Has there, so far, been a single aspect of this case that didn't turn out to be an embarassing cock-up by the feds? Warrants not in order, video footage of the raid quietly goes missing, seized materials swiftly duplicated and fedexed out of NZ before anybody has a chance to object, Carpathia left sitting on tens of thousands a day in servers-in-legal-limbo, random megaupload customers who were using the place as a backup/transfer system locked out for months...
Was somebody delusional enough to start out thinking that they had an open-and-shut case, and bodged it up? Did they start out thinking that; but start 'improvising' once it became clear that they didn't? Was the whole operation fully intended to be an incrementally-more-legal-than-just-having-a-Reaper-handle-it intimidation job?
Why, back in my day passing the bar was an effectively unfettered license to intimidate and extort practically anybody who couldn't afford the services of my colleagues.
Now with these 'inter-tubes', and moron with an ISP can mock, castigate, calluminate, and generally disrespect me. ME a Respectable Businessman. How dare they? This madness must end.
The system was designed, and would continue to make most sense on, some sort of touchscreen device; but there is nothing (architecturally) preventing most of the interesting bits from running on top of basically any reasonably normal linux. And the UI is pretty slick, certainly beats at least older android variants hands down. I don't know if 4.0 or 4.1 brings things to parity there.
It's to be expected that HBO would be spineless twits. What surprises me is that, in their capacity as profit maximizing spineless twits, they decided that this recall/re-edit/lament/apologize/etc. tactic is more cost effective than just issuing a generic "Yeah, we are making a blood-drenched swords-n-sorcery series, so we buy prop heads by the fucking truckload without carefully vetting them for non-resemblance to any persons living or dead. Who cares?" and going on with their day.
Given that this is Broadcom we are talking about, I can't muster much surprise; but the idea of getting all worked up over having your own secret proprietary ARM bootloader seems kind of nuts, given how utterly common ARM bootloaders are... Not even executing on the part of the chip with a known architecture certainly is a classy touch, though...
The problem you describe could simply be a case of severe failing-to-think-it-through. However, with patience and a decent feedback/compensation mechanism, it might be possible to simply sidestep the problem entirely.
Have you ever watched, in video or in person, a bunch of ants moving? The little klutzes can barely walk properly. They run around, stagger all over the place, trip, slide, attempt to climb structurally unsound objects, tumble over one another, etc. However, on average the aggregate ant mass keeps going in the right direction.
In the same vein, so long as it is capable of righting itself if(read when) it flips, and isn't required to follow a precise path, or hit any specific waypoints with any great accuracy, a tiny vessel could perfectly conceivably manage the correct average heading...
For extra credit: The only airflow sensors you get are strain gauges at the attachment points of the sail(s), so your power/control surface is also your sensor array... Modeling textile behavior in a fluid system,in real time, is totally within the capabilities of a weedy little ARM core, right?
I suspect that reverse engineering wouldn't be your problem(I can't remember if they've finished releasing all the board specs or not; but it isn't being treated as a zOMG super secret.); but obtaining and fabricating the parts at a price that wouldn't make a beagle-something, or even the guts of the fanciest Android device currently shipping a more sensible proposition...
I'm told that attempting to order cost-optimized SoCs from Broadcom in quantity 1 is even trickier and less fun than trying to solder several-hundred-contact BGA packages without specialist equipment...
Arduinos, by contrast, were through-hole DIPs for much of their life, with even the later or cheaper/smaller variants generally being mere surface mount, still with actual leads and everything.
Given that underwater gliders, usually with a fairly high degree of autonomy(if for no other reason than communicating underwater on teeny batteries is damn difficult), have been a thing in oceanography for some years, I imagine that team jackboots has either already had their panic attack, or is too dense to start now.
Incidentally, though: I'm actually surprised that they went with a boat design, rather than a glider design. Yes, submersion-proofing electronics isn't entirely trivial; but some of those gliders are crazy efficient, and have a convenient invulnerability to even the nastiest wind/waves/salt-spray forming a crust on stuff, by virtue of spending most of their life underwater...
