it takes twice as much water (per kwh) to run as a normal power plant
Definitely an issue for Nevada, however, air cooling and hybrid cooling systems that reduce water consumption by 50% to 85% have already been studied. Either option would bring water consumption inline or lower than coal fired plants and possibly even in the range of gas fired plants.
I guess we'll have to wait for the design details before we know if they go for the low capital cost water cooling option or the low water consumption air or hybrid cooling option.
Nevada will have no problem selling power to California. In state power generation is not always consumed in state, intrastate power transmission is very common.
Instead of replacing power plants before they degrade, the NRC expects maintenance to do what it can't.
Maintaining a power plant versus decommissioning is not an NRC decision, it is a corporate decision based on profitability. The NRC is not forcing any corporation to operate nuclear power plants, they are monitoring operations to reduce the probability of a catastrophic incident. Any corporation that tears down a 37 year old power generation facility to build a new one because the cooling system was not properly inspected and maintained will not be in business very long.
The far far bigger problem is continuing to use early reactor designs past their end of life!
Power plants are not cars, they are not maintained like a car and operational life span is not measured like a car.
Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant - 37 years Glen Canyon Dam - 44 years Hoover Dam - 74 years
We should have continued building and updating designs over the last 30 or 40 years, but anti-nuclear nuts have left us all pretty damn screwed.
New designs are in fact available but are irrelevant. The decision to close an older power generation facility falls to a business decision or regulation decision. A corporation is in business to profit, they will run a nuclear power plant into the ground if it is more profitable than investing in alternative power generation. And from my experience with machinery, investment and corporate planning in U.S. businesses they refuse to think long term, 3 year planning is an eternity for U.S. business planning let alone 3 decades.
And when you consider the length of time that radioactive contamination impacts mining areas, refinery areas, waste areas and the rare, but obviously not impossible, catastrophic power plant incident it is debatable who is the nut job, the people who are armed with reality and have an issue or those who ignore reality and continually pound their finger on their theoretical plans and designs.
But if it makes you feel better to ignore reality and blame everything on anti-nuclear nuts then knock yourself out. Like it or not these issues with old facilities are going to be a long term issue whether corporations build new facilities or not. And if they do not properly maintain and operate the uranium mining operations, the refineries, the waste facilities or the power generation facilities for the new facilities in the same way they have operated poorly in the past then this will continue to be an issue for any new designs when they have reached what in your opinion is their end of life but for the corporation it is still profitable.
Regulations are the embodied in law. Deregulation means lawlessness.
Imagine if your neighbor's toilet clogged and, instead of calling a plumber, he started taking a dump over the fence on your garden.
What would you do?
A) call the police
or
B) complain about lack of a regulation on taking a dump over the fence?
You would A) call the police. The police would then inform you that the city council exempted your neighbor from all lewdness and human waste handling laws and the regulations embodied in those laws. A surreal WTF moment.
It turns out that your neighbor makes a great deal of profit by taking a dump on your property and posting videos on his YouTube channel where he is an advertising partner. He used some of his profits on political spin campaigns to convince a majority of your other neighbors to elect the current crop of council members who in turn implemented the exemption for the natural human extrusion process in a new city wide business partnering plan that will raise all boats or some other corny shit.
So you get a lawyer and pay out of your meager salary to sue your neighbor. Your neighbor hires a team of lawyers, finances a massive spin campaign to shape public opinion, and when you finally make it to court you are informed by your lawyer that he will do his best but you should know up front that the judge's election campaign was paid for by your neighbors Human Extrusion YouTube channel.
You give up and sit at home like the rest of the community and try to ignore the smell of human waste as you watch Ow My Balls and bate like everyone else.
The AMD blog post listed three motherboards that were specifically targeted by their coreboot development release...
Each of these releases will be targeted at the following platforms: SuperMicro MBD-H8SCM-F-O for the 4100/SR56x0/SP5100, SuperMicro H8QGI-G34 for the 6100/SR56x0/SP5100 and Advansus (Advantech) A785E- I (w/1.7GHz dual-core) for the AMD 785E/SB8xx.
