As far as I can tell, the problem is with TV and radio endlessly repeating inflammatory footage and soundbite-hungry talking heads. Television and radio are passive media designed to keep you in an almost trance-like state to stay tuned in.
That has nothing to do with hypermedia. The term "hypermedia" refers to media with links between documents. If anything, hypermedia are a little bit of an antidote to media hysteria because there is a much better chance that going to another information source via a hyperlink will provide you with more accurate information.
Vmware costs about as much as a low-end PC. You still need a Windows license. You still have the hassle of dealing with Windows installation and Windows administration. You still have all the privacy and virus problems that come with Windows. And vmware has quite a bit of overhead.
Shared memory in X11 is great and widely used. You are not going to do any better with any other protected mode software API. Windows GDI is actually considerably worse.
TV cards have special hardware to stuff bits from the frame grabber directly into the frame buffer without any software intervention. To arrange for that to happen, applications need special APIs to lock and manipulate frame buffer memory, and those happen to be implemented in DGA. That has nothing to do with whether DGA is good or bad for normal graphics operations.
The whole X window system was designed from the get go with the idea of having a dumb terminal at the user end.
X11 was designed from the start to allow implementations on both thin clients and workstations, a goal that it achieved admirably. The X11 designers, developers, and users were, from the start, primarily workstation users. Project Athena, one of the main users of early X11 implementations, was a big network of workstations, not thin clients. And the people who designed X11 knew what they were doing, given that they had several years of experience with X10.
The X protocol is designed for, and works just fine with, high latency links. The problem is with applications and toolkits that add unnecessary synchronization points by asking for lots of server information repeatedly, by asking for events at the wrong time and with the wrong APIs, etc. (some "modern" toolkits are particular offenders). But LBX also provides partial workaround for that by caching a lot of information.
tiny? not by a long shot
on
Tiny Apps
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· Score: 2
Look at the sizes of those distributions: those don't look like "tiny" applications to me. Compare that to what you get with Linux:/usr/bin/mail is 70k, mutt is 500k, trn is 223k, and links is 600k (with some dynamically linked libraries). A statically linked "Hello World" executable for X11 using the FLTK toolkit under Linux comes in at about 50k.
BSD UNIX for PDP-11 managed to pack a lot of functionality into 64k of data space and 64k of instruction space (with overlays available on some machines, but often statically linked).
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what makes many programs are so much bigger these days. There are reasons, some good, some bad.
For under $250, you can get a 20G FireWire powered drive (no battery/charger necessary) from one of the name brand Apple add-on manufacturers. Check your local computer store.
The current PowerBooks (iBook, G4) look pretty nice and quite competitive with Intel-based laptops. But the sheer variety of Intel-based laptops seems to put the PowerBooks to shame. You can get tiny Sony laptops with cameras or FireWire, you can get really powerful IBM laptops with trackpoint and 1600x1200 screens, or you can get sub-$1000 Toshibas with DVD and 3D graphics chips. With PowerBooks, you get a choice of two form factors and exactly one pointing device, take it or leave it. Tough luck if you can't stand the pointing device or if the form factor is too big.
Laptops, much more so than desktops, seem a place where Apple should invite third party hardware. Just imagine what Sony could do in terms of portable hardware.
It would be easy to argue on the (lack of) merits of each of your points, but the simple fact is that, to most people, the choice between open source and proprietary software does not involve any money: they get both the proprietary and the free stuff without paying any additional money.
So, many of the current open source users must be using open source software because of its attributes.
From that, one can't conclude where open source software's advantages are, only that in total, many people prefer it to the proprietary stuff, all things being equal. Personally, I can say that on almost every point you list, I consider the mainstream Microsoft stuff greatly inferior to its open source equivalent.
The fault with Microsoft and its proponents is not that they produce the stuff they do, but that they think that everybody else must be just like them. Grow up and learn to understand that what you may consider "usable and beautiful", I may consider "awkward and ugly", and neither of us is wrong in any objective sense.
I think the point that is being made is that a small company is not necessarily in a position to hire additional employees or retask existing employees to fix or enhance an open source project. Not all costs are monetary. Things like time, resources, etc can often exceed the percieved monetary savings.
Both open source and proprietary software have bugs. The questions are: how much time does it take to get them fixed, how many resources is it going to take, and will we miss our release date because of it?
