Panasonic gives a 25 year warranty on 80% panel efficiency compared to date of install... panasonic will likely still be around in 25 years to honor that warranty. They're in deep with Tesla. Their engineers are claiming closer to 92% efficiency after 30 years.
Even older poorer technology solar panels from the 90s are doing better than 80% after 25 years.... durability is not especially a factor in purchasing solar.
Even without rebates, solar is cost effective on single home residential. Solar install competition is very high, keeping prices low. Are you from 1998? Hello? Say hi to President Bill Clinton for me. Can you still buy leaded gas where you're at? On what planet is home-scale solar expensive?
Solar is both the cleanest and cheapest, which is why it's gotten so much traction over the last 15 years. I am not sure what cave you have been living in.
I'm not sure you reviewed the link you posted, average annual rainfall in the eastern two thirds of the state is well under 24", which would make sense if you've been there before... regardless, with that little rain, as you pointed out, makes eastern oregon an ideal location for solar.... as does most of california, except for the 10 miles closest to the ocean. That nullifies your weather point. BrSolar install cost is far less than 1% of the total cost of the house, and begins paying for itself on day 1, which nullifies any kind of cost point.
Also the California state capital, where this was decided, is actually north of San Francisco by ~45 miles. it is remarkably sunny there, despite, as you point out, being far north of palm springs
Net savings is about $30 a month, maintenance in the first 10 years is usually less than $1000, storm damage isn't really a thing, people have been mounting these things on ocean going sailboats for almost 20 years with no issues. Generally the mount wears out before the solar panel does. All these things were solved almost 25 years ago, it mostly sounds like either you are spreading FUD, or you don't understand solar, or possibly both.
Uh, we do not get as much fog as everyone thinks. Maybe 7-10 days where there is fog for more than 8 hours during the day. And it's just in the northern section of the city, by the bridge. We have microclimates here, it's a thing. I would guess daytime fog is closer to 3 days. Regardless San Francisco is only about 800,000 people in a 7x7 mile section of the state, in a state that represents about 65% of the west coast and 40 million people.
Most of the bay sees 280-300 days a year of sun.
Also most of Oregon is desert, and very sunny.
Also, most of the central valley of california is flat and dry, and blisteringly hot.
Please reference a map. Thank you.
p.s. Germany has way worse weather conditions, like snow, and being way further north, and they have more installed solar than we do and produce more solar power than anyone else in Europe.
Given how cheap solar is, there are few places in the world where installing solar is not a net positive. Even in as you say "foggy" san francisco. Get out more dude.
Average comments on a story has stayed pretty consistent at about 120 posts per interesting story, ~20-30 for less interesting stories. To get 1000 comments a new chapter in the IBM/SCO lawsuit needed to happen or something. This has been true from ~2000 all the way through present era.
I think Azure revenue is supposed to supplement or replace major revenue streams like consumer OS and consumer office software, yes.
Microsoft is being pretty aggressive with Azure, right now it goes 1. AWS, 2. Azure... then way behind in 3rd place is GCE/GCP, and way, way behind that is everyone else.
For 20 years microsoft has been trying to get customers to subscribe to windows, and nobody has bought in to that idea. Finally with Azure, Microsoft gets their monthly customer subscription revenue, except instead of milking consumers dry, they're milking their enterprise customers that they're already deeply in bed with.
Solar and wind were already cost effective a decade ago on every island on the planet, the problem was sourcing quality materials and labor to install them. This problem has been solved, and the price of solar and wind continue to fall, as does grid scale battery technologies. There is no reason to not forecast solar and wind destroying coal in the long term. Public utilities like them because it improves their image with their customers, plus maintenance and fuel costs are rock solid stable to forecast for decades at a time.
Long term, energy problems are solved globally, forever, using local resources. This solves a lot of global problems, like invading oil-rich countries periodically to ensure energy supply for one's economy. And the price will continue to come down to the point where even subsidized, clean energy will end coal.
We bought a 65" Name Brand 4K HDTV online during holiday season 2016 for $900 with "partial" (90%) HDR color/brightness/contrast. Even two years later it's still in the top third of 65"4K TVs you can buy.
This year we bought a 1080p Nintendo Switch.
