*countable infinities only

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-06-12 at 13:11 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > You are, and that was being very un-excellent, so please refrain from it
> > in future.
> 
> I'm left wondering where your concern about being excellent to each
> other has been hiding throughout this thread,

I don't think I've ascribed any kind of malintent to anyone else at any
point. Please quote me if you believe I'm wrong.

>  and where it was when
> you made the "Your Majesty" comment to Jay Sulzberger moments after
> this post.

See other post.

> > It is never a good idea to assume malice where you can't prove it.
> 
> This sounds like a guilty conscience speaking to me. I never claimed
> any malice.  I apologize if my message sounded as though I were.

"My understanding is that the folks working on secureboot are too busy
building cryptographically signed boot-loaders that will inhibit users
from changing their kernels to take pictures and work on instructions.
 But I could be mistaken."

That is, at minimum, snarky. 'You're too busy doing something evil to
write instructions'.

> The idea that the firmware is complete enough to build and test the
> cryptographic lockdown but not complete enough to make write
> instructions against simply didn't occur to me.   And with that
> thought in mind I think it's even more sad that the Fedora community
> isn't focusing primarily on making instructions _now_ while there may
> still be an opportunity to encourage making those yet unwritten
> interfaces easy and consistent.

The UI always gets written last.

Someone already did the gedanken on what the instructions would look
like, if written now without the confidence that they would be referring
to any kind of interface which may actually be sold. I found the post
pretty funny, and sadly accurate.

I'm not sure how you can use the process of writing instructions to
'encourage making those yet unwritten interfaces easy and consistent'.
The whole root of all our problems here is, to put it in specific terms,
that manufacturers don't actually give two shits about people who want
to install alternate OSes on their machines. Such people - us - are at
best entirely insignificant and at worse an active pain in the ass, as
far as they're concerned. So what possible pressure can we exert on
their firmware interface designers? To put it baldly, HP, Dell, Sony,
Acer, Asus et al do not give two shits how difficult we find it to write
a guide on disabling Secure Boot (or that we're so narked off about the
issue in the first place). They don't give _one_ shit. If we're very
lucky, they may possibly employ one person in PR who understands that
it's profitable in an extremely minor way to, every so often, write a
piece of fluff about how important the 'enthusiast community' is to
them. That is the extent of their caring. I feel that sometimes people
lose their sense of perspective when debating issues like this. It's
always important to remember how unimportant you are. =)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net