If you have ever tried to get a company like Microsoft, Sun, or Oracle to acknowledge a bug, fix a bug, or enhance their product in some minor way, you'll know that this eats up lots of time. And your programmers will have to try to come up with workarounds for the bug, often with very little information to go on.
Fixing or enhancing open source software is usually a breeze, if the fix is reasonable, it makes it into a new release quickly, and you can usually easily come up with simple workarounds for your problem if you have the source (replace a buggy library function with a statically linked fixed version, etc.).
There are by comparison few/no people working on documentation, usability, design, interface, etc.
Where there is a market demand, it will be met. In the case of documentation for open source software, documentation is written and distributed by companies like O'Reilly.
As for "usability, design, and interface", that's a matter of debate and preference. To the degree that UI designers and researchers know what they are doing at all (and much of their methodology is questionable), they are usually designing products that appeal to a "naive" (in the technical sense) mass market. Sorry, I'm not part of that market.
If I wanted to use what these professionals come up with, I'd be using it--God knows, the stuff is shipped with every PC and Mac whether you want it or not.
but there is a non-commerical license called the "Qt Academic License,"
Reminds me of "Hey, the first one is on me, buddy." Seriously, working in the commercial world, these academic licenses are really tiring: companies get students hooked on some piece of software in the hope that they will then enter the workforce and demand that their employers buy their overpriced commercial software, even when good open source alternatives are available. I hope more and more employers will refuse to fall into this trap: someone who has experience with a costly commercial package where a free alternative is available simply lacks the relevant experience for the job and needs to be retrained.
Matlab is a huge offender in the engineering world (almost free for students, thousands of dollars in the real world). Qt doesn't seem much different.
My message to universities (as well as open source developers): if you want a cross-platform C++ toolkit, use wxWindows or FLTK; they are good enough. And if you think it needs improvements, make those improvements student projects and contribute them.
Sure, there have been lots of bugs in libraries on Linux, quite similar to the bugs on Windows: buffer overruns, incompatible API changes, race conditions, memory leaks, and all that.
There is a big difference, though: on Linux, you get the source. That means that, unlike Windows, you never get stuck on a project. With the source, you can usually code a workaround, recompile the library and link statically, or fix the bug. You aren't dependent on anyone's release cycle and you don't have to pay for the privilege of having a bug fixed that you yourself reported. Microsoft has actually attempted to help out developers in similar ways with partial source releases, but it just doesn't work out the same way in practice.
What that all amounts to in practice is that Windows does end up being a lot more expensive to buy, a lot more expensive to maintain, and a lot less reliable in practice than open source systems. And the fact that Windows is a kitchen sink of functionality, with much more interdependency than other systems, only compounds the problem.
Soon after we got CD-R, we got mini CD-R, small disks that can be read and written in most normal CD-R drives. I would expect the same to happen with DVD-R and DVD-RW. That would probably give you similar storage capacities to DataPlay in a similar format.
The review doesn't say whether the Belkin KVM (which otherwise seems really nice) takes USB mice and keyboards for input (it does generate USB mice and keyboard outputs). Does anybody know?
Now go stick your head back in the sand or book that one way trip to Germany and leave the rest of us alone.
Germany today has a constitution, legal system, and political system that was carefully crafted to protect the human rights and freedoms of the individual and to protect the people from government tyranny. This is thanks in part to the US. Unfortunately, domestically, the US system of government falls far short of that. That's perhaps not surprising, given that the US Constitution was crafted hundreds of years ago, without benefit of knowledge of 20th century technology and totalitarianism. And failure of the US system of government to protect individual rights and free speech isn't theoretical, the US system has had spectacular failures in McCarthyism, slavery, racism, antisemitism, and dealings with American Indians, to name just a few.
You're not going to find many places in Europe that are sympathetic to Osama bin Laden either.
Advising restraint, asking for publication of envidence, and exploring negotiation is not the same as sympathy for terrorism. Europeans strongly condemn the attacks on the WTC, but that doesn't mean that they generally believe the current course of action by the US is right or effective.
In fact, it is the US again that is today making deals with terrorists and repressive regimes (Pakistan, China, etc.) in order to satisfy domestic political pressures--to give the masses the revenge they are asking for. As long as US foreign policy consists of one opportunistic deal with terrorists and dictators after another, often motivated by simple economic interests, the US will continue to face huge foreign policy problems. If the US actually started promoting self-determination and democracy across the world, the problem of terrorism would disappear by itself.
