Perhaps we should live in caves on top of mountains.
Let's take note of the weight of the system and make sure your roof frame is designed to hold it.
Ever see how a lot of cheap contractors re-shingle a roof? they just keep adding layers. A truss frame is remarkably strong, and the weight is transferred to the walls, and in even stick-built houses, I've seen 5 story builds. So the weight transferred to the vertical walls better be able to take the weight of solar panels. I'm not expecting an entire two extra stories plus a roof to stress the capacity of a normal stickbuilt place of two stories plus solar panels.
Lastly, let's note the costs and realize these are toys for rich people. It will be quite some time before it is affordable for everyone else.
Your point? Things shouldn't happen unless the poorest of us can afford it? We wouldn't have much then.
And just as many know and don't care. Because really why the fuck would you.
Because when Windows 10 updates and their "Facebook" doesn't work, or they can't listen to their music or hear their Netflix any more or skype their grandkids or participate in chatroulette, or various masturbatory aids - then they care.
The shingle color begins to fade quick due to the Sun's radiation. The little bits of rocks & stones pressed into the top of the shingle at the factory is really what's protecting the roof shingle from being destroyed, since it reflects the sunlight.
Yup, and I see those little rocks just below my downspouts as they wash off.
Putin will arrive triumphantly in Washington DC, parading in like Hitler reviewing the Eiffel Tower, and the Americans who elected Trump will rejoice in an Anschluss Österreichs event that will provide the final victory of the cold war go to those who we thought had lost in 1989.
In hyper conservative (the real definition of conservative) housing industry, it takes a long time to get different looking things accepted.
And there's a good reason. To get my home on the real estate market, I just had to replace all Kitec water piping at a cost of over $20k. It was perfectly acceptable when our home was built but the product proved to fail too often over time. In my case it never failed but insurers may not insure or bankers might not give a loan to a house with Kitec. I'll get pennies on the dollar from a class action lawsuit.
I was part ofa class action lawsuit about water piping as well. Made a cool 5 dollars after replacing the existing system with copper.
I think the difference though is that stuff like piping gets replaced by things that are quick to assemble and can be done by an unskilled worker, get through, yet equally bad stuff like drywall and asphalt shingles are touted as the best thing around, and still in use even though they are pretty awful.
Why didn't you get a steel roof? Those can and do last 50+ years. Copper will last 100+ years.
Well, I know why... same reason I didn't, I bet.
in my case no. My financial controller liked the looks of shingles, and thought that steel roofing "looked cheap" Probably based on housing market inertia since that's her field.
side note - copper looks awesome, but you have to be careful. We get acid rain from a neighboring state's power generation, and you have to plan the roof out for how long water might be on it. If you get an area that has a lot of water running over it, it will stay reddish, while the other areas are aging like they should. Kinda hard to explain, but they had a downspout that emptied onto a lower portion of the porch roof, and removed by the porch gutter. It would become a fresh copper surface at the downspout outlet every time it rained.
How many house fires start because of the roof catching fire? Seems pretty unlikely for freestanding structures...
A massive shitload, actually. It's unusual for it to happen to one house, but it's very common for it to happen to a whole bunch of houses during a general conflagration.
Seriously nasty, and when they start, they like to stay burning more than a lot of materials. Bu tit comes down to that inertia. It's like granite countertops. People act like if the place doesn't have granite countertops how the hell are you going to get your money's worth out of it? On existing homes sales, when the shingles were put on is a selling point.
During forest fires, it's not unusual for burning debris to be thrown for miles. And let's not forget that propane tanks are more common in wooded areas, that they become bombs in major fires in spite of the cute little pressure relief system, and that they will throw burning debris even further.
I saw firsthand what one of those tanks can do. A local multiplex theater was under construction, and they had a large vertical Propane tank out front. The place caught on fire, and eventually the tank was surrounded by flames. Then the valve opened and it made a pretty good approximation of a rocket engine, with a roar and flames shooting straight up maybe a hundred feet. had it been horizontal, it would have lit a nearby shopping center on fire. Or maybe me. Regardless, the firefighters stayed away until the tank flamed out.