Woldscum is blind in one eye from childhood, and should be able to perceive a 3D movie in 2d without incident. Anonymous Coward, responding to Woldscum has two functioning eyes and finds 3D movies unbearable. I was replying to Anonymous Coward.
WTF is Ayn Rand doing on Slashdot? She's been dead for two decades, and surely the pure beard-force of the freeloading intellectuals that the government paid to build the internet should be enough to keep her unquiet spirit away, no?
While a good AI probably could introspect like that, your question is one(of a great many) that would be fairly vulnerable to being gamed by a much less interesting system because humans have such lousy memories...
Can I introspect about language? Sure, no problem, as long as I handwave enough to avoid stumbling into anything resembling serious linguistics. Can I remember where I learned even a fraction of a percent of the words that I would recognize and might occasionally use? Not a chance. Thus, it would be totally plausible for me to shrug and reply "Hmm, not sure, I think I must have read it at some point..." or "Oh, Mrs. Jones, 8th grade English, took vocabulary very seriously.
Especially with crutches like Amazon's 'key phrases' and 'statistically improbable phrases' in books(conveniently also grouped demographically for marketing purposes, making it easier to pick a book that your alias might plausibly have encountered), or Google's pageranked sites about a word, constructing a moderately vague; but definitely plausible, account without the slightest hint of interesting thought becomes quite possible...
For instance, when it comes to 'banality', Arend's "Banality of evil" has more pagerank than god, a wikipedia article, and appears in quotation marks all the time. "Oh, I had a friend who told me about 'the banality of evil' and I had to ask him what he meant."
I don't doubt that a superior athlete, such as the one you mention, could do better; but the power output figure provided really underscores how questionably qualified humans are for this sort of job.
Among the very lightest(manned) helicopters, are the 'ultralights' designed to be cheaper and more broadly accessible by falling below certain thresholds of size and performance that attract more FAA scrutiny. Outside of RC hobby circles, these are about the least powerful, most stripped down, helicopters you can buy. this one, for instance, sports a 45kW engine with an endurance time of ~60 minutes. Looking at the engine specs that's all in a 40kg package(not counting the 5 gallons of gas, which ostensibly provide slightly over an hour of flight time).
Humans do have a lot going for them: self-repairing, edible, refuel on commonly available materials, excellent natural language parsing; but even world-class athletes whose performance I will never have a hope of touching are just not very powerful compared to even quite modest engines.
Given the (by human standards) alarmingly high power draw, and therefore short duration, of the flight, endurance athletes like bicyclists might not be your best choice...
What I would be curious to know is whether muscle tissue is, fundamentally, up to the job(obviously it is for winged flight; but helicopters are trickier). If you dropped the requirement that a human be involved, and allowed the team to get out the scalpel and harvest whatever sorts of muscle tissue they preferred, from whatever species, and force-feed it some sort of oxygenated nutrient fluid, would there be one up to the task?
What I am honestly baffled about is why one would draw the connection between this forest-kindergarden stuff and 'leadership'...
Is playing outdoors and getting fresh air and exercise likely healthful and salubrious and whatnot? Sure. Is parental paranoia about sharp objects and fire ridiculously over the top? Sure. But 'leadership'? Where is the connection, especially with a 1-10 teacher-student ratio? At least on your basic 30-40 to 1 field trip, there are decent odds that you'll manage to get lost and have to improvise 'don't do anything stupid' until eventually collected...
It certainly isn't a virtue in either case; but I think that I'd actually be more comfortable with the computer science major who lacks a grasp of statistics. There are perfectly reputable areas of mathematics that fall under 'computer science' and don't involve statistics. In an empirical, largely study-based, subject like psychology, though, if you can't use statistics you are essentially stuck at the 'anecdote' stage of knowledge...
