Lpc2000

Brett

> I am getting tired of toolset vendors who offer useful products, but
> then cripple them and make developers lives needlessly unpleasant by
> only offering their products only on MS Windows.

For new tools, I agree. Today it is very easy to write multiplatform code.
The company I work for uses Qt, and had no problem to port our PC based 
tools
  from Windows to Linux (porting meant: compiling it.)

Also the otherway round. Some non-GUI software we developed on Linux works 
w/o any problem on Windows, either with Cygwin or even compiled with MinGW 
(i.e. native win32).

Normaly my first questions to tool vendors is: Do you support Linux ?
And I repeat this question louder and louder each time I place it.

The problem is rather simple: No market-pressure no will.
(Only one I talked to said, they will _never_ support Linux, let's wait :-)

> interface that has remained stagnant more than 10 years. Both KDE or
> GNOME have offered a far more usable desktop, with basic features like
> multiple desktops and window layer control, for years.

I have this on Windows as well. KDE and GNOME e.g. are much to overloaded 
with
features so I kicked it from my Linux-Box and use icewm instead.

> Following the recent thread on dongles, It seems that some vendors are
> way more worried about copy-protection than building an excellent
> product that sells itself and that everyone will want to buy.

Don't forget, the embedded market is no mass-market. So ROI is very small 
if
you do not protect your software esp. because many (not you of course) tend
to take it as a kind of friendlyness to "lend" some software to a friend
or co-worker.

Just my 2cents
-- 
42Bastian Schick