There is a dramatic difference in the quality/sharpness in the UI. It is about 15' from TV wall to back of couch, probably 14' from screen to eyeball. Even though it's wall mounted, we had to buy a larger, 67" wide cabinet below it to fit properly, and all-in, it is about as large as we want/need to go in our tiny San Francisco apartment.
That said, there are people out in Texas making Mega Bucks and live in houses with not only bedrooms that are 25' x 25' with 12' ceilings, but their living rooms clock in at 30' x 40' with 15-20' artrium ceilings, and that's not even talking about dedicated media rooms where a 100" (eight feet) screen is considered on the small side.
It would not surprise me if we keep our 65" 4K TV for ten years living in san francisco, but I'm sure there are ten of thousands of people living in much larger houses out in Texas or Oklahoma where earnings dwarf cost of living, where people are patiently waiting with cash in hand for a giant TV with the same PPI as my "medium size" TV. Not everyone is a poor 21 year old college kid in a tiny ass apartment.
99% of my workload in AWS is on open source code, mostly python, with some commercial java products, and a couple of private proprietary java apps. The 1% that is not is our VPN software that IT runs. All of this runs in Kubernetes. Inside that number is also our entire Jenkins/Selenium CI/CD process for QA. Our Kubernetes spend is $4000-8000/month, 100% of our kubernetes spend could run on ARM tomorrow just by adding an ARM build target for the container.
If we could shrink our AWS K8S spend from $8000 to $4000 per month, that is almost $50,000 in annual savings. My boss would buy me a round trip ticket to Europe if we accomplished that kind of monthly savings.
ARM might not be useful for someone in the Windows world, but there is very much zero reason why our company would be tied to intel arch, and we weren't even trying to be architecture agnostic. I suspect that if Amazon can offer ARM at a competitive cost to intel with the same reliability, people will make the jump. I can see putting all our low priority processes on ARM in the next quarter to save money.
I'm sure Facebook, arguably the largest PHP user on the web, would disagree with not needing more performance. An extra 1-2% performance bump is equivalent to getting an extra year of use out of compute resources they already own and have received a tax benefit from depreciation. It's million of dollars of free money.
I think nationally, San Diego is given way higher marks as having the best climate in the country, Los Angeles is arguably warmer and certainly less windy than San Francisco. Berkeley is fucking frigid most days because it gets the full blast of pacific air every afternoon.
Redwood City, Stanford both have far superior climates Stanford University exists 30 miles south of San Francisco for a reason, it could easily have been built in the city.
Curious if you have visited San Francisco outside of the indian summer season? San Francisco is a great city to live in due to lack of rain and snow, but I don't think anyone (besides you) has ever called San Francisco weather best in the country. Like the other guy said, the cities on the other end of the tunnel live in an entirely different microclimate, completely disconnected from San Francisco which is basically a mountainous peninsula 7 miles out in the pacific ocean, and the climate reflects that.
Don't let anyone lie to you, it is 63F in San Francisco most days, closer to 52F within 1 hour of sunset. 70F is a fairy dream. Also it's windy as fuck so even though it's 63F out and sunny, you typically need to find a wind break between 12 and 4:30pm if you aren't wearing a light jacket. It's 70F in my house without a heater, but it is certainly not 70F outside most days.
Yeah moving to Tulsa, unless you are a leader in your specific tech niche, is a dead end for your career. There are no meet-ups, no other tech businesses that you will want to network with/do business with, and local talent is going to be at minimum 5 years behind where you are moving from.
If you're a digital nomad building CRUD php websites for legacy businesses etc then Tulsa is probably the place for you. Better for Tulsa to have some tech industry, rather than no tech industry....it's a small bet that could possibly pay off well in 20-30 years. Digital nomads aren't exactly community leaders and big on social interaction or starting companies, but having 20 developers in your city instead of 1 or 0 is a start, no matter how meager. As Woody Allen (probably) said, 80% of life is showing up.
The Zero W is a pretty good compromise, I wish it had been avalible when I was working on that project.
I considered the Compute Module but it's miserable to work with as a hobbyist, sort of like (worse than, really) using an ATMega328p bare, except you can't even plug the compute module in to a breadboard. Also all my robots are designed with the A+ form factor in mind.
