kbolino

Display scaling 100%: 12px font, 48px button

Display scaling 75%: 9px font, 36px button

Where's the setting for 12px font, 24px button?

At 100% scaling with "Compact view" on, Windows 11's File Explorer takes 135 pixels to get from the top of the titlebar to the top of the content. The same dimension in Windows 7 is 92 pixels. That's almost 50% vertical space bloat for no discernible benefit.

> UX is meaningless for a boot mechanism standard.

Well, all I can really say to this is that yes, this attitude is exactly the problem here.

Of course, the world looks different now than it did 25-30 years ago, and all Intel really set out to do back then was to get away from BIOS and all of its limitations. This was especially important for their now-defunct "IA-64" (Itanium) project, but it ended up lasting anyway due to x86-64 happening.

Nevertheless, for most of us, UEFI rolled out in the 2010s, at a time when Internet connectivity was generally a given, and hardware capabilities had already moved well beyond where they were when Intel handed the matter off to UEFI in the 2000s.

Hardware makers have consistently shown contempt for software and user experience, regarding it somebody else's problem. Of course, a consortium of many hardware makers is not likely to develop opinions or sentiments that none of them individually would have. But it does show how parochial and short-sighted they were and often continue to be.

Yes, there are multiple different platforms that use UEFI. They can each have their own standard way of using it, though.

> Your computer's awful implementation says nothing about UEFI as a whole

This is just a copout. Of course the crappy implementations many people have to deal with cast the whole thing in a bad light. If nothing else, UX is a distant-to-nonexistent concern of the UEFI standards, and that's part of the problem.

However, you are also right that this doesn't hardly make UEFI any worse than BIOS.

BIOS had to be replaced. It didn't have to be UEFI, but it did need to be something, even just a new 64-bit stage would have gone a long way. But nobody made such a thing, and the alternatives that actually exist like Coreboot do a lot less even than BIOS did. Past a certain point, pretending to be smol-bean 1980s/'90s hardware stops being a fun game and starts being a real limitation holding things back. Said "hardware abstraction layer" was getting to be more like a bunch of increasingly hard-to-maintain lies told to BIOS rather than a real service provided by BIOS.

Yes, it is about the same, that's the point. If you are worried about this or future compromises of TLS/PKI, using SSH naively is not any better.

It's also an indictment of Apple's relationship to open source software. Never mind contributing back to upstream, they haven't even made the change in their own fork to support their own keychain.

SSH in typical use is not vulnerable to a compromised root certificate, instead it's "just" vulnerable to you having no idea whether you can trust that host key or not, so you just blindly say yes and hope for the best. At least if the key changes, you'll know something was wrong; maybe it was this connection that got compromised, maybe it was the first connection that got compromised, maybe the legitimate host just rotated their keys, who knows. SSH security against MITM is mostly based on lack of motivated attackers and wishful thinking.

Sandisk doesn't make DRAM.

Micron's stock price did go way up, after they stopped selling DRAM to the consumer market. It has been flat for several months though.

For comparison, SK Hynix stock is flat YoY and Samsung's stock did go up this year, but has come back down a bit (they're also much more diversified). Those are the only other companies outside of China that actually make DRAM at scale. There's also CXMT, which is making inroads, but its stock is not traded on any open markets, and the company is heavily backed by the Chinese government.

The conspiracy is real, it's even been proven in court, but as things stand, it's also necessary because of the factors you describe. Investors will not touch the DRAM market with a 10-foot pole, so it has had to rely on self-funding. While there have been state subsidies too, price fixing has proven to be the most effective way to survive the extreme volatility and fund the massive capex necessary for each generational leap. They have gotten a bit more sophisticated about it since the court case 20 years ago, but as far as I can tell, it's basically the same as it's ever been. The lack of effective competition is a function of the market itself, not any tilted scales. If anything, tilting the scales on purpose with greater state involvement is the only way to change the dynamics, but few states have the capacity and competence to carry that out effectively.

Yeah, I'd say the bigger point is that the latency gap isn't really there anymore. Old keyboards, cheap keyboards, expansion ports, and external hubs can still cause problems, though.

Windows 95 didn't even have scroll wheel support in the first place. Tweak UI allowed you to turn on focus-follows-mouse (aka X-Mouse), but that's a different thing.