST be a hotspot. With Linux I found a document that told me what setting in what configuration file to change and how to find out what values are supported by the hardware... one value supports dividing the wifi adapter in two like Windows insists on, another is for a dedicated hotspot.

Win8 could be made usable via Classic Shell and turning off virtually all its supposedly-nifty features. When I got a good look at what people were saying came standard with Win10, and some of it COULDN'T be turned off, I first turned off Windows Update entirely and then installed Linux. I haven't run Windows in a few months now.

You forgot that Sarah is with Sam. So Larry is trailing them hoping Sam screws up bad enough that Sarah needs rescued, and Rich is trailing Larry because he's a suspicious git. ---- Also, it appears that Elliot is happiest to hear from Ashley. Whereas Susan's message has him confused, and Sarah's, concerned.

In the magic-rewrite Pandora described from a previous life, a large number of people who were able to do a certain sort of magic suddenly became unable. And since they were going to war with pretty much nothing but that magic as weapons, it didn't go well for them. (Of course, we don't know all the details.)

So far I've checked two websites and found four distinctly-different pronunciations.

My take on it is that magic (effectively - taking this literally may be over-personification) wants to be special. If too high a percentage of people have it and pretty much everyone knows about it, it stops being special. At this point I think that even in Moperville, an estimate that 5 people per thousand are uryuom, seyunolu, or magic-using is likely to be rather higher than reality. How well magic is understood by the fraction who know about it, probably doesn't matter nearly as much as how large that fraction is.

Agreed. As usual, I am appalled by how bad one major candidate is... and even more so by the fact that the other major candidate makes that one look relatively GOOD. (Specification of which is whom is deliberately omitted.)

Several times. And, as usual, it seems that approximately nobody was persuaded to change what they thought had happened.

IMHO we have insufficient information on this question. Also there isn't necessarily just one answer. Apparently he does have to at least think about his phone to activate its functions. (Or have something external happen that would activate it and draw it to his attention, such as someone calling him.)