Per my usual, since I have had a temporary lapse of judgement and attempted to submit a story to /., I will post it here, as I doubt it would otherwise see the light of day:

  wowbagger writes "Has anybody ever heard of a VNC-like tool that, instead of exporting to Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol or VNC, exports the display to a UPnP hosted MPEG stream?

With the rising number of set top boxes/TV sets/media players that can play MPEG content from a UPnP server, a program that could scrape a display, convert it to an MPEG stream, and send it via UPnP to those devices could allow many existing devices to act as a remote display. Yes, exporting via MPEG wouldn't be as "good" as via a protocol designed for such a purpose, but unless and until you see all these devices coming with a VNC or RDP client, that option is not open.

Even better would be a program that acted like vncserver in that it would create a virtual display that persisted even when no client was connected, so that an otherwise headless server could be viewed via a set top box."

------------
BTW - am I the only one who thinks the UI on /. has gone from bad to worse? Pretty much unusable without Javascript, who's brilliant idea was it to put the "Write in journal" at the BOTTOM of the page, etc.

I have a saying, paraphrasing The Man With No Name: "when a business forgets what business it is in, that business is a dead business."

For example, Polaroid made their money on instant photography - that was their business. They forgot that, and got the idea they were in the self-developing film business, and so chose to ignore the digital photography business, because it wasn't self-developing film. Kodak moved in, and look where Polariod is now.

Likewise, the various intelligence gathering agencies - the NSA, the CIA, the FBI - were in the business of "Protecting America". However, they have lost sight of that, and now believe they are in the "intelligence gathering" business. And just like a miser who just amasses wealth for wealth's sake, and lives in a hovel and eats beanie-weenies, they have lost sight of the idea that the reason we gather information is so we can use it!

Instead, the spooks are so busy "gathering information" that they never share it, nor act on it - "My God man, if we act on this information, we might compromise our assets! We might not be able to gather any more information! No, we will just protect our assets, kept this information secret, and see what happens."

Yes, if the spooks have some double-aught sooper sekret spy stuff that lets them read the bad guys' brains, and they read that a guy is planning on flinging some poo at an embassy, and revealing the intel will compromise the secrecy of their brain scanner, they SHOULD site on the information - flinging poo is not worth losing that intel asset. But there is a world of difference between flinging poo and flinging PETN guys! - screw the secrecy of your "asset" and DO YOUR DAMN JOB!

In short, intelligence agencies: YOUR BUSINESS IS NOT GATHERING INFORMATION - YOUR BUSINESS IS PROTECTING THE US! IF YOU FORGET THAT YOU WILL GO THE WAY OF ANYBODY WHO FORGETS WHAT BUSINESS THEY ARE IN!

And I, for one, DON'T want to see what happens if you should go out of business!

It's a good thing I'm not on any of the several medications that react badly with Grapefruit juice, as it is one of my favorite drinks. However, something I cannot explain has happened: I can't get the stuff here in Wichita!

None of the stores at which I shop are carrying it anymore. I have some left over from my trip to California over the 4th, but that obviously won't last.

Since a statistical sampling of 1 isn't very valid, I'll throw this question out: what about anybody else, can you get it where you are?

Zogger, since you are a bit more plugged in to things agricultural than I, do you have any insights?

Also, the local stores no longer carry the "lots of pulp" versions of the Florida's Natural Orange Juice either.

Maybe the stuff isn't selling (while I buy a lot, obviously I don't buy enough to justify a store carrying it all by my little lonesome).

OK, I think I've been fair in trying out Alpha, but I just don't see it being useful - let me give you my use cases and see what you think:

Use case 1: I wanted to know the change in elevation from Moriarty, NM to Albuquerque, NM. OK, this should be easy for WA, right? "(elevation Moriarty, NM) - (elevation Albuquerque, NM)". Result? "I don't understand your question".

Use case 2: I wanted to know the energy of a red light photon in electron volts. "energy red light photon in eV". FAIL. OK, let's help it a bit: "energy 638nm photon in eV". FAIL.

The sad thing is that Use case 2 was answered by Google on the first question.

So, what was WA supposed to do for us again?

NOTE: "for us", not for "it's hype feeding creator."

I am an achievement whore. Now I get an achievement for this. I probably won't ever use the journal again.

I'm looking for a good source for some gears.