The problem is not that the processor or even chipset supports it but that the bundled BIOS *IS* coreboot, which is unlikely.
The AMD blog posting lists three motherboards that will be utilising AMD chipsets and CPUs with these new coreboot developments provided by AMD, so unlikely is no longer the correct assumption.
Isn't it a motherboard, and not a CPU, that needs to support a BIOS?
Yes, read TFA.
AMD is providing coreboot development to support both AMD CPUs and chipsets. They specifically list three motherboards that will utilize coreboot and AMD chipsets and CPUs thus benefiting from AMDs development work on coreboot.
They can and do, the issue here is that a group of ignorant religious nutjobs is attempting to convert the United States from a secular nation where there is a clear distinction between church and state into a theocracy where there is a separation between church and state except when it is Christianity. This is the western version of the Taliban, they occasionally resort to violence but for now they restrict their actions mostly to politics and media.
Anyone who is so rabidly and psychotically devoted to their pseudo science religious doctrine is free to send their children to a private school or even home school, they just can't expect the secular state to pay for their religious indoctrination. Nobody is forced to send their children to a public school where real science is taught.
Hey there are teachers at universities that teach that the 9/11 attacks where a plot by the US government and they get defended on the grounds of Academic freedom.
Try reading the article you linked again. The Geosciences professor is not teaching the 9/11 conspiracy theory, she is exercising her freedom to publicly speech her opinion.
So do you want the government to tell teachers what they can and can not teach?
Short answer, yes. Long answer, the government does not need to micro-manage public education down to every minute detail but they do need to set some type of standard.
K-12 is only a primary education and the students, and often even the educators, almost certainly lack the time, knowledge, or materials to effectively question or critique generally accepted scientific theories. Once the exit K-12 should should have the necessary foundation to enter a university where they can then effectively engage in serious research and critique.
Evolution is generally accepted as is gravity. Newton's laws of gravity are known to be inaccurate but the theory is generally accepted, accurate enough to be useful and easily taught in the K-12 program. You don't throw out Newton's lessons and insert Einstein's relativity theories as the math required exceeds the ability of most K-12 students and educators. And relativity is not perfect either, but you would not expect K-12 students to spend their class time trying to develop an accurate theory when they don't even know what a theory is, how science works, or have virtually any of the tools necessary to perform such a task.
Standards are necessary, teaching the controversy serves no purpose in K-12, and lets be honest, everyone knows the purpose and intent is to replace science with religion which would be damaging. God done it is not an acceptable answer from a student who completes K-12.
*sigh* This rhetoric is so tired. Pretending that every Christians subscribes to this one interpretation of the creation story in Genesis is ridiculous. I knew this post would be here even before I entered the comments section.
Yes, for as long as the battle has been raging with Christians electing government officials with the intent of forcing Christianity on every citizen who is governed you would think that those who do not follow the faith would have given up by now. Yet they continue to struggle and publish articles, make comments, and launch legal defences against this continual encroachment of the ecclesiastical upon the governed.
But fret not, if you are weary of the battle then do not read articles and their comments that are obviously related to the struggle and if you really want to end the struggle then the next time you vote make sure you select a candidate that has the mental and moral strength to restrain themselves from injecting their religious struggles into the laws of the people.
In TFA he doesn't actually state what the risk is with copyrights but I assume the risk is that developers who contribute code to a project may be angered by the choice of licensing used by the project and will no longer contribute to the project. The only example provided in the article mentions some vagueness in the Ubuntu project licensing terms that suggest Canonical may license contributed resources under a license of their choice.
It doesn't seem like much of a risk, it's not as if Ubuntu is the only game in town for open source contributors.
The other issue, software patents, are a risk for all businesses whether they develop or just use closed source or open source software.
when you ran out of fuel in the other cars, you took a few minutes to fill up and could go back out. The Tesla, on the other hand, was done for the day as it took something like 12 hours to recharge
An issue, yes, an insurmountable issue, no, and an issue that was only in the minds of the Top Gear hosts rather than reality.