While it might be reasonable to use asphalt roofs in the desert, it is utterly unconscionable to permit them in wooded regions. And most of us want to live around trees...
I don't like them anywhere, high maintenance, and once we got people to accept that they were attractive - and they are not - the housing market inertia set in.
If you have branches falling and hitting your roof, there's a good chance your house is shaded enough that solar power probably isn't the best idea for you.
We're not a perfect area for solar, I do have a sort of test system up for my radio equipment that works pretty well.
You may also want to find out why your shingles are failing prematurely. Do you have poor attic ventilation?
I have one of those rooftop systems, with a vent running the length of all the rooflines and soffit vents along the bottom. It's pretty good.
Its the low pitch. It takes a beating. Debris that lands on it tends to stay on it. As well, I have to get up and get rid of the debris a few times a year. That doesn't help. Over time, the little stones in it get washed away.
There are some homes in my area that are over 50 years old with their original shingles on them. The roofs are sort of an Edwardian look with very steep pitch, one you'd have to use scaffolding to change out the shingles. But not much ever touches them.
That's often the cause of accelerated deterioration in shingle roofing. You should be getting 25+years from a single application of quality asphalt if the conditions are within the operating range for your material.
Asphalt/Fiberglass shingles don't last for shit. Even sunlight destroys them. Shale and Terra Cotta shingles can last a long time if no nasty weather events happen. But even they wear away. Metal roofing lasts, but is noisy and there's that aesthetic issue people complain about. I have seen some fiberglass looking inch thick roofing panels that probably last a long time, but they define fugly, and are seriously expensive.
Musk is merely using the words you have to use today, because if he said "indefinitely" all by itself, Tesla would probably be sued by the first person who had a house destroyed in an earthquake and broke a solar panel in the process.
These tempered glass panels are almost certainly much much tougher than any existing roofing material except steel, and maybe those fugly inch thick things.. And steel will rust if it gets the chance.
Jerry Sandusky says your ten year old son is perfectly safe around him.
Seriously, Thanks Google, but we've been told that Android phones don't have asecurity problem in the first place, so how can they be as safe as iPhones now if they never had a problem?
In a way that is largely irrelevant (impact of a heavy dense object), and entirely ignores the most common roofing material - asphalt shingles.
Asphalt or fiberglass shingles aren't all that tough. In general, the higher the pitch of the roof, the longer they last. On a low pitch roof such as mine, 25 year shingles last 10-15 years. Just how it is. I've had branches come down and damage them. Get enough damage, and you better hope they still make the same color after a few years - uness you don't mind a trashy looking roof. Even the replacements you should buy - I have several bundles sitting in my shed, will look different for a few years. And having replaced my roof shingles twice since I bought my place - they aren't cheap.
That we could walk on these panels. I have a low pitch roof, and have to get debris off of it fairly often. Not that it is a problem for that many homeowners Anyhow, good on Tesla. In hyper conservative (the real definition of conservative) housing industry, it takes a long time to get different looking things accepted. I personally find a roof full of regular photovoltaic panels as aesthetically pleasing as a asphalt shingle roof, but if people like that look, then it's a selling point.
Look, Windows 7 is old. It has old technology from 7 years ago. There is no way anyone could want a computer with something so obsolete.
Yes there is. I shook down Windows 10, and it is unreliable. Stuff gets continually broken. Same with other's W10 installs. I have a W7 install that has been about a year and a half with continuous uptime.
It is probably difficult for some to understand, but I do not give a flying fig about whatever someone in Redmond or Cupertino decides is so damn awesom that we have to put out a new operating system. What I need from an operating system is low overhead, working with my programs, a good way to maintain it, and otherwise get the hell out of the way.
