There is no constraint on any reviewers (or real users) about taking own photos or videos... there are of course (as with most new product launches) screenshots, how-to videos, user guides etc. that are made available by Microsoft. Given the preview just started, more hands-on reviews are just making their way out. Several have been posted already - and are pretty representative of the diversity of experiences ("magical/awesome" to "can't handle my accent/recognize my speech"), and have continued to be helpful in improving the system - which is the entire point of a preview release. Here are a couple that I bookmarked: http://mashable.com/2014/12/15... http://www.gizmodo.in/news/Sky... This is work that's been done at Microsoft Research for a long time, and we have been continuously improving it (and sharing a lot of the research behind it with the world). Remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It's exciting for us to be able to see real people use it! (full disclosure: I work at Microsoft Research and am involved with Skype Translator)

I work on Skype Translator. Given the complexity of the technology in the back-end, the team looked for a client code base that was fast to experiment with, develop and release on - and so the modern windows 8 app seems like a good way to go - no other nefarious reason. Also, users of skype translator can call other Skype clients (Skype Desktop is officially supported, while I have certainly called ios, xbox on other clients successfully).

So, to the Red Hat employees reading this: thank you! Red Hat does great work for the world. We as a community also tend to undervalue a $1B/year publicly traded company with a large sales force out explaining to every potential enterprise customer that will listen the virtues of free software.

The Dev Suite thing is kinda cool. Not that I'd buy it :-), but interesting to know that option exists.

Any changes to the infrastructure need to get reviewed by someone in the Wikimedia Operations staff prior to actually going live, and they tend to be pretty careful about letting things through. Here's the list of changes awaiting review, along with discussion of each proposed change in many cases.

From TFA: "The company has more than 180 patents, both issued and pending, covering its solutions, software and differentiated intellectual property."

Even though Kodak saw digital photography coming, the problem was Kodak's whole financial structure was tied to film, and digital technology was disruptive technology. They might have been able to sustain the brand by merging with or buying the right company at the right time (e.g. Canon), but most companies have a hard time dealing with technology shifts that vaporize their main profit center. It's not as simple as just knowing what the next trend is; it's figuring out how to gracefully wind down the existing cash cow while giving the new technology the management attention and resources it needs to thrive. Even then, there still ends up being a lot of pain because you can just put all of the same people you had producing film to work in a digital camera business.

Agreed, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that Google would be upset if Chrome marginalized Firefox through merit-based competition.

The main thing I would add is that it was only a matter of time before someone created a competitive Webkit-based browser for Windows, and there's no guarantee that whoever that was was going to be friendly to Google.

Hi there, I'm on the team that deployed Pending Changes. We picked 2000 rather arbitrarily, but it actually was a technical limitation driven by our need to limit possible load on the system rather than an editorial decision. Based on rough community consensus, it's actually in effect on far fewer articles as of this writing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Queue#Using_pending_changes for the community discussion of how and where to apply it.

From the Hydrogen economy article on Wikipedia:

There have also been some concerns over possible problems related to hydrogen gas leakage.[50] Molecular hydrogen leaks slowly from most containment vessels. It has been hypothesized that if significant amounts of hydrogen gas (H2) escape, hydrogen gas may, because of ultraviolet radiation, form free radicals (H) in the stratosphere. These free radicals would then be able to act as catalysts for ozone depletion. A large enough increase in stratospheric hydrogen from leaked H2 could exacerbate the depletion process. However, the effect of these leakage problems may not be significant. The amount of hydrogen that leaks today is much lower (by a factor of 10–100) than the estimated 10–20% figure conjectured by some researchers; for example, in Germany, the leakage rate is only 0.1% (less than the natural gas leak rate of 0.7%). At most, such leakage would likely be no more than 1–2% even with widespread hydrogen use, using present technology.[50]
...
[50] ^ a b "Assessing the Future Hydrogen Economy (letters)" (PDF). Science. 10 October 2003. Retrieved 2008-05-09.

The implication there is that even if leakage were a major problem, the gas doesn't escape the planet. Even if it did, and we switched entirely to hydrogen, and consumed 100 times the current rate of energy, I have a hard time believing we'd actually make a dent in the oceans. I'm going to guess that, by volume, the amount of oil that was ever on the planet is pretty trivial compared to the size of the oceans. Unlike what happens to oil when we burn it, most/all of the hydrogen would eventually be converted back into water.

I think it's reasonable to expect an editorial that complains that Flash is "not open" as its first big bold bullet point would somehow address the reason why Jobs thinks we should care. I know why I care, but it's not at all clear why Jobs thinks I should care.

So you're focused on speed, but dont allow native code? Not allowing trusted code is not the same as not allowing native code. See Native Client. Was it really necessary to accuse the people involved of being unqualified and lazy to ask your question?