I'm not convinced that other magazines couldn't have provided an image of similar quality, your arguments are rather hand-wavy. The notion that only a person from the same field can have a valid opinion on this is frankly ridiculous. It's plainly ad hominem / argument from authority. I don't care to convince you that we should change the practice of using this picture, but I'm curious to know why you would think we should NOT change it, given that there happen to be people who believe that we should.
Find one. I've been through a fair amount of old periodicals from the 60s and 70s and I'm at a loss to think of something comparable. A copy of Vogue (est 1892) or W magazine (est. 1972) would probably have comparable images, but would probably not have been readily available at the time to the demographic doing this kind of research.
We should not change it for the reasons I made in several sibling comments: we lose a common point of comparison.
You can dilute it's relevance by providing many alternative reference images for many algorithms and popularized those alternative reference images. No one in the field is going to complain about having more common reference images, but they sure as heck are going to see you as "book burner" if you trying to eliminate the one common image without first providing alternatives. Merely stating there are other lossless images is not sufficient. You need to provide those same images after having been processed with every relevant algorithm someone might need to know.
How about you start off by doing this work for Bellard. Take the Mozilla set, run them through BGP and send the images to Bellard for inclusion on his website. Enrich us. Don't make us poorer.
> The notion that only a person from the same field can have a valid opinion on this is frankly ridiculous. It's plainly ad hominem / argument from authority.
The notion that someone uninvolved can have an opinion and expect others to shoulder the burden of conforming to that opinion is even more ridiculous.