Isn't the use of statistics pretty much the only thing that distinguishes 'psychology' from 'talking about feelings'?
I realize that most psych majors don't actually go on to practice in psychology or psychiatry, and the ones that do generally have to do some flavor of graduate work; but I'm still rather alarmed by the implication of TFS that psych students might well be deeply uncomfortable with statistics...
It's probably going to get even worse now that so much of the new hotness is in functionally embedded systems that ship tied to hardware...
With software, the vendor essentially faces the choice of keeping it under wraps, or of having pre-release builds leaking all over the damn place. Maybe if it's just a handful of partner companies with some seriously mean NDAs; but once it gets to the journalist level you can forget about it(analogous to the Oscar screeners that get leaked every damn time, despite being subject to just about everything short of armed guard...)
Hardware, though, with the exception of the occasional unit that...um...goes missing in a bar, is easier to keep a tight grip on. Plus, very-late-prototype hardware, in limited quantities, is inevitably available to the vendor a modest period before retail hardware is available. That sort of thing is perfect for rewarding, or punishing, media outlets. Play ball, and you'll be seeing a sample unit in the mail in time to have your benchmarks and review done before the other guys get back from Best Buy. Don't, and you can read your competitor's reviews while you wait in line to buy something to review...
This sort of thing has gone on for years in the gaming-enthusiast-wanking sector of CPU, GPU, and motherboard reviews; but it hasn't really been all that relevant. Enthusiasts care a lot; but there just aren't a lot of enthusiasts, so it was mostly just sideshow, and the truth usually managed to surface by the time whatever the product was trickled down to the '80% of the speed, 20% of the price' market where people actually buy things.
Now that the 'mainstream' devices are tightly embedded hardware units, though, there will likely be a lot more room for the same sort of shenanigans that rule enthusiast hardware wank to worm their way into mainstream tech coverage.
But you CAN actually use an Apple product when they are showed to the press. An unfinished product could be miles away from the promess made so the surface reviews are a moot point
This is typically true, largely because Apple's style is typically one of ruthless secrecy until launch; but really orthogonal to TFA's point:
His problem was not that a prerelease product was being shown to the press; but that most of the coverage completely failed to mention how tight a leash it was on.
At what point in the development cycle one chooses to demo a product is a matter of strategy and taste. Only when already shipping? Fine. Pre-alpha, only the boys from the lab can even touch it? Fine. The problem being highlighted is that journalists were(understandably, given the pressure for ad impressions; but very arguably unethically) overstating the amount of information they were actually bringing to their readers. Regurgitating press releases makes you a flack; but it isn't inherently unethical. Re-labelling press releases as 'news' and then regurgitating them is another matter entirely...
Eh, I don't think that this can be dismissed as 'Microsoft hate'. Yeah, it involves a Microsoft product; but it treats that as a (recent, high profile, and thus salient) example of the phenomenon of absurdly stage-managed 'hands-on'/'reviews'/etc. involved in tech industry prerelease puffery, and the generally supine compliance of the 'journalists' who eagerly enable the hype machine out of some mixture of fanboyism and desperation for ad impressions.
It isn't the world's biggest secret that, even among ostensibly respectable journalists who write about Serious Topics for Serious Publications of Record, 'access', advertisers, and parent companies have pretty severely eroded the teeth of the vaunted '4th estate'; but it never hurts to remind people of that fact. Tech journalism seems to be substantially more dreadful still.
Again, this phenomenon isn't really MS specific; but (given that most of the 'hands on!!!' coverage has politely failed to note exactly how carefully the minders were keeping a leash on things) it is good to have somebody inform us of that fact.
Obviously, a prerelease product is going to have rough edges, which team PR isn't going to want people cutting themselves on in front of the cameras; but a problem arises when most of the coverage simply elides the fact that PR flacks were waving people away from those rough edges, rather than noting them and moving on...