Running out of charge and pushing the car to the shop was a stunt, a hoax, it was fake, neither car ran out of charge.
I like watching most of the Top Gear shows but I expect them to flog cars not their egos and stubborn pride.
You might think a 60+ mile per gallon Kawasaki Ninja 250 with a 4.8 gallon fuel tank will have a range of over 200 miles but it seems if I drive around in circles in my driveway it only has a range of a few hundred feet.
I am tired of people complaining that a free product that saves them $2500.00 a pop every time they use it on a server is not being completed fast enough for their liking.
Just ignore them, keep up the good work, and thanks.
LOL, those guys at Microsoft are quite the jokers.
So they cover their ass with an exception that says it is okay if their copyrighted material is packaged over seas by a company that pirates software so nobody can sue Microsoft under this law and then they block open source software from the same protection under the law even though the most popular open source software in use is protected by copyright.
they might even start hiring US work force again and get the economy better
Their will be no jobs.
Microsoft will not hire any more people to reproduce and package software. Reproduction costs are virtually $0, this is why software piracy is so rampant, and even if they did need to expand their factory that produces CDs and shrink wrapped boxes its likely they'll open a factory over seas where they can pay dirt wages and avoid paying any U.S. taxes.
State side companies hit by this new Microsoft law will have two choices, bring the manufacturing to the states and pay for Microsoft software licenses and employee wages here in the states or pay for the Microsoft software licenses in the Chinese factory and keep paying the dirt wages. Now which do you think they are going to choose? Yeah, I know, duh, no brainer.
In reality there will be no jobs and if enforced the only thing this will do is increase local retail prices for goods in the States so that local companies can pay off Microsoft to leave their dirt cheap Chinese manufacturing alone. It wont be feasible for many local companies to audit the various Chinese suppliers to verify if Microsoft's thugs are telling the truth about piracy and how much a Chinese manufacturer should be paying to Microsoft so they'll just bite the bullet, take a cut from their profits and hand it over to Microsoft. No jobs created, just a bit of inflation here in the States to boost Microsoft's bottom line.
Unfortunately that indemnification that you paid for does not cover nobody wanting to buy your product. I am pretty sure the smartphone manufacturers could not care less which OS is running on the phone as long as they sell like crazy.
When Asus was working on the first netbooks they tried to get Windows XP from Microsoft because they already knew from their research that nobody was going to pay a premium price for a low power laptop running Windows 7. Highly portable laptops were not a new concept, dirt cheap highly portable laptops were. Microsoft refused because obviously there was a risk of the Windows XP licenses cannibalizing their recently released, very expensive, super high profit margin Windows 7 product.
Given the choice of trying to sell a low power highly portable laptop with an OS that costs about as much as the hardware itself which was doomed to failure and risking Microsoft and all the paid FUDsters boogie man stories about the patent issues in linux they still released the first netbooks with linux and there was no Windows option.
Yes there is a cheap version of Windows 7 on netbooks now and at least in the U.S. they almost exclusive sell with Windows, but this was the goal of the netbooks in the first place, Microsoft had to capitulate or face losing out on market share. Since most people want a familiar OS on their laptops it only made sense for Microsoft to give in and put together a cheap version of Windows 7 fo the netbook market.
Smartphones are a different story. Nobody wants a WinPhone, there is no opportunity for capitulation because the phone makers know nobody wants a WinPhone, its a dead end. So given the choice of making phones that nobody wants versus making the phones that sell like crazy and taking on the companies that hate competition it is a no brainer, you make the product people will buy and go to court.
Actually, no, there is no need to wonder. The only innovation in the iPhone is taking ideas and technology from other people and companies and putting it on a smart phone.
The multi-touch you seem to think everyone stole from Apple, guess what... Multitouch Overview.
Apple is not even close to being the inventor of multi-touch and it is not even that difficult to discover this fact if one simply does a quick google search before making false assumptions and writing a paragraph based on those false assumptions.
The iPhone is a pretty cool device but lets not get carried away and start making suggestions that other manufacturers and developers are lifting ideas from Apple without first checking to see if the ideas actually came from Apple in the first place.
