> And the German word for "piano" is "Klavier".

I don't know about modern German, but in Bach's time any keyboard instrument would be called a Klavier.

However, you are certainly correct about the Well-Tempered Clavier being by design particularly suited, more than any of Bach's other music, to newer instruments that were more closely approaching the modern piano than anything that had come before. That's the whole point of the piece, in fact.

> I went to Bach's childhood home and they have a number of his harpsichords

Yes, but those harpsichords were probably all justly intoned for a particular key (not necessarily all for the /same/ particular key, mind you). Well tempered instruments were a relatively new thing in Bach's time, and the instrument most widely associated with well temperament (and later perfectly equal temperament) is the pianoforte.

Most of Bach's works would be better performed on some other instrument -- violin, harpsichord, or in a few cases the pipe organ. The Well-Tempered Clavier is the exception. More than anything else Bach wrote, it really does belong on the piano.

The more you study Bach's work, the more you get the impression that he didn't really prefer one instrument over another. The man routinely took pieces that had been originally written for one instrument and reworked them for another. He made violin pieces work on the harpsichord, harpsichord pieces on the pipe organ, organ pieces on the violin, whatever. He really seems to have been more interested in the music itself than in the specific acoustic properties of any particular instrument.

Besides that, of all the works Bach wrote, the WTC specifically is probably the best suited for pianoforte. Virtually every other keyboard instrument available in Bach's time was tuned to a just intonation in almost every case, making them unsuitable to play this particular piece. A justly intoned harpsichord (or a set of justly intoned violins for that matter) would be fine for BWV1079 or 1080, but it clearly wouldn't work at all for WTC.

Yeah, it depends.

I think I've had five power supplies go bad for every one other component that has failed. So if you count by the number of incidents, definitely PSUs.

But, when a power supply goes bad, you replace it, and *usually* the computer then works just fine.

If you count by the number of hours of my time that have been spent as a result of hardware failures, then obviously hard drives have caused me the most trouble. They're the second most common thing to go bad after the PSU, and you typically have to _at least_ do a full OS reinstall after you replace one, then install updates and applications. That's if the system in question didn't have any data on it that you have to restore from backup, or any significant customization...

At least they've improved the performance of using .zip files in Windows Explorer. Back when they first introduced that, it was *awful*. If the zipfile contained more than a couple of dozen files, copying them out took an amazingly long time. (It's still not as fast as some other software that works with .zip files, e.g. info-zip; but it's way more reasonable now than it used to be. It's no longer bad enough to drive me to put the .zip file on a USB 2.0 flash drive and hand-carry it to a Linux box to unzip it and hand-carry the contents back and copy them from the USB 2.0 flash drive to the Windows computer -- at one time, this was actually significantly faster than using Explorer's zipfile support, if the zipfile had a lot of small files in it.)

> You'd get whiter skies. People wouldn't have blue skies anymore.

I grew up in northeastern Ohio. I always assumed the notion of the sky being "blue" was a cultural symbolic thing, like how they teach you to draw yellow lines radiating from the sun to represent the sunlight coming from it, or the black lines you draw behind a moving object to show the motion.

When I was in seventh grade we moved to western Michigan. The first day, I got out my camera and took photographs of the sky being *actually* blue (well, sky blue), because I didn't think anyone would believe me, or understand that I was being literal, if I just told them about it.

Actually, there are German and Japanese variants. (The German one is a translation of UnNetHack, done I think by the same guy who did the English version of that variant. The Japanese one, somewhat older, is called NetHack Brass and seems to be mainly a flavor variant, i.e., it changes much more than just language.)

Actually, that could happen, if you've eaten a purple F, for example. (Admittedly, the fact that "gnome" and "gargoyle" both start with g would be an irrelevant coincidence in such a case.)

Five bytes. In decimal, it'd be 38 115 104 121 59. HTH.HAND.

Honestly, it'd probably taste better than some of the other stuff NetHack characters eat.

For practical purposes, you can think of libuncursed as the display layer of NetHack 4, replacing an older curses library that NitroHack used, which in turn replaced the extensive and rather complicated set of platform-specific user interfaces NetHack 3.4.3 used, which were never entirely consistent with one another, due to being separately maintained.

libnethack is distributed with the game, as part of it, and I think it is even linked in statically by default. Yes, it was written as a highly-generalized support library, so that it *could* be used by other projects if desired and could probably even be made a dynamic library. But if all you want to do is build and run NetHack 4, that doesn't matter.

But in any case the original question from the Dev Team is about what to do in the vanilla codebase that may eventually lead to a new vanilla release (with a number yet to be announced, but 3.6 is probable; the number 3.5 will not be used for reasons explained on nethack.org). The vanilla codebase does not use libuncursed and in a number of additional ways is far more similar to 3.4.3 than it is to NetHack 4.

Although, the NetHack 4 devs are probably following this thread as well and may also implement Unicode in a larger way. (Unicode graphics for map display are already supported there, but things like player names, fruit names, object names, and level annotations are still treated as ASCII, I think, the same as in 3.4.3.)

Another thing not mentioned in the post is that the Dev Team is known to have already implemented some Unicode support, using wchar_t, which you can find in the leaked code (a tarball made from the tip of the dev team's internal repository from a few months ago now), if you hunt down a copy of that. But apparently they have not entirely settled on that implementation as the final solution.

Get ready for the big one. If we have an earthquake because of this, it could measure, 3.0, 3.5, maybe even 4.0 on the moment magnitude scale. People up to several miles away from the epicenter might be able to *feel* the quake, if they are sitting quietly in unpadded chairs at the time and concentrating on paying attention to tiny vibrations.

(I exaggerate. Slightly. I believe we actually had a 6.something once, back in the eighties, and people up to eighty or ninety miles from the epicenter claimed afterward that they felt it.)

Ohio is only seismically active in the technical sense. You generally need an actual seismograph to detect said activity. I'm sure it's fascinating, but it has little practical significance.

My current favorite is NetHack. Brogue is also interesting, but it's *really* hard, and I'm not that good.