Mobile corporate messaging par excellence. It's what made your name and it was world class. Since then you've just faffed about with every bandwagon going and totally missed your USP.
I suspect that this wouldn't really help very much. It might save them another Playbook fiasco; but RIM's problem isn't really that they've been sucking more at their core market; but that others have been sucking less at it.
The uptick in adequacy of email and messaging on handsets-that-aren't-blackberries has been pretty dramatic indeed(especially from the perspective of customers who couldn't afford/didn't want a BES; but even BES users have improved, though still inferior, alternatives). Even if, best case, the competition remains locked in a sort of asymptotic approach to RIM's offering, never quite as good, they still have a problem:
Apple's massive margins and charm on the consumer side give them plenty of time to make their management features less unpleasant, and plenty of push on IT departments to just-make-it-work.
Android lacks some of the glamour and much of the profit, but it certainly makes it a lot easier for any carrier to hack together a mostly-functional blackberry-esque handset from some razor-margin handset OEM without paying a tithe to RIM, which doesn't help them much in terms of ability to extract money from carriers for their proprietary network features.
Microsoft may or may not have exited the 'error' phase of their trial-and-error development process; but as long as they are entrenched on the customer's mailserver with buckets of cash, they can't be safely ignored.
AC may be referring to the firmware blobs without which newer AMD chips are good for little more than spartan 2d...
That said, you really end up picking your poison with firmware. Some vendors include enough flash to store the blob, some demand that the kernel hand them the blob. There are exceptional cases, where the firmware is OSS, or where the vendor is a real asshole and forbids the blob to be distributed(for no obvious reason, since somebody always whips up a script that grabs the windows driver from the vendor site and gouges the firmware out of that.)
In this unfortunate vein, it is probably worth noting that Intel is better about not making the firmware stuff visible, but AMD has historically been overwhelmingly nicer about coreboot vs. BIOS.
Slashdot Mirror
Has there, so far, been a single aspect of this case that didn't turn out to be an embarassing cock-up by the feds? Warrants not in order, video footage of the raid quietly goes missing, seized materials swiftly duplicated and fedexed out of NZ before anybody has a chance to object, Carpathia left sitting on tens of thousands a day in servers-in-legal-limbo, random megaupload customers who were using the place as a backup/transfer system locked out for months...
Was somebody delusional enough to start out thinking that they had an open-and-shut case, and bodged it up? Did they start out thinking that; but start 'improvising' once it became clear that they didn't? Was the whole operation fully intended to be an incrementally-more-legal-than-just-having-a-Reaper-handle-it intimidation job?
Why, back in my day passing the bar was an effectively unfettered license to intimidate and extort practically anybody who couldn't afford the services of my colleagues.
Now with these 'inter-tubes', and moron with an ISP can mock, castigate, calluminate, and generally disrespect me. ME a Respectable Businessman. How dare they? This madness must end.
The system was designed, and would continue to make most sense on, some sort of touchscreen device; but there is nothing (architecturally) preventing most of the interesting bits from running on top of basically any reasonably normal linux. And the UI is pretty slick, certainly beats at least older android variants hands down. I don't know if 4.0 or 4.1 brings things to parity there.
It's to be expected that HBO would be spineless twits. What surprises me is that, in their capacity as profit maximizing spineless twits, they decided that this recall/re-edit/lament/apologize/etc. tactic is more cost effective than just issuing a generic "Yeah, we are making a blood-drenched swords-n-sorcery series, so we buy prop heads by the fucking truckload without carefully vetting them for non-resemblance to any persons living or dead. Who cares?" and going on with their day.
That is the disturbing bit, to my mind.
Given that this is Broadcom we are talking about, I can't muster much surprise; but the idea of getting all worked up over having your own secret proprietary ARM bootloader seems kind of nuts, given how utterly common ARM bootloaders are... Not even executing on the part of the chip with a known architecture certainly is a classy touch, though...