Canonical is developing patches but they are now making only the complete Kernel as a tar ball available
I think there is some confusion here. Red Hat is no longer providing separate patches in the Red Hat kernel package. I am pretty sure Red Hat will continue to provide patches back to the kernel development community. I don't think the kernel developer community are downloading the Red Hat source RPM for the kernel and extracting the patches to include in the tree.
The problems arise if you try to take RedHat's patches and apply them in other distributions (Attems is in the Debian kernel team, so he is among the most affected people), or if you are among the breed of people still patching and rolling their own kernels.
Is this factual? From what I've read this change is distribution affects Red Hat's kernel source used in the Red Hat distro, this does not mean that Red Hat's kernel patches are not fed back into the kernel development process as individual patches.
I'm not a kernel dev so I don't know the exact process but it sounds like your saying the only way Red Hat contributions make it back into the kernel is by somebody outside of Red Hat extracting patches from the Red Hat distribution kernel source and putting them into the vanilla kernel development tree. Perhaps this is the way it works but I'm skeptical.
It effects the kernel devs and other distros that may want to incorporate some of Red Hats changes.
I doubt this is true, they are only changing how they package the Red Hat kernel source, I am sure they are still submitting changes to the community. It seems the difference here is if you want to use the Red Hat kernel but don't want certain patches, but if you just want to use Red Hat changes in a vanilla kernel I am sure the Red Hat developed patches will still be available.
Now instead of searching the patches for those, they need to search the entire patched source.
If there are trademarks in the kernel that need to be removed then this is a good change for CentOS. They would need to search BOTH the kernel source AND the patches when they were separate, now they only need to search the kernel source.
The CentOS team does awesome work, but it's a tricky situation they're in.
Agreed, and I hope my comment did not make it sound like the CentOS team has an easy job. I am not in a position right now to pay for a full blown Red Hat Network license for home use so I've been using Fedora and CentOS since Red Hat dropped the $60 / year RHN subscriptions. I am very appreciative of the work the CentOS team does.
But I also think it is a big mis-representation to put what Oracle is doing into the same realm as what CentOS does. Ellison has publicly stated that he believes the value of the open source community is to be plundered but you don't put your own good work in the open source arena because your competitors will get it. CentOS on the other hand is part of the open source community.
I think it is also important to point out the tricky position that Red Hat is in. CentOS and other rely on Red Hat and Red Hat is a business that needs to profit from their operations to remain viable. I know for a fact, in speaking with sysadmins I know, that there are many companies who utilize Red Hat's software but do not pay the required Red Hat Network licensing but at the same time spend millions on Microsoft and Oracle licensing. I like to think that Red Hat can remain as open and giving as possible and people will reward them with honest business, unfortunately that is not the case and the intentions of companies like Oracle have been stated bluntly by their CEO.
So yes, tricky situations for Red Hat and CentOS and a lot of outstanding work by both that is valuable to many individuals, corporate organizations, and governments.
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Definitely an issue for Nevada, however, air cooling and hybrid cooling systems that reduce water consumption by 50% to 85% have already been studied. Either option would bring water consumption inline or lower than coal fired plants and possibly even in the range of gas fired plants.
http://www.quora.com/Solar-Towers/How-much-water-for-evaporative-cooling-do-solar-thermal-power-generators-need-per-watt-hour-generated
I guess we'll have to wait for the design details before we know if they go for the low capital cost water cooling option or the low water consumption air or hybrid cooling option.
Nevada will have no problem selling power to California. In state power generation is not always consumed in state, intrastate power transmission is very common.
Maintaining a power plant versus decommissioning is not an NRC decision, it is a corporate decision based on profitability. The NRC is not forcing any corporation to operate nuclear power plants, they are monitoring operations to reduce the probability of a catastrophic incident. Any corporation that tears down a 37 year old power generation facility to build a new one because the cooling system was not properly inspected and maintained will not be in business very long.
Power plants are not cars, they are not maintained like a car and operational life span is not measured like a car.
Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant - 37 years
Glen Canyon Dam - 44 years
Hoover Dam - 74 years
New designs are in fact available but are irrelevant. The decision to close an older power generation facility falls to a business decision or regulation decision. A corporation is in business to profit, they will run a nuclear power plant into the ground if it is more profitable than investing in alternative power generation. And from my experience with machinery, investment and corporate planning in U.S. businesses they refuse to think long term, 3 year planning is an eternity for U.S. business planning let alone 3 decades.
And when you consider the length of time that radioactive contamination impacts mining areas, refinery areas, waste areas and the rare, but obviously not impossible, catastrophic power plant incident it is debatable who is the nut job, the people who are armed with reality and have an issue or those who ignore reality and continually pound their finger on their theoretical plans and designs.
But if it makes you feel better to ignore reality and blame everything on anti-nuclear nuts then knock yourself out. Like it or not these issues with old facilities are going to be a long term issue whether corporations build new facilities or not. And if they do not properly maintain and operate the uranium mining operations, the refineries, the waste facilities or the power generation facilities for the new facilities in the same way they have operated poorly in the past then this will continue to be an issue for any new designs when they have reached what in your opinion is their end of life but for the corporation it is still profitable.
Regulations are the embodied in law. Deregulation means lawlessness.
You would A) call the police. The police would then inform you that the city council exempted your neighbor from all lewdness and human waste handling laws and the regulations embodied in those laws. A surreal WTF moment.
It turns out that your neighbor makes a great deal of profit by taking a dump on your property and posting videos on his YouTube channel where he is an advertising partner. He used some of his profits on political spin campaigns to convince a majority of your other neighbors to elect the current crop of council members who in turn implemented the exemption for the natural human extrusion process in a new city wide business partnering plan that will raise all boats or some other corny shit.
So you get a lawyer and pay out of your meager salary to sue your neighbor. Your neighbor hires a team of lawyers, finances a massive spin campaign to shape public opinion, and when you finally make it to court you are informed by your lawyer that he will do his best but you should know up front that the judge's election campaign was paid for by your neighbors Human Extrusion YouTube channel.
You give up and sit at home like the rest of the community and try to ignore the smell of human waste as you watch Ow My Balls and bate like everyone else.
Brought to you by Carls Junior.
Yes.
The AMD blog post listed three motherboards that were specifically targeted by their coreboot development release...
The AMD blog posting lists three motherboards that will be utilising AMD chipsets and CPUs with these new coreboot developments provided by AMD, so unlikely is no longer the correct assumption.
Yes, read TFA.
AMD is providing coreboot development to support both AMD CPUs and chipsets. They specifically list three motherboards that will utilize coreboot and AMD chipsets and CPUs thus benefiting from AMDs development work on coreboot.
They can and do, the issue here is that a group of ignorant religious nutjobs is attempting to convert the United States from a secular nation where there is a clear distinction between church and state into a theocracy where there is a separation between church and state except when it is Christianity. This is the western version of the Taliban, they occasionally resort to violence but for now they restrict their actions mostly to politics and media.
Anyone who is so rabidly and psychotically devoted to their pseudo science religious doctrine is free to send their children to a private school or even home school, they just can't expect the secular state to pay for their religious indoctrination. Nobody is forced to send their children to a public school where real science is taught.
Try reading the article you linked again. The Geosciences professor is not teaching the 9/11 conspiracy theory, she is exercising her freedom to publicly speech her opinion.
Short answer, yes. Long answer, the government does not need to micro-manage public education down to every minute detail but they do need to set some type of standard.
K-12 is only a primary education and the students, and often even the educators, almost certainly lack the time, knowledge, or materials to effectively question or critique generally accepted scientific theories. Once the exit K-12 should should have the necessary foundation to enter a university where they can then effectively engage in serious research and critique.
Evolution is generally accepted as is gravity. Newton's laws of gravity are known to be inaccurate but the theory is generally accepted, accurate enough to be useful and easily taught in the K-12 program. You don't throw out Newton's lessons and insert Einstein's relativity theories as the math required exceeds the ability of most K-12 students and educators. And relativity is not perfect either, but you would not expect K-12 students to spend their class time trying to develop an accurate theory when they don't even know what a theory is, how science works, or have virtually any of the tools necessary to perform such a task.