In different words, the one who's sticking his head in the sand is you. Get your head out of the sand, open your eyes, go travel around the world, and learn about its people and their problems, as well as both the good and the bad aspects of American life.
What people like this guy miss is that the MS Windows applications are not uniformly better. Word makes one set of tradeoffs, TeX/ispell/Emacs makes another set of tradeoffs. MS Word is easy to learn and that's why lots of people like it; but for advanced users, it gets in the way more than TeX and similar tools in my experience (I have used both).
Many people in the US like to be able to do things without spending a lot of time learning stuff. Microsoft caters to that market. However, the market for the real UNIX/Linux desktop tools is large enough that it won't go away.
One size doesn't fit all, not when it comes to cars, clothes, or operating systems.
Apple also has copied pretty liberally. For example, features like smooth shadows, transparency, attached dialog boxes, 3D buttons and widgets, and icon scaling on mouse-over have existed in other systems.
I think X11 window managers should provide smooth shadows, some transparency, and attached dialog boxes, because they can make UIs genuinely easier to use. But that isn't "ripping off Apple", it is using well-known UI techniques. The liberal use of gumdrops and color in Aqua, OTOH, are actually not such a good idea and it is best not to duplicate them.
Treating computer "viruses" and "hacking" as "weapons of mass destruction" is absurd. The destructive power of computer viruses is a myth. In reality, critical systems are usually embedded and well-protected. The Windows desktop computers and web sites that are compromised by the millions by viruses and hackers are generally easily restored. If particular systems are critical, their owners could protect them with little more effort than that required to have a lock on their front door, something any reasonable person would do.
This is just a long range in a long series of poor judgements in public policy. Horrible as the WTC attacks were, most people are not at risk from those kinds of attacks. Anthrax is not a pleasant disease, but it is common in many countries and easily treatable in most cases. The hysterical reaction to terrorism and resulting policies in the US is causes more damage than the terrorism itself.
Re:Qt/embedded is already the best choice
on
Palm OS Spinoff
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· Score: 2
Personally I'd be very happy to see embedded Linux not making the same usability mistakes that desktop Linux has in the past, and which it is only now recovering from. Lots of toolkits == inconsistent interface == usability problems. Diversity is great, but there are places where it is inappropriate,
Linux has been a booming success with X11 as its graphics system and its wide variety of available GUIs. Anybody who wants any more consistency under X11 than they get with the standard conventions only has to restrain their urge to install packages whose GUI they don't like. All this talk about "inconsistency" and "usability" is just that: empty talk from people with an agenda to push, or people who value looks over functionality.
If you have political problems with Qt, then say. You certainly seem to be short on valid technical problems.
I would have a "political problem" with Qt/Embedded if I thought there was a chance that it might succeed and in the process do damage to Linux on handhelds. But I simply think Qt/Embedded is doomed (although we may see some Qt/X11 applications on handhelds still). The only thing that is marginally regrettable is that some people in the open source community waste effort on it, but if they don't get the issues,
maybe they wouldn't help on other projects anyway.
"It's high time the security community stopped providing the blueprints for building these weapons," Culp writes in the essay.
Basically, by referring to demonstrations of security holes as "blueprints [...] for building weapons", Culp is plugging into the current hysteria and war atmosphere to try to achieve their goal. What is their goal? To cover up that it is Microsoft that fails to use proper development practices to avoid common security holes and that it is Microsoft that is responsible for shipping products that does not meet even minimal security standards.
If you do want to use the language of war, Microsoft is like a very powerful weapons manufacturer that sells weapons to the US military that do not function properly, that they know do not function properly, and that allow the enemy to break in and disable them using trivial, well-known methods. I would say it is every American's patriotic duty to make sure that the shortcomings in the products of such a manufacturer are exposed widely so that both the political and the legal system can curb their abuses and keep them from putting American property and lives at risk in the future.
You see, the key issue is that we know well how to avoid the kinds of security holes that keep appearing in Microsoft software. Microsoft is simply trying to save money by cutting corners on development practices and trying to kill competitors by rushing immature products to market prematurely. That is what Microsoft should be held responsible for, both financially and possibly criminally.