The problem you describe could simply be a case of severe failing-to-think-it-through. However, with patience and a decent feedback/compensation mechanism, it might be possible to simply sidestep the problem entirely.
Have you ever watched, in video or in person, a bunch of ants moving? The little klutzes can barely walk properly. They run around, stagger all over the place, trip, slide, attempt to climb structurally unsound objects, tumble over one another, etc. However, on average the aggregate ant mass keeps going in the right direction.
In the same vein, so long as it is capable of righting itself if(read when) it flips, and isn't required to follow a precise path, or hit any specific waypoints with any great accuracy, a tiny vessel could perfectly conceivably manage the correct average heading...
For extra credit: The only airflow sensors you get are strain gauges at the attachment points of the sail(s), so your power/control surface is also your sensor array... Modeling textile behavior in a fluid system,in real time, is totally within the capabilities of a weedy little ARM core, right?
I suspect that reverse engineering wouldn't be your problem(I can't remember if they've finished releasing all the board specs or not; but it isn't being treated as a zOMG super secret.); but obtaining and fabricating the parts at a price that wouldn't make a beagle-something, or even the guts of the fanciest Android device currently shipping a more sensible proposition...
I'm told that attempting to order cost-optimized SoCs from Broadcom in quantity 1 is even trickier and less fun than trying to solder several-hundred-contact BGA packages without specialist equipment...
Arduinos, by contrast, were through-hole DIPs for much of their life, with even the later or cheaper/smaller variants generally being mere surface mount, still with actual leads and everything.
Given that underwater gliders, usually with a fairly high degree of autonomy(if for no other reason than communicating underwater on teeny batteries is damn difficult), have been a thing in oceanography for some years, I imagine that team jackboots has either already had their panic attack, or is too dense to start now.
Incidentally, though: I'm actually surprised that they went with a boat design, rather than a glider design. Yes, submersion-proofing electronics isn't entirely trivial; but some of those gliders are crazy efficient, and have a convenient invulnerability to even the nastiest wind/waves/salt-spray forming a crust on stuff, by virtue of spending most of their life underwater...
Woldscum is blind in one eye from childhood, and should be able to perceive a 3D movie in 2d without incident. Anonymous Coward, responding to Woldscum has two functioning eyes and finds 3D movies unbearable. I was replying to Anonymous Coward.
BU seem me trollin', they hatin'.
WTF is Ayn Rand doing on Slashdot? She's been dead for two decades, and surely the pure beard-force of the freeloading intellectuals that the government paid to build the internet should be enough to keep her unquiet spirit away, no?
http://www.2d-glasses.com/
(Not joking).
While a good AI probably could introspect like that, your question is one(of a great many) that would be fairly vulnerable to being gamed by a much less interesting system because humans have such lousy memories...
Can I introspect about language? Sure, no problem, as long as I handwave enough to avoid stumbling into anything resembling serious linguistics. Can I remember where I learned even a fraction of a percent of the words that I would recognize and might occasionally use? Not a chance. Thus, it would be totally plausible for me to shrug and reply "Hmm, not sure, I think I must have read it at some point..." or "Oh, Mrs. Jones, 8th grade English, took vocabulary very seriously.
Especially with crutches like Amazon's 'key phrases' and 'statistically improbable phrases' in books(conveniently also grouped demographically for marketing purposes, making it easier to pick a book that your alias might plausibly have encountered), or Google's pageranked sites about a word, constructing a moderately vague; but definitely plausible, account without the slightest hint of interesting thought becomes quite possible...
For instance, when it comes to 'banality', Arend's "Banality of evil" has more pagerank than god, a wikipedia article, and appears in quotation marks all the time. "Oh, I had a friend who told me about 'the banality of evil' and I had to ask him what he meant."
I don't doubt that a superior athlete, such as the one you mention, could do better; but the power output figure provided really underscores how questionably qualified humans are for this sort of job.
