There is also Viber which I've found to be popular in Europe as an alternative to WhatsApp. I've been using it for years and like it.

Unfortunately it's easier to say to encourage people to change from WhatsApp to another app but they are comfortable with it and everyone else they know is using it. Asking them to change means having them using two apps, one to chat with you, and one to chat with everyone else they know.

Australia already has at least three sites with battery storage operational and a years' worth of data on two of them. We're past the small scale tests of batteries and they are proving themselves in the field.

https://www.energy-storage.new...

Pretty ironic considering it's usually Word that kills my productivity when it screws up the formatting of my document and the useless "show codes" does nothing to help solve the problem.

I used to work at Nortel doing source code control for a number of various projects. One day I get an email from some manager asking why I hadn't implemented his request to put a graph of the historical number of lines of code into the weekly build report and the message was CC'd to just about every VP in the company.

As I'm trying to figure out how to diplomatically tell this idiot to f-off my manager, who was copied in the message, walks over to my desk, quietly says that he'll handle it, and I never hear a thing about it again until I get a thank you message after I implement the completely useless graph.

Which is a complete shame because I really wanted to reply to the manager, all of the VP, and add in the CEO. I was going to tell him that that if he could get the CEO to agree to delaying his pet project that had been announced to the press then I would have gladly worked on getting his graph done. I was currently working on setting up the source code control environments for all of the developers on the new project. If I delayed that then the whole project would have started late.

I would have loved to see that managers' face when he thought he was torpedoing the career of some slacker when in fact he just brought my good work to the attention to the corporate execs (not that I care about their attention).

It should be like the last time they transitioned processors to Intel. For a couple of years they had something called Rosetta, a virtual machine on the app level, that ran transparently and, in my experience seamlessly, to the user. Any applications that were compiled for the old processors were run on Rosetta. So until VirtualBox, in your case, is built for the new Mac processor, the new "Rosetta 2.0" software will run the existing version compiled for Intel processors without you having to do anything. You'll be able to run Linux without any problems.

1200 years? Impossible. Try holding it for just a night and you could end up like Tycho Brahe.

We have the technology to simulate it all with technology so why not get rid of the players too!

The person said home bread baker doesn't need sugar, not a home cook. Unless a sugar, such as molasses, is being used in a bread for it's taste then there's no reason to be adding sugar to a bread.

In fact, the basic ingredients of flour, water, yeast, and salt will be enough for many types of bread. The proportions, the time left to set up (proof), and how the dough is baked will change the properties of the final product.

People have been dreaming of a world where we just speak to computers and they understand us all of the time. But that vision of interfacing with a computer seems like some sort of hell to me, even if they someone managed to get the computer to correctly understand our voice 100% of the time. Imagine trying to work in the office, at least something like in pre-COVID times, in which everyone is speaking to the computer for every little task and you are trying to think about your project. Or you are on mass transit, even now with COVID, where the people nearby are using their phones. It's annoying enough when someone is talking loudly on the phone. How would it be if everyone is almost shouting at their phone? Or you are at home with the family watching a movie and you get an email from work but the only way to view it is with voice commands. Those people whom use their phones at the theatre will be even more annoying with this.

I'm someone who definitely thinks that we should keep a way to enter information in with a physical means. So probably that will mean a keyboard and some other device such as a mouse or trackpad. But who knows what people could come up with that may be better even though we've had the same things for many decades with incremental improvements.

If you're reading this site I'm surprised that you haven't replaced the fuses with a circuit breaker as you'd be replacing so many fuses the cost to change it to a circuit breaker would easily be repaid within a year.

I have a Late 2015 model of the Retina 5k iMac and I can play that content. I can't be doing any intensive CPU or memory tasks at the same time but I don't have to shut down all my apps in order to view it either. I just fire up VLC and everything plays fine.

Whenever I buy a movie or TV series, including 4k content, I rip the content onto my computer and convert everything over to hevc to save storage space. I like having everything easily at hand plus it's a good backup in case the discs fail. (I have had some DVDs already become unplayable even though they have been sitting in their cases protected. I'm not going to buy the item again for a failed disc.)