I have software I use. I need it to work. Not sometimes, not every so often after finding out what broke because of the operating system, but when I need to use it.
I get this from my W7 installs. Not at all from Windows 10. I use a computer to do work, not to try to get the computer to work.
It's amazing that a change to an interface somehow makes customer data flow out somewhere. I'm going to assume you can't follow a conversation and just froth at the mouth at the opportunity to mention telemetry every chance you get.
Go do a little research. The put Wireshark on a Windows 10 computer, and sit back and enjoy the show. Then enable all of the security features.
Then spend some more time with wireshark and lecture us on telemetry.
Because you are either ignorant, or lying. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt, and we'll just say you don't know what you are talking about.
Actually I work for a multi-national company in the Fortune 50 list currently looking at wide scale deployment of Windows 10 across the world. We also have internally approved the use of Office365 and Onedrive to store commercially sensitive and confidential documents.
We're clever enough to realise that we're less likely to be compromised thanks to the shitload of security advances that are included in Windows 10 which basically makes whole categories of previous attacks impossible.
Lawnmowing has no future here.
What is their position on the telemetry holes? Or do your lawyers tell you that they are impossible to exploit?
You know, if you are not a shill, you should be. Impossible is not a word that anyone who knows what they are doing would ever utter. It's one of those words that actually encourages the bad guys.
By the way. have you ever noticed that there are lawyers on both sides of every case?
As someone with small businesses dealing with sensitive commercial and personal data, not only do we give a crap, so do our lawyers. YMMV, but the telemetry and automatic updates are not a non-issue for those too small to be using the enterprise-level tools.
Then there's the updates breaking systems debacle. I support Windows computers, and its an unholy mess as every update breaks big stuff. You can leave in the evening with everything working, and come back in again with the computer in endless reboot mode. Or the sound card not working. Or the camera not working. Or an ethernet device not working, or after delayin updates as long as allowed, it updates and changes all of the privacy settings to express.
Yeah, it's fine. There's no advantage to it though, other than a slightly different interface to learn. And the drawback of invasive anti-privacy options - which are fairly easily disabled.
Do you have the telemetry that Windows collects on you after you've disabled everything they tell you about turned off?
More likely MS is embarrassed by the consumer dislike of windows 10.
I'm far from a MS apologist (typing this on a Mac; doing my development on Linux) but I think a simpler explanation is that they don't want to support a 7 year old OS.
The fly in that ointment is that it takes a stretch to say that Windows 10 works.
If Microsoft were to enable turning off updates, it would go a long way toward fixing the problem. There is still the telemetry issue, but most users don't know and don't care.
I don't think smart watches are a failure, they are before there time, they don't provide the functionality required to make them useful enough, because the technology isn't there yet.
I think one real serious limiter of smart watches is that a whole lot of us don't wear watches any more. It would take a law to make me put something on my wrist today. when I usesd to wear watches a long time ago, the bands would pull hair off my arm, or stink, depending on the material of the band. Finally, since I was working around a lot of high current devices, I just abandoned them. Now I have a smartphone that does all I need. The trick of the smartwatches will be to convince us something we don't have now is something we really really need.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see how well they hold up to hurricane force winds and the debris that comes with it.
You mean like the shingles wandering around in this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Perhaps we should live in caves on top of mountains.
Let's take note of the weight of the system and make sure your roof frame is designed to hold it.
Ever see how a lot of cheap contractors re-shingle a roof? they just keep adding layers. A truss frame is remarkably strong, and the weight is transferred to the walls, and in even stick-built houses, I've seen 5 story builds. So the weight transferred to the vertical walls better be able to take the weight of solar panels. I'm not expecting an entire two extra stories plus a roof to stress the capacity of a normal stickbuilt place of two stories plus solar panels.
Lastly, let's note the costs and realize these are toys for rich people. It will be quite some time before it is affordable for everyone else.