I like the A form factor because it's small enough to fit in nearly any enclosure, plus it has full size ports, so you don't need a bunch of hokey hard-to-find adapters that I'm bound to lose as soon as the project goes back in the drawer. And the Zero W is not a whole lot smaller than the A+, especially vertically.
The Zero W with some extra ram and USB-C port for power + USB + HDMI would be a killer board.
I had been using the A+ form factor for my robotics projects, as they pulled about 0.230 amps peak, or 0.115 amps during normal operation. If you could smooth out that brief 0.230 spike at boot, you could run an A+ off of a 250ma solar panel (a little larger than the size of a playing card) in direct sunlight.
The A+ has been discontinued for years - probably since at least mid-2015, maybe even late 2014.
It's good to see it back, I never had use for the extra 3 USB ports that the B+ provided, especially now that bluetooth and wifi are built in, solves most of the reason to own the B+. The square formfactor is both smaller on the X axis, and because it doesn't have that 4xUSB-A riser, is quite a bit more flat on the Y axis, which makes it ideal for homebrew embedded projects.
Curious to see how the power usage is on the new A+, I doubt it will chill out at 0.115 like the old single core device did, but it's probably still lower than the B+ by at least 15%, which is a big plus for robotics projects.
Nobody ever regretted buying their way out of their contract. $240 is a lot, but it's not a lot-lot, and it's better than being stuck upside down in a contract you can't afford.
England is conveniently located within 30 day's sailing time from the eastern seaboard of the US, as a result there are regions there called "new england" and other major cities were named after other major areas in Europe... New York City was famously once called new Amsterdam.
So then, it shouldn't be surprising that as you head south, you have a lot of Spanish speakers, the cities often are named "San ____", reflecting their Spanish/Mexican heritage due to Spanish colonization from the south.
So then, it shouldn't be surprising that as you head west, you have a lot of asian speakers, the cities often have a chinatown or japantown, reflecting their asian heritage due to importing asians to build American railroads, and also simply being 30 days sailing time from the western seaboard of the US.
TL;DR if you don't live on the east coast, it is really weird to hear someone being concerned about English being spoken in the US, because it is only 1/3rd of the picture, and you sound very isolated. I am glad you are here on the internet now, maybe you can catch up on being exposed to other cultures now. Good luck.
I drove the same Honda Accord for the third time I've driven a Honda Accord over 60 times
SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 for the third time We've launched the Falcon 9 over 60 times
Yes, the "the" in the last line is implied, but that is why they teach reading comprehension starting in.. what? 2nd grade? And you write essays to improve reading comprehension from at least 6th grade.
We work in demanding jobs, typically we are up by 8, an hour of commute, out of the office around 8pm, home by 9. Plus family commitments during the weekend. There's not a lot of time to buy groceries or eat out, Uber eats, GrubHub, etc are typically only $5 more than eating out, and if you time it right, the food arrives at the house less than 10 minutes after you get home, so you can enjoy the most of your 3 hours of free time before you have to go to bed at 11:30 or 12. Those extra 30 minutes a day of free time are totally worth the $5 delivery fee, especially if you are making the kind of salary that allows you to live in a major city.
Yeah the fact that a VR capable card went from $200 to $1200 had a major impact on my decision to buy in to VR. Sure the goggles/headset is only $400, and the PC to run it is only $400 (if you don't reuse any parts) but when the video card costs 3x what the headset does... well I can go on two european vacations for the cost of VR. And I'm sure if you're in college that's just an astronomical cost to buy in to.
The Quest being a totally self-contained unit for $400, even if it's lower quality graphics than the rift, that I can buy in to, I love that it's wireless and my girlfriend is not going to complain about a big ugly computer being in the corner of our largest room, the living room, so I can do VR for an hour twice a week. Plus it sounds like Big Screen app has some sort of 2D remote desktop feature, so the $400 price tag is something I can stomach.
Yeah gpus have come back down in price somewhat, but they're still ridiculous and I've already bought my "next gen" compute device - a not-VR ready laptop. I will circle back around to PC-compatible VR when you can get a wireless quest type device for $400 that works with my existing laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Panasonic gives a 25 year warranty on 80% panel efficiency compared to date of install... panasonic will likely still be around in 25 years to honor that warranty. They're in deep with Tesla. Their engineers are claiming closer to 92% efficiency after 30 years.