Among the very lightest(manned) helicopters, are the 'ultralights' designed to be cheaper and more broadly accessible by falling below certain thresholds of size and performance that attract more FAA scrutiny. Outside of RC hobby circles, these are about the least powerful, most stripped down, helicopters you can buy. this one, for instance, sports a 45kW engine with an endurance time of ~60 minutes. Looking at the engine specs that's all in a 40kg package(not counting the 5 gallons of gas, which ostensibly provide slightly over an hour of flight time).
Humans do have a lot going for them: self-repairing, edible, refuel on commonly available materials, excellent natural language parsing; but even world-class athletes whose performance I will never have a hope of touching are just not very powerful compared to even quite modest engines.
Given the (by human standards) alarmingly high power draw, and therefore short duration, of the flight, endurance athletes like bicyclists might not be your best choice...
What I would be curious to know is whether muscle tissue is, fundamentally, up to the job(obviously it is for winged flight; but helicopters are trickier). If you dropped the requirement that a human be involved, and allowed the team to get out the scalpel and harvest whatever sorts of muscle tissue they preferred, from whatever species, and force-feed it some sort of oxygenated nutrient fluid, would there be one up to the task?
If managing a zerg rush doesn't take leadership skills, why are there Cerabrates and Overlords?
What I am honestly baffled about is why one would draw the connection between this forest-kindergarden stuff and 'leadership'...
Is playing outdoors and getting fresh air and exercise likely healthful and salubrious and whatnot? Sure. Is parental paranoia about sharp objects and fire ridiculously over the top? Sure. But 'leadership'? Where is the connection, especially with a 1-10 teacher-student ratio? At least on your basic 30-40 to 1 field trip, there are decent odds that you'll manage to get lost and have to improvise 'don't do anything stupid' until eventually collected...
It certainly isn't a virtue in either case; but I think that I'd actually be more comfortable with the computer science major who lacks a grasp of statistics. There are perfectly reputable areas of mathematics that fall under 'computer science' and don't involve statistics. In an empirical, largely study-based, subject like psychology, though, if you can't use statistics you are essentially stuck at the 'anecdote' stage of knowledge...
Isn't the use of statistics pretty much the only thing that distinguishes 'psychology' from 'talking about feelings'?
I realize that most psych majors don't actually go on to practice in psychology or psychiatry, and the ones that do generally have to do some flavor of graduate work; but I'm still rather alarmed by the implication of TFS that psych students might well be deeply uncomfortable with statistics...
It's probably going to get even worse now that so much of the new hotness is in functionally embedded systems that ship tied to hardware...
With software, the vendor essentially faces the choice of keeping it under wraps, or of having pre-release builds leaking all over the damn place. Maybe if it's just a handful of partner companies with some seriously mean NDAs; but once it gets to the journalist level you can forget about it(analogous to the Oscar screeners that get leaked every damn time, despite being subject to just about everything short of armed guard...)
Hardware, though, with the exception of the occasional unit that...um...goes missing in a bar, is easier to keep a tight grip on. Plus, very-late-prototype hardware, in limited quantities, is inevitably available to the vendor a modest period before retail hardware is available. That sort of thing is perfect for rewarding, or punishing, media outlets. Play ball, and you'll be seeing a sample unit in the mail in time to have your benchmarks and review done before the other guys get back from Best Buy. Don't, and you can read your competitor's reviews while you wait in line to buy something to review...
This sort of thing has gone on for years in the gaming-enthusiast-wanking sector of CPU, GPU, and motherboard reviews; but it hasn't really been all that relevant. Enthusiasts care a lot; but there just aren't a lot of enthusiasts, so it was mostly just sideshow, and the truth usually managed to surface by the time whatever the product was trickled down to the '80% of the speed, 20% of the price' market where people actually buy things.
Now that the 'mainstream' devices are tightly embedded hardware units, though, there will likely be a lot more room for the same sort of shenanigans that rule enthusiast hardware wank to worm their way into mainstream tech coverage.
