Totally agree. Calling them robots, we might as well call 'tablets' (pills) as robots as welll - they go down into the stomach guided by water and change their state and trigger what-not.

Thanks for articulating the differene so clearly.

Very informative. Needs modding up.
But I agree with others that Comic Sans gives a feel of utter casualness to the text and should be restricted to only comic strips and the like. While I am just a user of fonts, I intrinsically appreciate the big difference fonts create how on our impression of content. The analogy is design of a package for a product - the more attractive a package, the more weight (value) we implicitly attach to the product.

Me too, been doing that since the days of landline (pre-mobile) days time. And now that you mention, everyone in my family uses left ear and so do most of the people that I see in my neighborhood and office. And we are all right handed, So I guess your logic of having the right hand free makes very good sense.

I was surprised to read the words 'resurgence' as if it had ever gone down. Many years back (I don't live in Europe these days) I have travelled several times on overnight trains there crossing countries and geographies, and as always, loved the journeys. To me the journey is most of the joy of going somewhere, and nothing beats the lullaby of the train rolling on the tracks, and the sounds changing as we cross bridges, tunnels and stations platforms.

I totally dislike the new Settings screen. First of all there is no Save button. It completely flies against basic UX principles. You change any option it gets changes right away. Second the UI looks so childish. 6-7 fields, but the screen requires to be scrolled to see all the fields. When the first time I came across this type of settinmgs (in Proxy settings) - for many days I was wondering is that a Windows screen or Chrome's settings screen - because it looked so out of place and poor UI compared to the Control panel.

Whether one likes him or not, let's remember that without his contribution (making the DOS deal with IBM), the world today may still very well have been one with proprietary microcomputers and token ring LANs and that's about it. His work resulted in the mass deployments of PCs on every desk that very well may not have happened otherwise. And that obviously has enormously speeded up all aspects of IT & resulting semiconductor development to where we are today.

You are missing one key difference. All previous automation was over several years if not decades - giving lot of time for reskilling.. Whereas the current AI has already made several jobs redundant in the very first year of it being available publicly. And this is just the start. In previous one, mechanical stuff (either mechanical or clerical) got automated , letting people reskill themselves to non clerical work. Now whatever brains humans have are being replaced by AI. So what will people reskill themselves to - back to mechanical jobs were it is harder for robots to be used - like gardeners?

By the time we arrive into the future where 'thousands' of spaceships are getting launched in a window, we may very well have newer transport technologies that make this one moot.

I keep coding MS Access VBA occasionally - wonderful tool for developing useful applications on the desktop.

I did my first Basic on the ZX Spectrum 128K. The only languages I had learned prior to that were Fortran and COBOL - both from text book with no actual hands-on at all, as my college did not have the computer with those languages. Believe it or not, at that time I used to think that real computer professionals programmed in assembler and that languages like Basic and Fortran were for ordinary users. Only after I joined a software company I realised that assemblers are only for niche purposes. Much later, I did a project on VB6 and even now regularly dabble in MS Access VBA - keeping that Basic DNA.

Unisys mainframes are used by a good number of Airlines and they are still building mainframes.
Their technology has been ahead of its time in mainframe days.

I still use Win 7 at home because I like the UI - I have my own colour schemes that I have been applying since the days of XP. But Win 10 has gone just black-and-white - a serious drawback. Many of the earlier User Experience knowledge that the Microsoft devleopers had put in from the days of XP have been thrown to the wind. So hard to find where a toolbar ends , where the content area starts etc. The only con with Win 7 now is that many applications have started to stop working. e.g. Google drive.

Why is it the occasionally highly bright individuals start believing the model (whatever model in whatever domain) is the reality? Is it their past success tells them that whatever they think must be correct?