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

[Kevin Kofler]

Adam Williamson wrote:

> On Sat, 2012-11-10 at 02:49 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Adam Williamson wrote:
>> > You're being pretty absurd comparing 2003 requirements to 2012
>> > requirements without allowing at all for hardware inflation.
>> 
>> People thinking like you are the reason why entire villages in China and
>> Africa are huge heavily-polluted landfills of electronic scrap material.
> 
> That's so stupid it barely merits a response. But I'll humour you.

How's it stupid? A computer can easily last a decade or more. The computer 
I'm typing this message on is from 2003. Why should we have to replace our 
hardware every few months?

And I didn't invent or exaggerate the story about the villages in China and 
Africa either. I've seen several documentaries about it on TV. Just use a 
search engine and I'm sure you'll find articles on the Internet about the 
problem.

> We improve the ability of our hardware so we can improve the ability of
> our software. When designing modern software it does not make sense to
> design to the capabilities of a Commodore PET. A PC from nine years ago
> really is not a terribly different case.

You need to care about older hardware if you want to reduce the pollution of 
our environment and the plundering of our planet's resources (copper, 
aluminium, gold, rare metals etc.). "This is last year's hardware, just 
throw it away" just doesn't cut it.

> We are not designing an OS to be used to extend the life of ancient
> hardware for re-use in the developing world. That is a fine goal, but it
> is not really Fedora's goal. Our goal includes Features and First - i.e.
> we are pushing the envelope of what is possible.

This is not only about the developing world! Most of the scrap in those 
landfill villages in China and Africa originates from the so-called 
"developed" world, i.e. Europe and North America! WE need to stop replacing 
our hardware for no reason every couple years!

> In doing this it is clearly appropriate to target the capabilities of
> contemporary hardware, not hardware built before George W. Bush's second
> term in office began.

And I respectfully disagree, for both ecologic and economic reasons.

> Modern software does not use more resources than old software because
> it's 'bloated' or because modern coders are lazy. It just uses the
> greater resources available to do better stuff. This is why hardware
> engineers work to make more resources available in the _first_ place. We
> could now list all the capabilities of modern code that code from 2003
> didn't have, but I really, really don't see the point.

I fail to see those capabilities in the case of Anaconda, or more precisely, 
I don't see it having anywhere near 10 times the features it had in 2003!

        Kevin Kofler