If Microsoft (and other large software companies) were held responsible for bugs in their software, you can bet that the "software crisis" would end soon, as software developers would finally find it more lucrative to invest in proper training, tools, and testing rather than to just grind out flaky code with the equivalent of unskilled labor.
If the "secure" part of "secure digital" is implemented correctly, you should be able to use even "secure" content with open source operating systems, as all the encryption and decryption would be carried out by hardware devices and the software would just shuffle bitstreams between them.
Of course, if the "secure" part relies on keys that get embedded in software somewhere, then that needs to be kept secret. But, then, someone will reverse engineer it pretty soon anyway.
(handhelds.org and PocketLinux distributions for the iPaq)
Great distribution. But the installation goes through a serial port boot loader and it takes a lot of manual intervention and patience. One can only hope that Compaq will either start shipping iPaq's with Linux or that there will be at least a "one click" installation from CompactFlash.
Re:KDE/Qt Embedded won't fly on Linux handhelds
on
Palm OS Spinoff
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· Score: 5, Informative
1) When was the last time your manager needed X11 remote display capabilities?
Remote display is extremely useful for developing software for the handheld and for debugging it. Also, a 200MHz handheld is a powerful machine--with X11, you can use it like a desktop and with desktop applications running on it when you connect it to a network.
2) Why the need for different toolkits?
Because there are already lots of handheld applications written for toolkits other than Qt. Face it, the world isn't going to switch its vertical application development to Qt just because some people think it would be nice.
On a PDA, a single, integrated, interface is the way to go.
If you think "consumer market", perhaps. But Linux PDAs are for vertical apps, and the cost and success of vertical apps is driven by ease of development and porting among platforms, not by some nebulous notions of appearance. Multiple toolkits are a reality in that market.
Linux programmers need to start programming apps for 320x240 displays, and QT/Embedded sounds like a good place to start.
FLTK and Java are already much more widely used than Qt/Embedded, and they don't cost anything.
Slashdot Mirror
That has nothing to do with hypermedia. The term "hypermedia" refers to media with links between documents. If anything, hypermedia are a little bit of an antidote to media hysteria because there is a much better chance that going to another information source via a hyperlink will provide you with more accurate information.
Vmware costs about as much as a low-end PC. You still need a Windows license. You still have the hassle of dealing with Windows installation and Windows administration. You still have all the privacy and virus problems that come with Windows. And vmware has quite a bit of overhead.
TV cards have special hardware to stuff bits from the frame grabber directly into the frame buffer without any software intervention. To arrange for that to happen, applications need special APIs to lock and manipulate frame buffer memory, and those happen to be implemented in DGA. That has nothing to do with whether DGA is good or bad for normal graphics operations.
X11 was designed from the start to allow implementations on both thin clients and workstations, a goal that it achieved admirably. The X11 designers, developers, and users were, from the start, primarily workstation users. Project Athena, one of the main users of early X11 implementations, was a big network of workstations, not thin clients. And the people who designed X11 knew what they were doing, given that they had several years of experience with X10.
The X protocol is designed for, and works just fine with, high latency links. The problem is with applications and toolkits that add unnecessary synchronization points by asking for lots of server information repeatedly, by asking for events at the wrong time and with the wrong APIs, etc. (some "modern" toolkits are particular offenders). But LBX also provides partial workaround for that by caching a lot of information.
BSD UNIX for PDP-11 managed to pack a lot of functionality into 64k of data space and 64k of instruction space (with overlays available on some machines, but often statically linked).
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what makes many programs are so much bigger these days. There are reasons, some good, some bad.
For under $250, you can get a 20G FireWire powered drive (no battery/charger necessary) from one of the name brand Apple add-on manufacturers. Check your local computer store.
Too big to carry in your pocket, too small to use as a tablet? I don't think so.
Laptops, much more so than desktops, seem a place where Apple should invite third party hardware. Just imagine what Sony could do in terms of portable hardware.
From that, one can't conclude where open source software's advantages are, only that in total, many people prefer it to the proprietary stuff, all things being equal. Personally, I can say that on almost every point you list, I consider the mainstream Microsoft stuff greatly inferior to its open source equivalent.
The fault with Microsoft and its proponents is not that they produce the stuff they do, but that they think that everybody else must be just like them. Grow up and learn to understand that what you may consider "usable and beautiful", I may consider "awkward and ugly", and neither of us is wrong in any objective sense.
