Fedora 18 Beta to slip by two weeks, Beta release date is now Nov 27

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2012-11-10 at 00:52 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> > It hasn't really 'skyrocketed'. We cited 512MB for several releases,
> > bumped it to 768MB for F15/F16 (IIRC), got it back down to 512MB for
> > F17, and it's back up to 768MB or 1GB for F18 atm because everyone has
> > more important stuff to do than optimize the RAM usage right now. But
> > it's not been rising crazily or anything.
> 
> These were the numbers for RHL 9:
> http://www.gurulabs.com/downloads/RELEASE-NOTES-RHL9.html
> | Memory:
> | - Minimum for text-mode: 64MB
> | - Minimum for graphical: 128MB
> | - Recommended for graphical: 192MB
> So, since Fedora has existed, Anaconda's memory requirements have increased 
> by at least an order of magnitude! How's that NOT "skyrocketing"?

RHL 9 came out in 2003. That's *nine years ago*. In 2003, an expensive
system from Dell - cost price UKP 1314, that's nearly $2k in U.S. money
- came with 512MB of RAM.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/Dell-Dimension-8300-3-0GHz-Ultimate-Christmas-Bundle_Desktop-PC_review

A U.S. model with 1GB of RAM cost $3,600:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1135791,00.asp

I can't find any reviews of more modest configs on the front page of
Google, but it seems reasonable to assume a 'typical' system shipped in
2003 would've had maybe 256MB-512MB of RAM.

The most expensive stock config I can find from Dell today - comparable
to the two systems listed above - is
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dddapy1&model_id=xps-8500&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19 (interestingly, model 8500 - has Dell had a single model line all this time?), which costs $1050 - half as much as the 2003 system, not even adjusted for inflation - and comes with 24GB of RAM. That's 48 times as much, for those keeping score at home. That blows our measly 5-or-7 times increase in RAM requirements out of the water. We appear to be effectively reducing our memory requirements over time, considered as a percentage of the typical RAM allocation of an off-the-shelf system.

Even a more modest 'typical' Dell desktop -
https://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-660/pd - comes with 6GB at the most
basic configuration (comparable to 256MB for a 2003 basic desktop, I'd
guess - so a 24x ratio), or 8GB (32x ratio) at a moderate config (only
$599).

You're being pretty absurd comparing 2003 requirements to 2012
requirements without allowing at all for hardware inflation.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net