Even older poorer technology solar panels from the 90s are doing better than 80% after 25 years.... durability is not especially a factor in purchasing solar.
Even without rebates, solar is cost effective on single home residential. Solar install competition is very high, keeping prices low. Are you from 1998? Hello? Say hi to President Bill Clinton for me. Can you still buy leaded gas where you're at? On what planet is home-scale solar expensive?
Solar is both the cleanest and cheapest, which is why it's gotten so much traction over the last 15 years. I am not sure what cave you have been living in.
I'm not sure you reviewed the link you posted, average annual rainfall in the eastern two thirds of the state is well under 24", which would make sense if you've been there before... regardless, with that little rain, as you pointed out, makes eastern oregon an ideal location for solar.... as does most of california, except for the 10 miles closest to the ocean. That nullifies your weather point.
BrSolar install cost is far less than 1% of the total cost of the house, and begins paying for itself on day 1, which nullifies any kind of cost point.
Also the California state capital, where this was decided, is actually north of San Francisco by ~45 miles. it is remarkably sunny there, despite, as you point out, being far north of palm springs
Net savings is about $30 a month, maintenance in the first 10 years is usually less than $1000, storm damage isn't really a thing, people have been mounting these things on ocean going sailboats for almost 20 years with no issues. Generally the mount wears out before the solar panel does. All these things were solved almost 25 years ago, it mostly sounds like either you are spreading FUD, or you don't understand solar, or possibly both.
Uh, we do not get as much fog as everyone thinks. Maybe 7-10 days where there is fog for more than 8 hours during the day. And it's just in the northern section of the city, by the bridge. We have microclimates here, it's a thing. I would guess daytime fog is closer to 3 days. Regardless San Francisco is only about 800,000 people in a 7x7 mile section of the state, in a state that represents about 65% of the west coast and 40 million people.
Most of the bay sees 280-300 days a year of sun.
Also most of Oregon is desert, and very sunny.
Also, most of the central valley of california is flat and dry, and blisteringly hot.
Please reference a map. Thank you.
p.s. Germany has way worse weather conditions, like snow, and being way further north, and they have more installed solar than we do and produce more solar power than anyone else in Europe.
Given how cheap solar is, there are few places in the world where installing solar is not a net positive. Even in as you say "foggy" san francisco. Get out more dude.
Average comments on a story has stayed pretty consistent at about 120 posts per interesting story, ~20-30 for less interesting stories. To get 1000 comments a new chapter in the IBM/SCO lawsuit needed to happen or something. This has been true from ~2000 all the way through present era.
I think Azure revenue is supposed to supplement or replace major revenue streams like consumer OS and consumer office software, yes.
Microsoft is being pretty aggressive with Azure, right now it goes 1. AWS, 2. Azure... then way behind in 3rd place is GCE/GCP, and way, way behind that is everyone else.
For 20 years microsoft has been trying to get customers to subscribe to windows, and nobody has bought in to that idea. Finally with Azure, Microsoft gets their monthly customer subscription revenue, except instead of milking consumers dry, they're milking their enterprise customers that they're already deeply in bed with.
Ideally everyone is using DNS or some variant. The only time you should be at the IP level is for debugging.
Solar and wind were already cost effective a decade ago on every island on the planet, the problem was sourcing quality materials and labor to install them. This problem has been solved, and the price of solar and wind continue to fall, as does grid scale battery technologies. There is no reason to not forecast solar and wind destroying coal in the long term. Public utilities like them because it improves their image with their customers, plus maintenance and fuel costs are rock solid stable to forecast for decades at a time.
Long term, energy problems are solved globally, forever, using local resources. This solves a lot of global problems, like invading oil-rich countries periodically to ensure energy supply for one's economy. And the price will continue to come down to the point where even subsidized, clean energy will end coal.
We bought a 65" Name Brand 4K HDTV online during holiday season 2016 for $900 with "partial" (90%) HDR color/brightness/contrast. Even two years later it's still in the top third of 65"4K TVs you can buy.
This year we bought a 1080p Nintendo Switch.