Both open source and proprietary software have bugs. The questions are: how much time does it take to get them fixed, how many resources is it going to take, and will we miss our release date because of it?
If you have ever tried to get a company like Microsoft, Sun, or Oracle to acknowledge a bug, fix a bug, or enhance their product in some minor way, you'll know that this eats up lots of time. And your programmers will have to try to come up with workarounds for the bug, often with very little information to go on.
Fixing or enhancing open source software is usually a breeze, if the fix is reasonable, it makes it into a new release quickly, and you can usually easily come up with simple workarounds for your problem if you have the source (replace a buggy library function with a statically linked fixed version, etc.).
Where there is a market demand, it will be met. In the case of documentation for open source software, documentation is written and distributed by companies like O'Reilly.
As for "usability, design, and interface", that's a matter of debate and preference. To the degree that UI designers and researchers know what they are doing at all (and much of their methodology is questionable), they are usually designing products that appeal to a "naive" (in the technical sense) mass market. Sorry, I'm not part of that market. If I wanted to use what these professionals come up with, I'd be using it--God knows, the stuff is shipped with every PC and Mac whether you want it or not.
Reminds me of "Hey, the first one is on me, buddy." Seriously, working in the commercial world, these academic licenses are really tiring: companies get students hooked on some piece of software in the hope that they will then enter the workforce and demand that their employers buy their overpriced commercial software, even when good open source alternatives are available. I hope more and more employers will refuse to fall into this trap: someone who has experience with a costly commercial package where a free alternative is available simply lacks the relevant experience for the job and needs to be retrained.
Matlab is a huge offender in the engineering world (almost free for students, thousands of dollars in the real world). Qt doesn't seem much different.
My message to universities (as well as open source developers): if you want a cross-platform C++ toolkit, use wxWindows or FLTK; they are good enough. And if you think it needs improvements, make those improvements student projects and contribute them.
There is a big difference, though: on Linux, you get the source. That means that, unlike Windows, you never get stuck on a project. With the source, you can usually code a workaround, recompile the library and link statically, or fix the bug. You aren't dependent on anyone's release cycle and you don't have to pay for the privilege of having a bug fixed that you yourself reported. Microsoft has actually attempted to help out developers in similar ways with partial source releases, but it just doesn't work out the same way in practice.
What that all amounts to in practice is that Windows does end up being a lot more expensive to buy, a lot more expensive to maintain, and a lot less reliable in practice than open source systems. And the fact that Windows is a kitchen sink of functionality, with much more interdependency than other systems, only compounds the problem.
Soon after we got CD-R, we got mini CD-R, small disks that can be read and written in most normal CD-R drives. I would expect the same to happen with DVD-R and DVD-RW. That would probably give you similar storage capacities to DataPlay in a similar format.
The review doesn't say whether the Belkin KVM (which otherwise seems really nice) takes USB mice and keyboards for input (it does generate USB mice and keyboard outputs). Does anybody know?
Germany today has a constitution, legal system, and political system that was carefully crafted to protect the human rights and freedoms of the individual and to protect the people from government tyranny. This is thanks in part to the US. Unfortunately, domestically, the US system of government falls far short of that. That's perhaps not surprising, given that the US Constitution was crafted hundreds of years ago, without benefit of knowledge of 20th century technology and totalitarianism. And failure of the US system of government to protect individual rights and free speech isn't theoretical, the US system has had spectacular failures in McCarthyism, slavery, racism, antisemitism, and dealings with American Indians, to name just a few.
You're not going to find many places in Europe that are sympathetic to Osama bin Laden either.
Advising restraint, asking for publication of envidence, and exploring negotiation is not the same as sympathy for terrorism. Europeans strongly condemn the attacks on the WTC, but that doesn't mean that they generally believe the current course of action by the US is right or effective.
In fact, it is the US again that is today making deals with terrorists and repressive regimes (Pakistan, China, etc.) in order to satisfy domestic political pressures--to give the masses the revenge they are asking for. As long as US foreign policy consists of one opportunistic deal with terrorists and dictators after another, often motivated by simple economic interests, the US will continue to face huge foreign policy problems. If the US actually started promoting self-determination and democracy across the world, the problem of terrorism would disappear by itself.
