There's a fair amount of software that I'd like to buy, but every single product has a ridiculously high price tag. First on my list is Adobe Photoshop CS2. Retail price tag: $599. I have Photoshop 5.5 (a truly ancient beast), and I don't think the upgrade (only $149) supports versions that old. My dad could buy it at the academic price (since he's a professor), but the license is listed as "basic"; what exactly does that mean?

Next up is SlickEdit: retail price of $284. There's no doubt this is a great editor (although a tad on the bloated side, one might say), but the price used to be $99! What's up with that? I'm not sure any programming editor (regardless of how great it is) is worth three Benjamin's.

Finally, there's Dreamweaver 8. The upgrade edition (which is the route I would take) is $199. Two hundred dollars for an upgrade? Proof positive that Adobe does in fact own Macromedia.

All of the aforementioned products are great, but are they hundreds of dollars great? That's an incredible hard call to make. It's going to take a lot of thought before I drop that much money on something that consists of nothing but 1's and 0's.

According to the story over at Slashdot, it appears that the Opera web browser is now available for free. This should be an interesting thing to watch over the coming weeks. Will large numbers of Firefox users switch to Opera? I know that I certainly won't, but a number of Slashdot comments already indicate that at least some portion of the Firefox community is (and will be) making the switch. I don't see anything in Opera that immediately jumps out and says, "You should try me now!" Is there something I'm missing? Or is Firefox still the best little browser in the world?