Your point? Things shouldn't happen unless the poorest of us can afford it? We wouldn't have much then.
And just as many know and don't care. Because really why the fuck would you.
Because when Windows 10 updates and their "Facebook" doesn't work, or they can't listen to their music or hear their Netflix any more or skype their grandkids or participate in chatroulette, or various masturbatory aids - then they care.
The shingle color begins to fade quick due to the Sun's radiation. The little bits of rocks & stones pressed into the top of the shingle at the factory is really what's protecting the roof shingle from being destroyed, since it reflects the sunlight.
Yup, and I see those little rocks just below my downspouts as they wash off.
Putin will arrive triumphantly in Washington DC, parading in like Hitler reviewing the Eiffel Tower, and the Americans who elected Trump will rejoice in an Anschluss Österreichs event that will provide the final victory of the cold war go to those who we thought had lost in 1989.
In hyper conservative (the real definition of conservative) housing industry, it takes a long time to get different looking things accepted.
And there's a good reason. To get my home on the real estate market, I just had to replace all Kitec water piping at a cost of over $20k. It was perfectly acceptable when our home was built but the product proved to fail too often over time. In my case it never failed but insurers may not insure or bankers might not give a loan to a house with Kitec. I'll get pennies on the dollar from a class action lawsuit.
I was part ofa class action lawsuit about water piping as well. Made a cool 5 dollars after replacing the existing system with copper.
I think the difference though is that stuff like piping gets replaced by things that are quick to assemble and can be done by an unskilled worker, get through, yet equally bad stuff like drywall and asphalt shingles are touted as the best thing around, and still in use even though they are pretty awful.
Why didn't you get a steel roof? Those can and do last 50+ years. Copper will last 100+ years.
Well, I know why... same reason I didn't, I bet.
in my case no. My financial controller liked the looks of shingles, and thought that steel roofing "looked cheap" Probably based on housing market inertia since that's her field.
side note - copper looks awesome, but you have to be careful. We get acid rain from a neighboring state's power generation, and you have to plan the roof out for how long water might be on it. If you get an area that has a lot of water running over it, it will stay reddish, while the other areas are aging like they should. Kinda hard to explain, but they had a downspout that emptied onto a lower portion of the porch roof, and removed by the porch gutter. It would become a fresh copper surface at the downspout outlet every time it rained.
How many house fires start because of the roof catching fire? Seems pretty unlikely for freestanding structures...
A massive shitload, actually. It's unusual for it to happen to one house, but it's very common for it to happen to a whole bunch of houses during a general conflagration.
Seriously nasty, and when they start, they like to stay burning more than a lot of materials. Bu tit comes down to that inertia. It's like granite countertops. People act like if the place doesn't have granite countertops how the hell are you going to get your money's worth out of it? On existing homes sales, when the shingles were put on is a selling point.
During forest fires, it's not unusual for burning debris to be thrown for miles. And let's not forget that propane tanks are more common in wooded areas, that they become bombs in major fires in spite of the cute little pressure relief system, and that they will throw burning debris even further.
I saw firsthand what one of those tanks can do. A local multiplex theater was under construction, and they had a large vertical Propane tank out front. The place caught on fire, and eventually the tank was surrounded by flames. Then the valve opened and it made a pretty good approximation of a rocket engine, with a roar and flames shooting straight up maybe a hundred feet. had it been horizontal, it would have lit a nearby shopping center on fire. Or maybe me. Regardless, the firefighters stayed away until the tank flamed out.
While it might be reasonable to use asphalt roofs in the desert, it is utterly unconscionable to permit them in wooded regions. And most of us want to live around trees...
I don't like them anywhere, high maintenance, and once we got people to accept that they were attractive - and they are not - the housing market inertia set in.
If you have branches falling and hitting your roof, there's a good chance your house is shaded enough that solar power probably isn't the best idea for you.
We're not a perfect area for solar, I do have a sort of test system up for my radio equipment that works pretty well.
