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The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?
). But it's very true that my use of for example Cinema4D is going to be far less intensive and financially lucrative for me than someone using it professionally. Again I would pay 1-$200 for it and be glad of it. I intend to post a thread about that soon (speed of commercial apps vs. free/OS, specifically in media editing). The point though is that the commercial product is *not* always superior! There is Kristal and Reaper as well for multi-track editing, both seem to do what they do very well, possibly as well as Adobe Audition/Sound Forge/etc. I think in certain market segments there are free/OS alternatives that are genuine competitors. This is not true in all areas, and it probably has something to do with how unusual the UI is, how readily copyable an existing product's UI/approach is, etc. I think good, original UI design is not the strength of free/OS software, in most cases. Cross-platform needs also play heavily into open source issues. The Gimp is as clunky as it is partly because Windows is not its native platform. 
There are a number of freeware paint apps that are much nicer though, like Photofiltre, Paint.NET, etc. I mean yes we can all agree there have been worse "tech products" - any genuine spyware qualifies admirably. But I think I get what they're aiming for here and given that I don't think the list is that bad. Sure it's a bit knee-jerk and based on "one side of the story", but I think there's a reason AOL and RealPlayer have the reputations that they do. They earned them. And the article goes into specific reasons why, which I think are pretty much all valid. They even acknowledge exactly what Jazper pointed out - IE's vulnerabilities are so well-known in part because of its popularity. Yes Real pioneered some good streaming video/audio tech. But the player was always awful and the fact that it was proprietary was part of its big problem. So even though the tech may have been great, it was tied to something that wasn't great, just like so many other company's products. Ultimately a mixed bag at best. Fortunately you don't need RealPlayer to play Real content these days. It looks/sounds extremely, extremely promising though. I really like the idea of it automatically prioritizing tasks and it seems to have a very good foundational concept in that it's trying to remove extraneous tasks from your list so you avoid task overload. "Paste and go" is one of them I did remember after posting (also available as an FF extension). I think the bottom line is that FF is great, I love the extensibility, but even assuming Opera and FF started on an equal footing (as far as memory use and speed, which they don't), it would still take far too many extensions for FF to equal the important functionality in Opera. And I don't even think all that functionality *is* available as extensions. Granted however that some functionality I might like is available for FF and not Opera, but that is by far the exception rather than the rule.