*countable infinities only

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 9:58 AM, Peter Jones 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.
>

If the fimware frontend is designed to hide the secureboot settings,
it would be hard to believe that it is doing this with good
intentions. Yet in such a case, the electric equipment-capable user
has various options to figure his way out, such as
- Read the manual
- Do a quick online search (given the user has access without the
defective product)
- Contact the vendor
- Replace the product
rendering most of your points invalid.


> 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.
>

Take it as natural selection, or a way to cure some sociological
cancer. I am sorry, I am incapable of promoting unintelligence.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts though.
Best,
Orcan