You may also want to find out why your shingles are failing prematurely. Do you have poor attic ventilation?
I have one of those rooftop systems, with a vent running the length of all the rooflines and soffit vents along the bottom. It's pretty good.
Its the low pitch. It takes a beating. Debris that lands on it tends to stay on it. As well, I have to get up and get rid of the debris a few times a year. That doesn't help. Over time, the little stones in it get washed away.
There are some homes in my area that are over 50 years old with their original shingles on them. The roofs are sort of an Edwardian look with very steep pitch, one you'd have to use scaffolding to change out the shingles. But not much ever touches them. That's often the cause of accelerated deterioration in shingle roofing. You should be getting 25+years from a single application of quality asphalt if the conditions are within the operating range for your material.
You might want to look up the definition of the prefix "quasi".
Musk used the prefix. And FWIW, he said "quasi indefinitely" https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Asphalt/Fiberglass shingles don't last for shit. Even sunlight destroys them. Shale and Terra Cotta shingles can last a long time if no nasty weather events happen. But even they wear away. Metal roofing lasts, but is noisy and there's that aesthetic issue people complain about. I have seen some fiberglass looking inch thick roofing panels that probably last a long time, but they define fugly, and are seriously expensive.
Musk is merely using the words you have to use today, because if he said "indefinitely" all by itself, Tesla would probably be sued by the first person who had a house destroyed in an earthquake and broke a solar panel in the process.
These tempered glass panels are almost certainly much much tougher than any existing roofing material except steel, and maybe those fugly inch thick things.. And steel will rust if it gets the chance.
Uh, every smart person buys an extra box of tile, shingles, and laminate flooring to replace the inevitable later damage.
You would be surprised how many don't though.
I think that you can walk on these new solar tiles.
I'll have to check that out then. That'd be great.
Don't hold the Note 7 so close to your head.
With apologies to Johnny Cash, I present Phone of Fire:
My phone is a burnin' thing
And its tone is a fiery ring
Lured by the size and power
I bought a phone of fire
My phone turned into a burnin' ring of fire
burned my car up
As the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The phone of fire, the phone of fire
A smartphone is really sweet
With no data cap, for it to meet
I fell for it like a child
Oh, but the fire it went wild
My phone turned into a burnin' ring of fire
burned my car up
As the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The phone of fire, the phone of fire
Seriously, Thanks Google, but we've been told that Android phones don't have asecurity problem in the first place, so how can they be as safe as iPhones now if they never had a problem?
In a way that is largely irrelevant (impact of a heavy dense object), and entirely ignores the most common roofing material - asphalt shingles.
Asphalt or fiberglass shingles aren't all that tough. In general, the higher the pitch of the roof, the longer they last. On a low pitch roof such as mine, 25 year shingles last 10-15 years. Just how it is. I've had branches come down and damage them. Get enough damage, and you better hope they still make the same color after a few years - uness you don't mind a trashy looking roof. Even the replacements you should buy - I have several bundles sitting in my shed, will look different for a few years. And having replaced my roof shingles twice since I bought my place - they aren't cheap.
Quasi-permanent sounds damn good to me.
That we could walk on these panels. I have a low pitch roof, and have to get debris off of it fairly often. Not that it is a problem for that many homeowners Anyhow, good on Tesla. In hyper conservative (the real definition of conservative) housing industry, it takes a long time to get different looking things accepted. I personally find a roof full of regular photovoltaic panels as aesthetically pleasing as a asphalt shingle roof, but if people like that look, then it's a selling point.
Look, Windows 7 is old. It has old technology from 7 years ago. There is no way anyone could want a computer with something so obsolete.
Yes there is. I shook down Windows 10, and it is unreliable. Stuff gets continually broken. Same with other's W10 installs. I have a W7 install that has been about a year and a half with continuous uptime.
