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Comment by throwaway64 | Hacker News Reader

I disagree strongly with this type of argument, nobody starts out a "computer professional", we all get there by experimenting on commodity hardware. With this type of proposal you essentially make it impossible for a user of a regular device to ever advance beyond the walled garden.

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You seem to toss out the history of computers. I owned my first computer when I was in high school, I soldered it together from a kit (it was based on a Z80). Today I can do the same thing with an ARM chip (in fact I've been playing with the ST micro STM324F 'butterfly' which is a Cortex-M4 architecture.

You also toss out with the bathwater virtual machines. You can boot a virtual machine where the hypervisor is 'signed' on a machine which gives you 100% access to your virtual machine that can do most anything you might want, from talking to the network, to displaying graphics, to running the latest fizzbuzz contender.

My guess is that wmf's is correct, the relatively low volume of 'general purpose' computers will cause the cost to rise but I doubt it will ever be impossible to put one together.

>You seem to toss out the history of computers. I owned my first computer when I was in high school, I soldered it together from a kit (it was based on a Z80). Today I can do the same thing with an ARM chip (in fact I've been playing with the ST micro STM324F 'butterfly' which is a Cortex-M4 architecture.

My point being, I doubt that this was your first encounter with programming a computer, and even if it was, you are in the extreme minority, even on HN.

>You also toss out with the bathwater virtual machines. You can boot a virtual machine where the hypervisor is 'signed' on a machine which gives you 100% access to your virtual machine that can do most anything you might want, from talking to the network, to displaying graphics, to running the latest fizzbuzz contender.

Ah, where is this VM i can run on an unrooted ipad?

My first experience programming a computer was running FOCAL8 on a PDP8 that an engineer that was working with my Mom let me use because I was so bored waiting for her to be done with work and to give me a ride home from school. The second computer I programmed was running BASIC programs that I typed in on an ASR33 Teletype that was connected to a mainframe at the school district headquarters.

I don't doubt for a minute that my kids, should they choose to, could use a terminal application on a securely booted appliance device to access a computer 'instance' somewhere in the cloud (an EC2 instance perhaps). No need to root my iPad.

If you look at the Beagle board, or the RPi, or the Pandaboard or any number of 'kit' computers, they are still out there in numbers, and there will always be a market for them. And, depending on your level of sophistication you may start with a webiance and remove or simply access its internal compute engine with some other bit of code. Nothing UEFI can do, cannot be undone with a JTAG loader and new firmware. But it won't be useful for running those standard applications any more. Just like the TV I hacked into so that I could display video directly that was generated by my Z80 system ever tuned in TV shows again after that.

You're very lucky. My first computer was an old Dell that my parents were planning to throw away (as it was slow) but which I rescued and, whilst looking for ways to speed it up, stumbled across Ubuntu. That's how, aged 13, I first got into Linux. If we had been using computers with secure boot, I assume I would still have gotten involved with computers, but quite possibly at a much later stage and I highly doubt I would be at the same level I am now.

Plus, it's hard enough to get people to switch to Linux now as it is - telling people they need to buy new computers, that'll reserve Linux purely for geeks at a time when it is starting to appeal more and more to consumers (though admittedly, not quite there yet).

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