Standards are necessary, teaching the controversy serves no purpose in K-12, and lets be honest, everyone knows the purpose and intent is to replace science with religion which would be damaging. God done it is not an acceptable answer from a student who completes K-12.
Yes, for as long as the battle has been raging with Christians electing government officials with the intent of forcing Christianity on every citizen who is governed you would think that those who do not follow the faith would have given up by now. Yet they continue to struggle and publish articles, make comments, and launch legal defences against this continual encroachment of the ecclesiastical upon the governed.
But fret not, if you are weary of the battle then do not read articles and their comments that are obviously related to the struggle and if you really want to end the struggle then the next time you vote make sure you select a candidate that has the mental and moral strength to restrain themselves from injecting their religious struggles into the laws of the people.
In TFA he doesn't actually state what the risk is with copyrights but I assume the risk is that developers who contribute code to a project may be angered by the choice of licensing used by the project and will no longer contribute to the project. The only example provided in the article mentions some vagueness in the Ubuntu project licensing terms that suggest Canonical may license contributed resources under a license of their choice.
It doesn't seem like much of a risk, it's not as if Ubuntu is the only game in town for open source contributors.
The other issue, software patents, are a risk for all businesses whether they develop or just use closed source or open source software.
An issue, yes, an insurmountable issue, no, and an issue that was only in the minds of the Top Gear hosts rather than reality.
Running out of charge and pushing the car to the shop was a stunt, a hoax, it was fake, neither car ran out of charge.
I like watching most of the Top Gear shows but I expect them to flog cars not their egos and stubborn pride.
You might think a 60+ mile per gallon Kawasaki Ninja 250 with a 4.8 gallon fuel tank will have a range of over 200 miles but it seems if I drive around in circles in my driveway it only has a range of a few hundred feet.
Just ignore them, keep up the good work, and thanks.
LOL, those guys at Microsoft are quite the jokers.
So they cover their ass with an exception that says it is okay if their copyrighted material is packaged over seas by a company that pirates software so nobody can sue Microsoft under this law and then they block open source software from the same protection under the law even though the most popular open source software in use is protected by copyright.
Yep, scum bags will be scum bags, never fails.
Their will be no jobs.
Microsoft will not hire any more people to reproduce and package software. Reproduction costs are virtually $0, this is why software piracy is so rampant, and even if they did need to expand their factory that produces CDs and shrink wrapped boxes its likely they'll open a factory over seas where they can pay dirt wages and avoid paying any U.S. taxes.
State side companies hit by this new Microsoft law will have two choices, bring the manufacturing to the states and pay for Microsoft software licenses and employee wages here in the states or pay for the Microsoft software licenses in the Chinese factory and keep paying the dirt wages. Now which do you think they are going to choose? Yeah, I know, duh, no brainer.
In reality there will be no jobs and if enforced the only thing this will do is increase local retail prices for goods in the States so that local companies can pay off Microsoft to leave their dirt cheap Chinese manufacturing alone. It wont be feasible for many local companies to audit the various Chinese suppliers to verify if Microsoft's thugs are telling the truth about piracy and how much a Chinese manufacturer should be paying to Microsoft so they'll just bite the bullet, take a cut from their profits and hand it over to Microsoft. No jobs created, just a bit of inflation here in the States to boost Microsoft's bottom line.
Unfortunately that indemnification that you paid for does not cover nobody wanting to buy your product. I am pretty sure the smartphone manufacturers could not care less which OS is running on the phone as long as they sell like crazy.
When Asus was working on the first netbooks they tried to get Windows XP from Microsoft because they already knew from their research that nobody was going to pay a premium price for a low power laptop running Windows 7. Highly portable laptops were not a new concept, dirt cheap highly portable laptops were. Microsoft refused because obviously there was a risk of the Windows XP licenses cannibalizing their recently released, very expensive, super high profit margin Windows 7 product.