It is probably difficult for some to understand, but I do not give a flying fig about whatever someone in Redmond or Cupertino decides is so damn awesom that we have to put out a new operating system. What I need from an operating system is low overhead, working with my programs, a good way to maintain it, and otherwise get the hell out of the way.
I have software I use. I need it to work. Not sometimes, not every so often after finding out what broke because of the operating system, but when I need to use it.
I get this from my W7 installs. Not at all from Windows 10. I use a computer to do work, not to try to get the computer to work.
It's amazing that a change to an interface somehow makes customer data flow out somewhere. I'm going to assume you can't follow a conversation and just froth at the mouth at the opportunity to mention telemetry every chance you get.
Go do a little research. The put Wireshark on a Windows 10 computer, and sit back and enjoy the show. Then enable all of the security features.
Then spend some more time with wireshark and lecture us on telemetry.
Because you are either ignorant, or lying. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt, and we'll just say you don't know what you are talking about.
Actually I work for a multi-national company in the Fortune 50 list currently looking at wide scale deployment of Windows 10 across the world. We also have internally approved the use of Office365 and Onedrive to store commercially sensitive and confidential documents.
We're clever enough to realise that we're less likely to be compromised thanks to the shitload of security advances that are included in Windows 10 which basically makes whole categories of previous attacks impossible.
Lawnmowing has no future here.
What is their position on the telemetry holes? Or do your lawyers tell you that they are impossible to exploit?
You know, if you are not a shill, you should be. Impossible is not a word that anyone who knows what they are doing would ever utter. It's one of those words that actually encourages the bad guys.
By the way. have you ever noticed that there are lawyers on both sides of every case?
Alll of them having given their employers advice.
As someone with small businesses dealing with sensitive commercial and personal data, not only do we give a crap, so do our lawyers. YMMV, but the telemetry and automatic updates are not a non-issue for those too small to be using the enterprise-level tools.
Then there's the updates breaking systems debacle. I support Windows computers, and its an unholy mess as every update breaks big stuff. You can leave in the evening with everything working, and come back in again with the computer in endless reboot mode. Or the sound card not working. Or the camera not working. Or an ethernet device not working, or after delayin updates as long as allowed, it updates and changes all of the privacy settings to express.
Granted - that's a secure setup! 8^)
Having never tried Windows 10, is there not a "classical" theme for it?
Search for "Classic Shell" and it will do a lot of stuff you want. Windows update keeps uninstalling and complaining about it, but it works.
Yeah, because It's a great thing to have to ret your OS provider like your enemy. Stockholm syndrome I guess.
Yeah, it's fine. There's no advantage to it though, other than a slightly different interface to learn. And the drawback of invasive anti-privacy options - which are fairly easily disabled.
Do you have the telemetry that Windows collects on you after you've disabled everything they tell you about turned off?
Backwards compatibility is great and all, but W10 needs to run the contemporary stuff as well and not break it.
More likely MS is embarrassed by the consumer dislike of windows 10.
I'm far from a MS apologist (typing this on a Mac; doing my development on Linux) but I think a simpler explanation is that they don't want to support a 7 year old OS.
The fly in that ointment is that it takes a stretch to say that Windows 10 works.
If Microsoft were to enable turning off updates, it would go a long way toward fixing the problem. There is still the telemetry issue, but most users don't know and don't care.
I don't think smart watches are a failure, they are before there time, they don't provide the functionality required to make them useful enough, because the technology isn't there yet.
I think one real serious limiter of smart watches is that a whole lot of us don't wear watches any more. It would take a law to make me put something on my wrist today. when I usesd to wear watches a long time ago, the bands would pull hair off my arm, or stink, depending on the material of the band. Finally, since I was working around a lot of high current devices, I just abandoned them. Now I have a smartphone that does all I need. The trick of the smartwatches will be to convince us something we don't have now is something we really really need.
As if typing on a physical keyboard (wired or not) is in any way analogous to headphone listening (wired or not).
Welcome to the land of whoosh!