In different words, the one who's sticking his head in the sand is you. Get your head out of the sand, open your eyes, go travel around the world, and learn about its people and their problems, as well as both the good and the bad aspects of American life.
Many people in the US like to be able to do things without spending a lot of time learning stuff. Microsoft caters to that market. However, the market for the real UNIX/Linux desktop tools is large enough that it won't go away.
One size doesn't fit all, not when it comes to cars, clothes, or operating systems.
I think X11 window managers should provide smooth shadows, some transparency, and attached dialog boxes, because they can make UIs genuinely easier to use. But that isn't "ripping off Apple", it is using well-known UI techniques. The liberal use of gumdrops and color in Aqua, OTOH, are actually not such a good idea and it is best not to duplicate them.
This is just a long range in a long series of poor judgements in public policy. Horrible as the WTC attacks were, most people are not at risk from those kinds of attacks. Anthrax is not a pleasant disease, but it is common in many countries and easily treatable in most cases. The hysterical reaction to terrorism and resulting policies in the US is causes more damage than the terrorism itself.
Linux has been a booming success with X11 as its graphics system and its wide variety of available GUIs. Anybody who wants any more consistency under X11 than they get with the standard conventions only has to restrain their urge to install packages whose GUI they don't like. All this talk about "inconsistency" and "usability" is just that: empty talk from people with an agenda to push, or people who value looks over functionality.
If you have political problems with Qt, then say. You certainly seem to be short on valid technical problems.
I would have a "political problem" with Qt/Embedded if I thought there was a chance that it might succeed and in the process do damage to Linux on handhelds. But I simply think Qt/Embedded is doomed (although we may see some Qt/X11 applications on handhelds still). The only thing that is marginally regrettable is that some people in the open source community waste effort on it, but if they don't get the issues, maybe they wouldn't help on other projects anyway.
Basically, by referring to demonstrations of security holes as "blueprints [...] for building weapons", Culp is plugging into the current hysteria and war atmosphere to try to achieve their goal. What is their goal? To cover up that it is Microsoft that fails to use proper development practices to avoid common security holes and that it is Microsoft that is responsible for shipping products that does not meet even minimal security standards.
If you do want to use the language of war, Microsoft is like a very powerful weapons manufacturer that sells weapons to the US military that do not function properly, that they know do not function properly, and that allow the enemy to break in and disable them using trivial, well-known methods. I would say it is every American's patriotic duty to make sure that the shortcomings in the products of such a manufacturer are exposed widely so that both the political and the legal system can curb their abuses and keep them from putting American property and lives at risk in the future.
You see, the key issue is that we know well how to avoid the kinds of security holes that keep appearing in Microsoft software. Microsoft is simply trying to save money by cutting corners on development practices and trying to kill competitors by rushing immature products to market prematurely. That is what Microsoft should be held responsible for, both financially and possibly criminally.
If Microsoft (and other large software companies) were held responsible for bugs in their software, you can bet that the "software crisis" would end soon, as software developers would finally find it more lucrative to invest in proper training, tools, and testing rather than to just grind out flaky code with the equivalent of unskilled labor.
Of course, if the "secure" part relies on keys that get embedded in software somewhere, then that needs to be kept secret. But, then, someone will reverse engineer it pretty soon anyway.
Great distribution. But the installation goes through a serial port boot loader and it takes a lot of manual intervention and patience. One can only hope that Compaq will either start shipping iPaq's with Linux or that there will be at least a "one click" installation from CompactFlash.
Remote display is extremely useful for developing software for the handheld and for debugging it. Also, a 200MHz handheld is a powerful machine--with X11, you can use it like a desktop and with desktop applications running on it when you connect it to a network.
2) Why the need for different toolkits?
Because there are already lots of handheld applications written for toolkits other than Qt. Face it, the world isn't going to switch its vertical application development to Qt just because some people think it would be nice.
On a PDA, a single, integrated, interface is the way to go.
If you think "consumer market", perhaps. But Linux PDAs are for vertical apps, and the cost and success of vertical apps is driven by ease of development and porting among platforms, not by some nebulous notions of appearance. Multiple toolkits are a reality in that market.
Linux programmers need to start programming apps for 320x240 displays, and QT/Embedded sounds like a good place to start.
FLTK and Java are already much more widely used than Qt/Embedded, and they don't cost anything.