[rescue] ECC [was: Re: WOT: Ebay changes to IBM from Sun

[Mike F]

>    There are a bunch of them.  Some are even better than (though not as
> easy to use as) AutoCAD.  But .DWG files are a necessity, and people in
> "non-cutting-edge" businesses tend to shy away from anything that isn't
> expensive.
>
>    It's amusing...buy cheap shit hardware (and deal with the failures)
> because they want to save every dime, but then blow tons of money on
> bad commercial software (though I wouldn't lump AutoCAD in with this)
> when there are free alternatives that are superior in every way.

AutoCAD (the extremely extensible 2D drawing package) is decent software,
despite being Windows-only. It has many nice features that have been added
over the years, yet I can still use it almost exactly the same way I learned
to use it 10 years ago. However, I spend my time in Mechanical Desktop,
which is Autodesk's attempt at a midrange mechanical CAD (MCAD) package.
It's a really nice software package in concept, but it's so horribly buggy
and unstable that it mostly just pisses me off. Moreover, a lot of the
design automation tools in MDT aren't available in any open-source CAD
software, and the other commercial packages that do have the nice tools
are such a radical shift in UI and workflow that it's difficult to make
such a change.