But you CAN actually use an Apple product when they are showed to the press. An unfinished product could be miles away from the promess made so the surface reviews are a moot point
This is typically true, largely because Apple's style is typically one of ruthless secrecy until launch; but really orthogonal to TFA's point:
His problem was not that a prerelease product was being shown to the press; but that most of the coverage completely failed to mention how tight a leash it was on.
At what point in the development cycle one chooses to demo a product is a matter of strategy and taste. Only when already shipping? Fine. Pre-alpha, only the boys from the lab can even touch it? Fine. The problem being highlighted is that journalists were(understandably, given the pressure for ad impressions; but very arguably unethically) overstating the amount of information they were actually bringing to their readers. Regurgitating press releases makes you a flack; but it isn't inherently unethical. Re-labelling press releases as 'news' and then regurgitating them is another matter entirely...
Eh, I don't think that this can be dismissed as 'Microsoft hate'. Yeah, it involves a Microsoft product; but it treats that as a (recent, high profile, and thus salient) example of the phenomenon of absurdly stage-managed 'hands-on'/'reviews'/etc. involved in tech industry prerelease puffery, and the generally supine compliance of the 'journalists' who eagerly enable the hype machine out of some mixture of fanboyism and desperation for ad impressions.
It isn't the world's biggest secret that, even among ostensibly respectable journalists who write about Serious Topics for Serious Publications of Record, 'access', advertisers, and parent companies have pretty severely eroded the teeth of the vaunted '4th estate'; but it never hurts to remind people of that fact. Tech journalism seems to be substantially more dreadful still.
Again, this phenomenon isn't really MS specific; but (given that most of the 'hands on!!!' coverage has politely failed to note exactly how carefully the minders were keeping a leash on things) it is good to have somebody inform us of that fact.
Obviously, a prerelease product is going to have rough edges, which team PR isn't going to want people cutting themselves on in front of the cameras; but a problem arises when most of the coverage simply elides the fact that PR flacks were waving people away from those rough edges, rather than noting them and moving on...
Mobile corporate messaging par excellence. It's what made your name and it was world class. Since then you've just faffed about with every bandwagon going and totally missed your USP.
I suspect that this wouldn't really help very much. It might save them another Playbook fiasco; but RIM's problem isn't really that they've been sucking more at their core market; but that others have been sucking less at it.
The uptick in adequacy of email and messaging on handsets-that-aren't-blackberries has been pretty dramatic indeed(especially from the perspective of customers who couldn't afford/didn't want a BES; but even BES users have improved, though still inferior, alternatives). Even if, best case, the competition remains locked in a sort of asymptotic approach to RIM's offering, never quite as good, they still have a problem:
Apple's massive margins and charm on the consumer side give them plenty of time to make their management features less unpleasant, and plenty of push on IT departments to just-make-it-work.
Android lacks some of the glamour and much of the profit, but it certainly makes it a lot easier for any carrier to hack together a mostly-functional blackberry-esque handset from some razor-margin handset OEM without paying a tithe to RIM, which doesn't help them much in terms of ability to extract money from carriers for their proprietary network features.
Microsoft may or may not have exited the 'error' phase of their trial-and-error development process; but as long as they are entrenched on the customer's mailserver with buckets of cash, they can't be safely ignored.
AC may be referring to the firmware blobs without which newer AMD chips are good for little more than spartan 2d... That said, you really end up picking your poison with firmware. Some vendors include enough flash to store the blob, some demand that the kernel hand them the blob. There are exceptional cases, where the firmware is OSS, or where the vendor is a real asshole and forbids the blob to be distributed(for no obvious reason, since somebody always whips up a script that grabs the windows driver from the vendor site and gouges the firmware out of that.) In this unfortunate vein, it is probably worth noting that Intel is better about not making the firmware stuff visible, but AMD has historically been overwhelmingly nicer about coreboot vs. BIOS.