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de facto free
Tuesday, October 30 2001
Stock prices go up and down like the pistons of an engine. You can use that motion to drive your wealth upward or downward, depending on your wisdom and luck when you buy and when you sell. When I heard of people, some of whom are well known to me, engaging in panic selling in mid-September, I was dismayed at their foolishness. I knew the dip in stocks was a irrational one and that stock prices would soon return to their September 10th level (they did). Generally speaking, my technique has been to buy soon after some sort of bad news is announced, when stock prices take a psychologically-based dive. I then sell when they inevitably rebound. If I make more than 20 dollars in the difference, I come out ahead. With $5000 to play with, I'm about a 100 dollars up since beginning my stock experiments somewhat over a month ago. Soon after I started out, however, I was briefly $200 in the hole.
In other news, I've been experimenting with using Morpheus as a peer-to-peer information liberator, since it seems to cater more to the English-speaking world and less to the Japanese-speaking world than WinMX. I'm not necessarily saying that this happened to me, but there's nothing quite as frustrating as spending all day downloading a Windows XP installation only to find it's the Japanese version. By the way, despite dire warnings from Microsoft and other software vendors cautioning about pirated software available in this way, I've found only one virus in all of the executables and zip files I've obtained using these systems.
It's crossed my mind in the course of my experiments that non-freeware software development can't have much of a future, unless it is heavily subsidized by the corporate market. Will the fact that Adobe Photoshop is now de facto free for most consumers drive up the price for the few left who actually have to pay for it? Isn't it funny how the court-sanctioned suppression of Napster directly resulted in the proliferation of alternatives designed to share files of any type? If that's not evidence of the Sorcerer's Apprentice Effect, I don't know what is. Hold on, I do: the metastasizing terrorist networks of Afghanistan that will be raising hell around the world for years to come.
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