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 -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
