Sounds like they're trying to stick to a name with more lasting weight and a sense of authority. A name like Recursity may be trendy (a portmanteau ending in the letter 'y'), but I suspect ten years from now it will look very tacky.
I absolutely don't disagree on your point regarding innovation. A number of people accused Windows 7 of taking UI ideas from KDE, which ultimately greatly improved their OS's usability. Still, a delicate balance needs to be found among innovation, enterprise requirements, and personal/community wants. Thankfully, at least covering the third group, with Linux there are often solutions to these experiments (though they might still end up being rather involved, such as creating your own solutions or moving on to a different window manager entirely). Yet if one doesn't like the Windows 8 UI approach, for example, the only real recourse would be to downgrade and hope things change for the better in the next release.
As an aside, I decided to try out Cinnamon on my Debian box, and I actually found it to be a breath of fresh air. It's a modern approach to the non-bloated Gnome desktop of years ago. Reminded me a bit of when I first used xfce; very clean and straightforward. I feel Gnome and Unity try far too hard to dazzle and stand out, when it reality it all just gets in the way. No comment on KDE since I haven't tried it in a long time.
Some day though I'll go back to straight DWM, my old love.
True on the traffic. Sure, the game isn't perfect. However, one of the successes of Skylines has been the honest tone and communication with the developers. There's a sense of confidence that the game will be supported and improved over time. This didn't exist with Sim City 5, what with the always-online drama, the inability to play the game well for several months after release, and the early focus on producing large amounts of paid [overpriced?] DLC.
I had the ideal of going to law school several years ago, studied history and economics in college, with loads of public policy knowledge. Ultimately I determined that these fields actually don't interest me all that much. I mean, I had been reading texts on formal logic in my spare time because I found such subjects to be far more engaging.
I enrolled for another Bachelor's degree a while ago to help build up my chops for a career in development; effectively swapping one applied logic for another. Yet I have a lot of catching up to do to meet up with peers who have been working in the industry for nearly a decade. There's a nagging feeling of dread within me that I might just be naive at best, a fraud at worst, and end up a failure. Still, I enjoy working on projects for hours at a time (when I manage to find the time to do so) and find the subject matter I'm studying engaging. In that sense, I can at least say I don't regret the shift.
In a similar vein, I feel that there's a sense that consumers feel tablets are "vaguely better." By this, I mean a number of things. For example, laptops often by and large are still sold with hard disc drives instead of solid state, and therefore tablets are actually a faster experience. tablet and smartphone UIs do a 'better job' at handling errors; by this I mean keeping redundant error message pop-ups to a minimum and attempting to more elegantly kill an app. An app store is a simple and safer place to download new software than the awful method Windows had going through the 90's and 00's of venturing out and downloading mysterious programs (which in it of itself has greatly damaged the Windows reputation).
I guess my point is that these issues are not inherently solved due to the tablet form factor, but rather better UI and more pointed hardware directed toward consumer use cases.
Just a general thought. At some point (for consumers anyway), these paradigms will unite. As such, what will follow is the necessity for window management that can handle different use cases. Right now the only OS really attempting to bridge the gap is Windows 8, which is currently an unfortunate juxtaposition of two battling WM's rather than a seamless unification. Apple isn't really bothering to unify at the moment, Google isn't sure what it wants to do, and desktop linux (though I primarily work in linux) really is a less quality product.
I'd argue that window management innovation has been a terribly sorry state for quite a while. I mean, I would venture a guess that the increasing prevalence of browser-based tools is in part a result of a lack of [good] innovation by WM's (of course, as well as better tools for web app developers). Mobile OS's have been the only thing to really shake things up.
I'm not sure exactly what my point is here. Just a general feeling that we're going to continue to debate on the differences between tablets and pc's until someone actually goes ahead and creates a useful WM for both use cases. Windows 8 is an okay start in that regard, but I feel there's a way to do it better.
My guess is that we as humans tend to look at what we've missed out on rather than what we've gained. During Keynes's time there wasn't quite as much competition for one's time and attention, and whatever they had probably wasn't as cheap. Now we just have so much entertainment at our disposal that we can't feel satisfied with what we have.
I'll call it the Deal or No Deal irrationality. Essentially, if you go on that show hoping to win $1,000,000 but end up with just $100, you probably feel pretty disappointed. The $999,900 you didn't win ends up eclipsing the fact that you won $100. $100! A free night out with your friends! A nice fancy dinner! Who doesn't want that sort of bonus?!
[I might have accidentally stolen the above example from a Dan Ariely book. If I did then I do apologize]
Now in our society we have competing forces of remaining sociable, watching TV, browsing the Internet, maintaining hobbies, going on vacations, and (as the article notes) trying to work and more more in the process. I mean, I've had to sacrifice watching TV and playing video games just because I need to to have 'more productive leisure.' Board games, lifting weights, going out with friends, and programming are things that I like to do, sure, but that doesn't quite fill in the gap a video game may do in the same way. At the same time I'd like to do more biking and get into other more artistic hobbies, but the time cost to learning is so great and the ROI relative to what I already have on my plate.
Well, the simplest answer is that incomes are way higher for certain positions, even for significantly less skilled work. I mean, engineers are a dime-a-dozen in China, but the pay is lower and STEM work is not nearly as glamorized as it is in the US right now. Doctors too. All the praise goes to business and financial managers.
Of course, if you're an international trailblazing software-engineering guru, yeah, you'll get fantastic opportunities pretty much anywhere. However, even fairly low-level IT work in the US can feed a new family (depending on your geography, of course), which is not the case everywhere in the world. And with recruiters banging down peoples' doors throwing jobs in peoples' faces, it's no wonder foreigners want to stay in the US.
I was just in Guangzhou recently. Same thing there. In TienHe all of their multiple 6+ storey malls are connected by a sprawling series of underground malls. The shopping there is crazy.
Well, I would suspect that Google makes deliberate choices on how they set up these sorts of things. They've probably built models which demonstrate that only n percent of the global population will be affected by a certain naming policy and the differences in cost associated with modifying their databases or to accommodate such names or dealing with troll accounts versus maintaining the status quo. [Keep in mind I obviously do not work at Google and clearly have no idea what I'm talking about]. I suspect that, in reality, Google feels that keeping their uses safe from all the Grass Mud Horse's and Assmen of the world doesn't affect their profitability significantly. Frankly, I would love to look into the best ways to deal with the non-universality of names for users while still being able to meaningfully harvest and utilize all of their information for those sweet sweet advertising dollars. Perhaps the best way is just give users a generic field for "name" (not first/last name) and make the good, old-fashioned username be the identifier.