Also, notice that Mac users have only had access to 720p video until now even with the hardware available. It was with the latest macOS release that Netflix allowed the increase to 2160p, as long as you pay. So what happened to 1080p? I know that on my monitor, which is what I use to view videos, I can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p videos.

I'm sorry to hear about the loss of your Tonk.

I've had many cats during my life and my absolute favourite of all time was a Tonkinese. She was amazing. She was the smallest cat in the household but ruled the place. One time it sounded like there was a fight about to start. She jumped off me and went to the spot with me following to find out what was going on. It was like a scene from Fight Club with two cats about to fight and a few surrounding them watching. This Tonkinese just went in between the two about to fight, gave each one a tap on the nose, and left while the rest started to break up! She and a Lilac Siamese had a litter of kittens. It's been almost three years since the last two from that litter have passed away at the age of 18. I found the Tonkinese to be a bit smarter than the Siamese but I love both cats. When I'm ready for another cat I'd love to get another Tonk.

Every cat has their own personality. I love the fact that cats are independent because when they spend time with you it means that they want to be with you. They could easily be spending their time elsewhere but at that moment they picking you and that should feel special.

I knew a Siamese cat that could turn round door knobs in order to open doors. I sometimes would stay over at a friends house in the spare room. The door would be closed when I went to sleep and when I woke up in the morning the cat would be in the bed next to me. Before I had a chance to ask my friends if they opened the door I was returning to the room and the cat ran out in front of me, reached up, and opened the door.

Hydrogen has a number of problems. It's essentially a battery in a different form from what we're used to.

Currently one of the big issues with Hydrogen is that because electrolysis is so energy intensive is it easier to obtain it from fossil fuels, mainly natural gas. This defeats the whole purpose of using Hydrogen to get away from fossil fuels in the first place. If you use fossil fuels as a feedstock and use fossil fuels as the energy to produce the Hydrogen then one really isn't solving the issue. It's like using a coal fired power plant to recharge an electric car.

I can't recall hearing anyone propose using nuclear plants to power the electrolysis process. I have heard many people suggest using the excess power generated from solar and wind farms be used instead of throwing it away as we currently don't have battery storage online.

When using electrolysis to generate Hydrogen I haven't heard anyone (though I'm sure people probably have brought it up) talk about the pollution it will bring about. We've seen it occur with desalination plants. Those plants take out large amounts of water and the byproduct is a liquid that contains the concentrated amounts of everything that was in the source water. Dumping that liquid back into source would raise the concentrations there, making desalination or electrolysis more expensive for smaller amounts of end product, and also make the water more toxic for life wherever it was dumped.

Using Hydrogen is less efficient than a battery as it transforms the type of energy via a number of stages from electricity to get to Hydrogen and then from Hydrogen to get back to electricity. Each step has its' associated inefficiencies along with the energy required to keep the Hydrogen stored as a liquid. When using batteries there is the conversion into the battery and the conversion out of the battery, assuming that capacitors aren't being used. The losses will always be lower for the battery.

We already have a transmission system in place for electricity. We would require a new one for Hydrogen. To get Hydrogen powered vehicles on the road the equivalent of gas stations would have to be created along with the infrastructure to supply them with the gas. It wouldn't be as simple as converting the natural gas pipelines over to Hydrogen as they would leak Hydrogen.

Imagine thousands of Hydrogen powered vehicles in the middle of a freezing winter day with their water exhaust falling onto the roads and becoming ice. Every day the cities would have to be salting the roads during winter instead of during and just after a storm. The salt would ruin the local environment.

There is also the electric seaplane that had first flight back in December 2019. It's a collaboration between Harbour Air and magniX. Harbour Air wants to replace their fleet with all electric seaplanes. While the range is limited, around 100 miles I believe, it's plenty for what the company needs.

Here is the company's announcement of the seaplanes' first flight: https://www.harbourair.com/har...