I think you've got your years wrong. I too remember talk of OS X going completely resolution independent but OS X hadn't even been released in 1998.

I remember seeing some examples of what UI scaling in OS X looked like back in the 10.5 (I think) days looked like when enabled (which it obviously wasn't in the actual release version of OS X). It was looking pretty good, a few minor glitches here and there but definitely promising. Sadly they abandoned this approach in favor of the bitmap-based solution they've got now (though it works surprisingly well, if you had told me in the mid 90s that by 2013 we'd be up- and down-scaling desktop-size bitmaps in realtime with no visible UI lag I would've thought you were full of shit).

And nine times out of ten Windows users are practically computer illiterate, what's your point?

(BTW, my point here is that I know more developers (when only counting those who have some kind of choice, if you're working for a bank that mandates Windows 2000 Pro on all developer desktops because it's corporate policy then you're not really interesting in this case) who use Macbooks/iMacs/Mac Pros running OS X than I know developers who use Windows Whatever)

I'd say the flat UI trend is more about minimalism and a better comparison would be the interior design minimalism trend (which is still going strong) contrasted with past trends such as the 1970's "shag carpets, saturated non-matching colors and wood paneling" trend. So, by this standard we're still in the infancy of minimalist UIs but it's still better than what we had before and it will hopefully get even better with time as we further refine things.

My first thought was "Don't let this guy move to any future Mars colony, he'll end up founding the Red movement..."

I'm pretty sure this "article" is really just Dell advertising.

I suspect humans make it there and create permanent settlements the crime and war situations may change rapidly.

Speaking of which, I should finish reading Green Mars...

Well, I more often find myself thinking "I need to get to [some address], on a map it's right around this intersection, I wonder which stop is the closest". That's almost always the initial problem you face when you're about to go somewhere with a public transport system you're not intimately familiar with. Only after this do things like "which station should I change trains at?" factor in.

Add to this that may times public transport systems will have a stop/station named "Something Street" which is actually not on Something Street but rather it's ~50m from one end of Something Street and is only named Something Street because that's where Something Street meets the street that the bus/train/tram runs on and the stop you really wanted was two stops earlier which is called "Random Park" and happens to be on a street parallel to Something Street (and right next to the place you're going to).

But tablets and smartphones aren't minicomputers.

This sounds more like an attempt to return to the minicomputer era.

Perhaps you meant to say that the microcomputer fad is coming to an end? Of course, I doubt it's accurate to describe it as a fad...

Lule is also acceptable if trying to approximate how the name of the city is normally pronounced.

While it was pitched that way it actually dealt heavily with various political and ethical issues. That was what made it great, sure there was technobabble and bits of "space western" mixed in but overall it was speculation about the future and the present.

The "new trek" is just action movies IN SPACE which makes it "sci-fi" in the eyes of Hollywood.

Seriously, if you're still using tables for layout you probably shouldn't be doing web development.

Tables are horrible to work with yet I still see horribly hacked-up amateurish table-based layouts that are almost impossible to modify and work with cranked out by developers who should either consider that HTML has changed since 1999 or stick to writing server-side code.

Based on my experience I suspect you also never use <!DOCTYPE> tags, use deprecated elements, nest your elements in nearly unparseable ways and don't quite grasp how to write even basic JavaScript (I'm not claiming to be a JS expert but the incredibly poor quality of JS that some people with CS degrees and 10+ years of experience come up with makes me wonder how they have jobs in the first place).

Except the UI for GIMP is a pain to work with. Photoshop's UI may not be perfect but it's a lot better than GIMP's UI.

GIMP suffers from having a UI designed by programmers, what it really needs is a complete UI redesign (and it needs to be the default UI for the latest and greatest version, not some GIMP-with-a-decent-UI fork that's two versions behind and suddenly doesn't get updated anymore).

In fact, it needs a UI which is not just almost as good as Photoshop's, it needs to be good enough that an experienced Photoshop user's initial reaction to it is "Huh, this is different but I like it" (right now it's closer to "Why is this user interface such a mess? Why should I take the time to learn this?").