Note that the Torvalds article referenced is one year old (2 Oct 2008). The SSD space has, of course, changed a lot in the past year.

Well, it's sort of a moot question because we're moving towards drive-by-wire cars even if we keep the wheel and two pedals interface. Mechanical linkage between steering wheel and wheels will be gone in a decade or so.

Hey, Miguel, just to balance things out, how about you discuss a few Microsoft products/technologies/protocols that you think are utter crap, that you'd never touch with a 1000-foot pole, and that you think the Open Source community would be crazy create an open source implementation of.

In preparing your argument, you did cherry-pick your units a bit. For a counter example, explain to me how the ratio of yards in a mile is a useful, everyday ratio.

If the older systems consistently used ratios of 2, or 12, or 16, your argument would have some real merit. But the historical hodge-podge of ratios make comprehensive use of them very problematic.