Free Stuff
In the early days of the internet and even in those days preceeding the internet, you could find genuine public domain software that worked well and served a useful purpose.
While it is still possible to do that today, an increasingly growing number of desperate vendors offer free stuff that is not really free. The stuff is offered as free but it has some kind of angle. Either it is demoware, crippleware, nagware, adware, or just does not work well. Some might say ‘it is worth what you paid for it’.
Tonight, while browsing, I found a bunch of sites offering free website templates. Almost without exception, their free stuff was priced from under 10 dollars to over 100 dollars. To be entirely honest, they did have a few templates that were free, but they were also pretty simple. Some even cheesy.
Then there are the sites that tout free downloads. What a joke that is. Especially on a slow dialup connection. You pay for the connection and you are distracted for the time it takes the download to occur. So you also pay by not being able to do anything else while the download is going on.
Free is when they send you a CD and don’t charge for postage. I believe AOL was the last outfit to send me any free CDs.
However, all is not lost. There are still some worthwhile and free sources of useful software. Most Linux distributions are free or very low cost exept for the time you spend learning to use it.
Now that I think about it, there is a lot good free stuff still out there. Lots of it. Some of it is being used right now. Wordpress is free. Apache is being used by the server I am on and that software is free too.
Say, now there is something that is not only free but neat too. Right now, in the right sidebar, I see the flickr flash photo badge. Not flash photography but flash software showing photographs.
I guess I just want to complain because not everything is free. Comes from staying up too late.
I could also recommend the javascript kit folk. They have some very nice javascript programs and appelets. Have you noticed the tiny blue digital real time live clock at the top of the right hand column of the blog. The code that is doing that was made available by the javascriptkit folk.
I also found a code converter appelet they offered. This little widget converts typed in text to the dots and dashes of morse code. If you want to try it out go to my website and scroll down to the very end of the cw keys page. You will find the CW code converter there.