Given the choice of trying to sell a low power highly portable laptop with an OS that costs about as much as the hardware itself which was doomed to failure and risking Microsoft and all the paid FUDsters boogie man stories about the patent issues in linux they still released the first netbooks with linux and there was no Windows option.
Yes there is a cheap version of Windows 7 on netbooks now and at least in the U.S. they almost exclusive sell with Windows, but this was the goal of the netbooks in the first place, Microsoft had to capitulate or face losing out on market share. Since most people want a familiar OS on their laptops it only made sense for Microsoft to give in and put together a cheap version of Windows 7 fo the netbook market.
Smartphones are a different story. Nobody wants a WinPhone, there is no opportunity for capitulation because the phone makers know nobody wants a WinPhone, its a dead end. So given the choice of making phones that nobody wants versus making the phones that sell like crazy and taking on the companies that hate competition it is a no brainer, you make the product people will buy and go to court.
> One has to wonder...
Actually, no, there is no need to wonder. The only innovation in the iPhone is taking ideas and technology from other people and companies and putting it on a smart phone.
The multi-touch you seem to think everyone stole from Apple, guess what... Multitouch Overview.
Apple is not even close to being the inventor of multi-touch and it is not even that difficult to discover this fact if one simply does a quick google search before making false assumptions and writing a paragraph based on those false assumptions.
The iPhone is a pretty cool device but lets not get carried away and start making suggestions that other manufacturers and developers are lifting ideas from Apple without first checking to see if the ideas actually came from Apple in the first place.
I think there is some confusion here. Red Hat is no longer providing separate patches in the Red Hat kernel package. I am pretty sure Red Hat will continue to provide patches back to the kernel development community. I don't think the kernel developer community are downloading the Red Hat source RPM for the kernel and extracting the patches to include in the tree.
Ah, okay, that makes sense.
Is this factual? From what I've read this change is distribution affects Red Hat's kernel source used in the Red Hat distro, this does not mean that Red Hat's kernel patches are not fed back into the kernel development process as individual patches.
I'm not a kernel dev so I don't know the exact process but it sounds like your saying the only way Red Hat contributions make it back into the kernel is by somebody outside of Red Hat extracting patches from the Red Hat distribution kernel source and putting them into the vanilla kernel development tree. Perhaps this is the way it works but I'm skeptical.
I doubt this is true, they are only changing how they package the Red Hat kernel source, I am sure they are still submitting changes to the community. It seems the difference here is if you want to use the Red Hat kernel but don't want certain patches, but if you just want to use Red Hat changes in a vanilla kernel I am sure the Red Hat developed patches will still be available.
If there are trademarks in the kernel that need to be removed then this is a good change for CentOS. They would need to search BOTH the kernel source AND the patches when they were separate, now they only need to search the kernel source.
Agreed, and I hope my comment did not make it sound like the CentOS team has an easy job. I am not in a position right now to pay for a full blown Red Hat Network license for home use so I've been using Fedora and CentOS since Red Hat dropped the $60 / year RHN subscriptions. I am very appreciative of the work the CentOS team does.
But I also think it is a big mis-representation to put what Oracle is doing into the same realm as what CentOS does. Ellison has publicly stated that he believes the value of the open source community is to be plundered but you don't put your own good work in the open source arena because your competitors will get it. CentOS on the other hand is part of the open source community.
I think it is also important to point out the tricky position that Red Hat is in. CentOS and other rely on Red Hat and Red Hat is a business that needs to profit from their operations to remain viable. I know for a fact, in speaking with sysadmins I know, that there are many companies who utilize Red Hat's software but do not pay the required Red Hat Network licensing but at the same time spend millions on Microsoft and Oracle licensing. I like to think that Red Hat can remain as open and giving as possible and people will reward them with honest business, unfortunately that is not the case and the intentions of companies like Oracle have been stated bluntly by their CEO.
So yes, tricky situations for Red Hat and CentOS and a lot of outstanding work by both that is valuable to many individuals, corporate organizations, and governments.