Volkswagen owns Bugatti. Ford owned Aston Martin (but sold it in 2007). Fiat owns Ferrari. That makes your examples a bit unfortunate. Other than that, well spoken.

Bitmap pictures don't scale (well). Neither does video.

Problem is, many professors have no training as lecturers or teachers, and may not even have much talent for it. They may nevertheless be extremely good at what they do, and have extremely relevant and important things to say.

The course that most changed the way I think about stuff was by a prof who looked like he crawled straight out of some dusty archive, and he drone on in tedious monotone about it. The subject was just about the most boring imaginable as well. I had to struggle to stay awake for the first couple of lectures. Then I picked up on the substance of what he was saying, and it turned out it was some of the most insightful stuff I've ever come across, in any medium.

Conversely, there was another lecturer who was fascinating, funny, dazzling, and exciting, but never had anything to say that wasn't either trivial, wrong, or easily available in basic literature.

Is it fair to expect that professors are also great teachers? Personally, I don't think so. It would be a great bonus, but some profs just aren't cut out for it -- yet they may well be the ones with the deepest knowledge about their subject.

When they work.

Trouble is, they only work as intended some of the time, on some hardware configurations. Two-monitor setups are still a royal PITA much of time, or what should be trivial things like plugging in a projector to present something during a meeting.

Of course, this doesn't work perfectly all the time on Windows or OS X either -- but problems are a good deal less frequent.

RAW files aren't the only, or even the most important problem. The problem is colorspace conversions across programs. Can you do that under Linux with a reasonable effort? Honest question, 'cuz I don't know.

Good for you. Nevertheless, it's probably not good enough for anyone who needs to do color-critical photographic work, which means everybody doing anything for serious print media. Lightweight Web work is a different matter, of course; you don't even need GIMP for that.

Does the entire imaging chain from RAW in the camera to the final layout sent to the printer handle profiling transparently?

I.e., suppose I want to convert my RAW file to the ProPhoto colorspace and work in 16-bit in that when processing the pictures, then flatten them to Adobe RGB for page layout, then convert the RGB to CMYK for printing, to the device profile supplied by the print shop. Can this be done in a Linux environment? Can it be done without much muss or fuss?

Last I checked, it wasn't even close, but yeah, that was a while ago.

Oh, absolutely Linux wouldn't exist if it wasn't FOSS. Hell, I'd say it wouldn't exist if it wasn't free as in speech. There's a reason Linux is Linux and OpenBSD is OpenBSD, and a lot of the reason has to do with the licensing. That model has worked brilliantly for it.

But from that to claiming that that particular model is the only morally acceptable way to make software is a leap I'm not ready to make.

In my world, the software stands or falls on its own merits. There's plenty of truly excellent FOSS out there, and as I said in a neighboring message, I use some of it daily. There are also areas where the FOSS world has failed to produce anything beyond clunky second-rate knock-offs of proprietary software. And there are areas where proprietary software has built on and then surpassed the FOSS software it's riffing off.

Specifics?

Some of my favorite FOSS stuff -- things I'd pick over the commercial alternatives any day of the week, purely on their own merits: The Linux kernel and GNU command-line utilities. PostgreSQL. The Dojo toolkit. Firefox. Thunderbird. Eclipse. CUPS. Apache (web server, many of their other projects suck). Various Debian package managers. VirtualBox.

Some cheap and clunky and altogether second-rate things that attempt to duplicate functionality of commercial software that does the job much better, that I (hate to but nevertheless) use, for any of a number of reasons: GIMP. OpenOffice (especially the Word and Excel clones -- and good grief, it oughtn't be that hard to do better than *Word,* of all things!) GNOME/KDE/any other Linux desktop. Various RAW conversion utilities.

Some commercial software that does stuff better than the FOSS stuff they're riffing off or building on: Jira. Confluence. Mac OS X.

Some areas where the FOSS world has consistently failed to deliver, despite years and years of effort and constant promise, and the fact that the problems appear ideally suited to being solved the FOSS way:

Content management systems. There are a gazillion FOSS ones out there, and all of them suck in some significant way -- either they're a big ol' mess of vaguely connected utilities (Drupal), they make very big assumptions about how you want your site to work (Joomla), or they're half-finished while incorporating several internally competing ways of doing things (Lenya and its plethora of editors, none of which really work very well.)

Anything related to proper graphic design tasks. This requires a full chain of utilities from the RAW file in the camera to the finished file to be sent to the printer (or put up on the web). Most of the chain just isn't there: no system-wide color management, no RAW conversion software with accurate, consistent profiles for a wide range of cameras, no genuinely functional (and color managed) page layout software.

I could go on, but you get my drift. I don't care for ideological arguments. If FOSS is a genuinely and universally better way to make software, it would have incontrovertibly proved it by now. If it was genuinely and incontrovertibly unworkable, it would have failed by now. Instead, it's done neither -- it works brilliantly for some things, fails miserably in other things, and muddles along for lots of others. Just like any other way of making software.

Whew. I feel better now.

I'm also free to use free software even if I don't share the ideology that produced them, you know. Or do you want to stop anyone from using Linux if they're not ideologically pure? If so, perhaps there is something to the "free software is Communism" argument after all...

FWIW, I use FOSS software in work and play daily, and have even contributed a few very minor things. I wasn't even taking issue with the ethical argument for free software -- only pointing out that it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card that works against any and all criticisms leveled at FOSS, or the ways it's being produced.

Let's see:

Mr Microsoft Man: "Eyeballs alone won't make a kernel secure."
Mr FOSS Man: "Writing unfree software is immoral!"

Let me try this on for a couple of other common criticisms of some FOSS projects:

Mr Web Man: "Safari is way faster than Firefox on OS X and uses less resources."
Mr FOSS Man: "Writing unfree software is immoral!"

Mr Netbook Man: "The Gnome desktop is still kinda clunky, even after all these years."
Mr FOSS Man: "Writing unfree software is immoral!"

Mr Graphic Designer Man: "Linux still doesn't do proper color management."
Mr FOSS Man: "Writing unfree software is immoral!"

Mr Gamer Man: "There aren't any decent games for Linux."
Mr FOSS Man: "Writing unfree software is immoral!"

Who's derailing the conversation here, again?

Actually, Google reads my mail, handles my appointments, hosts my blog, and even has a few ads on my site. The upshot is that transitioning all that away from Google would be somewhat more annoying than transitioning from one OS to another. From where I'm at, that amounts to a quite a bit of lock-in. Google's position on the search market is as dominant as Microsoft's on the OS market, at least. IOW, while I have my doubts about TFA, and I don't think enforcing "search neutrality" through regulation is the answer, this isn't something we should just pooh-pooh away either. The markets only do their magic under specific conditions, and I'm not sure the conditions apply here.

Not an important one, though. This has been investigated experimentally, by constructing (rather elaborate) bikes that have nearly no gyroscopic effects. They're barely any harder to ride than regular bikes. OTOH it's a good deal more difficult to balance a regular bike on exercise rollers, where the gyro effects are unchanged but the ground reaction forces are much reduced. (Ref: Effective Cycling by John Forester for the former, personal experience for the latter.)

I guess you're right if "not updated since 2003" counts as "doing fine." Don't get me wrong, Nethack was a great game around the turn of the millennium, but gaming has come a long way since then, with NH largely left where it was.

And no, I don't mean Oblivion.