There is a dramatic difference in the quality/sharpness in the UI. It is about 15' from TV wall to back of couch, probably 14' from screen to eyeball. Even though it's wall mounted, we had to buy a larger, 67" wide cabinet below it to fit properly, and all-in, it is about as large as we want/need to go in our tiny San Francisco apartment.
That said, there are people out in Texas making Mega Bucks and live in houses with not only bedrooms that are 25' x 25' with 12' ceilings, but their living rooms clock in at 30' x 40' with 15-20' artrium ceilings, and that's not even talking about dedicated media rooms where a 100" (eight feet) screen is considered on the small side.
It would not surprise me if we keep our 65" 4K TV for ten years living in san francisco, but I'm sure there are ten of thousands of people living in much larger houses out in Texas or Oklahoma where earnings dwarf cost of living, where people are patiently waiting with cash in hand for a giant TV with the same PPI as my "medium size" TV. Not everyone is a poor 21 year old college kid in a tiny ass apartment.
99% of my workload in AWS is on open source code, mostly python, with some commercial java products, and a couple of private proprietary java apps. The 1% that is not is our VPN software that IT runs. All of this runs in Kubernetes. Inside that number is also our entire Jenkins/Selenium CI/CD process for QA. Our Kubernetes spend is $4000-8000/month, 100% of our kubernetes spend could run on ARM tomorrow just by adding an ARM build target for the container.
If we could shrink our AWS K8S spend from $8000 to $4000 per month, that is almost $50,000 in annual savings. My boss would buy me a round trip ticket to Europe if we accomplished that kind of monthly savings.
ARM might not be useful for someone in the Windows world, but there is very much zero reason why our company would be tied to intel arch, and we weren't even trying to be architecture agnostic. I suspect that if Amazon can offer ARM at a competitive cost to intel with the same reliability, people will make the jump. I can see putting all our low priority processes on ARM in the next quarter to save money.
I'm sure Facebook, arguably the largest PHP user on the web, would disagree with not needing more performance. An extra 1-2% performance bump is equivalent to getting an extra year of use out of compute resources they already own and have received a tax benefit from depreciation. It's million of dollars of free money.
Python, Go, RoR 5, in that order
I think nationally, San Diego is given way higher marks as having the best climate in the country, Los Angeles is arguably warmer and certainly less windy than San Francisco. Berkeley is fucking frigid most days because it gets the full blast of pacific air every afternoon.
Redwood City, Stanford both have far superior climates Stanford University exists 30 miles south of San Francisco for a reason, it could easily have been built in the city.
Curious if you have visited San Francisco outside of the indian summer season? San Francisco is a great city to live in due to lack of rain and snow, but I don't think anyone (besides you) has ever called San Francisco weather best in the country. Like the other guy said, the cities on the other end of the tunnel live in an entirely different microclimate, completely disconnected from San Francisco which is basically a mountainous peninsula 7 miles out in the pacific ocean, and the climate reflects that.
Don't let anyone lie to you, it is 63F in San Francisco most days, closer to 52F within 1 hour of sunset. 70F is a fairy dream. Also it's windy as fuck so even though it's 63F out and sunny, you typically need to find a wind break between 12 and 4:30pm if you aren't wearing a light jacket. It's 70F in my house without a heater, but it is certainly not 70F outside most days.
Yeah moving to Tulsa, unless you are a leader in your specific tech niche, is a dead end for your career. There are no meet-ups, no other tech businesses that you will want to network with/do business with, and local talent is going to be at minimum 5 years behind where you are moving from.
If you're a digital nomad building CRUD php websites for legacy businesses etc then Tulsa is probably the place for you. Better for Tulsa to have some tech industry, rather than no tech industry....it's a small bet that could possibly pay off well in 20-30 years. Digital nomads aren't exactly community leaders and big on social interaction or starting companies, but having 20 developers in your city instead of 1 or 0 is a start, no matter how meager. As Woody Allen (probably) said, 80% of life is showing up.
Anyone writing a greenfield project in Java in 2018, that isn't also targeting Android, or doing Big Data processing, needs to get their head checked
The Zero W is a pretty good compromise, I wish it had been avalible when I was working on that project.
I considered the Compute Module but it's miserable to work with as a hobbyist, sort of like (worse than, really) using an ATMega328p bare, except you can't even plug the compute module in to a breadboard. Also all my robots are designed with the A+ form factor in mind.
