*countable infinities only

[Jay Sulzberger]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2012, Peter Jones <pjones at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 06/12/2012 08:10 AM, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>
>> Due to my respect to your request, I thought about it for nearly 72
>> hours. I still stand behind what I said: People who are incapable of
>> switching a BIOS setting, which might involve doing a simple web
>> search beforehand, should better not touch any electric equipment.
>>
>> Fellow contributors assert that such people are not in Fedora's target
>> base, as per the statement of the Board. Of course they are right. I
>> am just claiming the set of BIOS-capable people is not limited to
>> target Fedora user base, but extends to all electric equipment users.
>
> I find it pretty hard to believe this position. Through my role working
> on our bootloaders at Red Hat, I've seen a fair amount of pre-production
> hardware, and I've spent a lot of time looking at hardware that implements
> Secure Boot, and how it does so. I've seen the firmware interfaces so far.
> They've gotten a lot better than when they initially started shipping, but
> there are still plenty of them where /I/ can't figure out what the firmware
> options mean.
>
> There are still plenty of other firmware options for other features that have
> some acronym that only a subject matter expert will ever figure out what 
> mean.
> This is not merely common, but it's true on nearly all machines I've ever
> encountered. On all but the most painfully limiting firmwares, there is an
> option the name of which I can't decode, much less establish a meaning for.
> A meeting of the minds between the user and the firmware developer is clearly
> not a high priority, and is basically never achieved.
>
> It's pretty disingenuous to think that our users are going to be able to
> figure this out. Even if we provide the best instructions we can, there are
> going to be users - reasonably smart people who are using computers and
> Fedora to solve real problems - who aren't going to be able to figure out
> how what we say maps to their firmware. It's pretty hurtful to say they
> shouldn't be using computers, much less /all/ electric equipment.
>
> Just because somebody doesn't have a high level of technical expertise
> doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't use the tools available to accomplish
> their goals, and it's pretty rude to treat people this way. Above that,
> when you make statements that denigrate a plurality of human beings, it
> becomes very difficult to take your point in any way seriously.
>
> --
>         Peter

Let Fedora help bring to market better hardware.

Do not agree that Microsoft should have the Hardware Root Key on
just about all x86 style computers for sale next year.

oo--JS.