I like the A form factor because it's small enough to fit in nearly any enclosure, plus it has full size ports, so you don't need a bunch of hokey hard-to-find adapters that I'm bound to lose as soon as the project goes back in the drawer. And the Zero W is not a whole lot smaller than the A+, especially vertically.
The Zero W with some extra ram and USB-C port for power + USB + HDMI would be a killer board.
I had been using the A+ form factor for my robotics projects, as they pulled about 0.230 amps peak, or 0.115 amps during normal operation. If you could smooth out that brief 0.230 spike at boot, you could run an A+ off of a 250ma solar panel (a little larger than the size of a playing card) in direct sunlight.
The A+ has been discontinued for years - probably since at least mid-2015, maybe even late 2014.
It's good to see it back, I never had use for the extra 3 USB ports that the B+ provided, especially now that bluetooth and wifi are built in, solves most of the reason to own the B+. The square formfactor is both smaller on the X axis, and because it doesn't have that 4xUSB-A riser, is quite a bit more flat on the Y axis, which makes it ideal for homebrew embedded projects.
Curious to see how the power usage is on the new A+, I doubt it will chill out at 0.115 like the old single core device did, but it's probably still lower than the B+ by at least 15%, which is a big plus for robotics projects.
Nobody ever regretted buying their way out of their contract. $240 is a lot, but it's not a lot-lot, and it's better than being stuck upside down in a contract you can't afford.
England is conveniently located within 30 day's sailing time from the eastern seaboard of the US, as a result there are regions there called "new england" and other major cities were named after other major areas in Europe... New York City was famously once called new Amsterdam.
So then, it shouldn't be surprising that as you head south, you have a lot of Spanish speakers, the cities often are named "San ____", reflecting their Spanish/Mexican heritage due to Spanish colonization from the south.
So then, it shouldn't be surprising that as you head west, you have a lot of asian speakers, the cities often have a chinatown or japantown, reflecting their asian heritage due to importing asians to build American railroads, and also simply being 30 days sailing time from the western seaboard of the US.
TL;DR if you don't live on the east coast, it is really weird to hear someone being concerned about English being spoken in the US, because it is only 1/3rd of the picture, and you sound very isolated. I am glad you are here on the internet now, maybe you can catch up on being exposed to other cultures now. Good luck.
I drove the same Honda Accord for the third time
I've driven a Honda Accord over 60 times
SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 for the third time
We've launched the Falcon 9 over 60 times
Yes, the "the" in the last line is implied, but that is why they teach reading comprehension starting in.. what? 2nd grade? And you write essays to improve reading comprehension from at least 6th grade.
I can't help you there.
We work in demanding jobs, typically we are up by 8, an hour of commute, out of the office around 8pm, home by 9. Plus family commitments during the weekend. There's not a lot of time to buy groceries or eat out, Uber eats, GrubHub, etc are typically only $5 more than eating out, and if you time it right, the food arrives at the house less than 10 minutes after you get home, so you can enjoy the most of your 3 hours of free time before you have to go to bed at 11:30 or 12. Those extra 30 minutes a day of free time are totally worth the $5 delivery fee, especially if you are making the kind of salary that allows you to live in a major city.
Yeah the fact that a VR capable card went from $200 to $1200 had a major impact on my decision to buy in to VR. Sure the goggles/headset is only $400, and the PC to run it is only $400 (if you don't reuse any parts) but when the video card costs 3x what the headset does... well I can go on two european vacations for the cost of VR. And I'm sure if you're in college that's just an astronomical cost to buy in to.
The Quest being a totally self-contained unit for $400, even if it's lower quality graphics than the rift, that I can buy in to, I love that it's wireless and my girlfriend is not going to complain about a big ugly computer being in the corner of our largest room, the living room, so I can do VR for an hour twice a week. Plus it sounds like Big Screen app has some sort of 2D remote desktop feature, so the $400 price tag is something I can stomach.
Yeah gpus have come back down in price somewhat, but they're still ridiculous and I've already bought my "next gen" compute device - a not-VR ready laptop. I will circle back around to PC-compatible VR when you can get a wireless quest type device for $400 that works with my existing laptop.