Background: I have several antennas on my tower, for various purposes (wideband receive, VHF omnidirectional, VHF directional, HF, etc.). I'd like to be able to switch those onto my radio as desired. Now, there are remote controlled antenna switching boxes out there, but:
1) Most of them are for HF only - not VHF. This is because
2) Most of them use relays to do the switching, and co-axial relays to switch VHF and UHF get VERY pricy.
3) Notwithstanding the use of cheaper HF only relays, most of those switch boxes are DAMN pricey.

Now, compare that with the cost of a simple antenna switch like an MFJ-1702. Simple, relatively inexpensive, good through UHF, good isolation, and not very expensive. However, it is a manual unit, so I'd either a) have to run down to the basement where all the feedlines enter the house and switch it there or b) run all the feedlines into my operating station.

What I want to do is set up a simple gear drive on an MFJ to select the antenna - I'm thinking something like a 3 inch diameter gear on the box, a 120 RPM or so gearbox and motor combination driving the gear, a couple of optical interruptors looking through holes in the gears to provide position sensing, and I should be able to make a switchbox that would do the job. Heck, done right I don't even think it would need much more than a couple of relays and transistors to control it - no microprocessor needed.

But I am having a time finding gears that would do - again, what I'd like would be a gear, preferably metal, about 3 inches in diameter. Anybody got any good sources?

"OK, Mr. Fox, you are applying for the 'Hen House Guard' position, is that correct?"

AP Sources: Obama wants Fed to be finance supercop

Unbelievable.

I am sure this would enrage the various neo-liberals on this board, save it is unlikely any of them are my fans.

The most "liberal" states are the least free.

Well, it looks like I will be able to get to Dayton Hamvention this year - at least for Friday and Saturday.

So, anybody who follows my Journal want to try to arrange a meet-up there?

A few of you have often noticed my signature, in which I mentioned that my current ISP offers 100 mbit fiber-to-the-home for $65/mo, no installation fee. Recently, I've discovered that while they do not filter, they do have a 20 gig/mo cap, alongside a vague policy about "more than five hours of video per week".

Of course, they sell a TV service, also. I would bet that is where this limit is coming from -- to prevent YouTube, Netflix, etc, from competing with Lisco TV.

Being unemployed, and as this is a small town, I would not mind relocating to find a job. The question is, where to? Is there anywhere which has similarly priced Internet, unthrottled, and uncapped -- or at least, with a significantly higher cap? (Alright, there's Japan. Anywhere in the US?)

VP Biden has stated he wants to see Amtrak get money as a part of the stimulus bill.

I agree with him on this - of the various things that are part of this "stimulus" bill, improving our passenger rail system seems to have a better than average probability of improving our nation's ability to be able to pay off the debt the stimulus bill represents - which I assert should be THE sole metric of whether something gets "stimulus" money or not: "Will spending this NOW help us pay it back LATER?"

However, I am cynical enough to wonder how much of the Amtrak stimulus will go for improvements in the areas nearer Washington, DC and Los Angeles, how much will go for improving the long distance rail service through "fly-over" country, and how much will go to helping create passenger rail service here in the unfashionably "red" states - such as helping re-instate the "Heartland Flyer".

I would love to see the AutoTrain service expanded to a cross-country run like the Southwest Chief, rather than just servicing the East Coast as it does now.

However, I am too addicted to oxygen to hold my breath until it happens.

I used to say that the wonderful thing about the GNU software stack was that idea that you could design a brand-new microprocessor, implement a GCC and binutils backend for it, make a few changes to the Linux kernel, pull down the sources, do a "for * in packages; do TARGET=mytarget make all install; done" and have a working set of software for that new processor.

That may be the ideal. The reality - not so much.

Consider what ought to be a very simple case: Build binutils, GCC (C and C++), and glibc for the OMAP3 processor, so that you can cross-compile applications on your nice quad-core i7 CPU box and run them on your Beagleboard.

Ought to be a snap, right? Especially if you are running Debian Lenny on both your workstation and the Beagleboard, right? It ought to be just an "apt-get" away to get the crosscompile packages, no building required, right?

<sarcasm>
Come over to my house - after we do the install I'll show you the ocean view from the high-rises in downtown Wichita. The mountains are really breathtaking.
</sarcasm>
(For the US geographically impaired, look here.)

First of all, you cannot install the GCC cross-compiler for ARM, as the packages are busted right now. (In fairness, these packages are not in the main Debian repositories, but they are in the Embedded Debian repo).

OK, so, let's cross compile.

Building binutils and the first pass on GCC (C compiler only) is pretty straightforward.

Now, go look at all the articles/web pages/books on cross compiling, and you will see them usually pointing you toward ulibC, or other C libraries other than GLIBC. "Yes, so what? They are targeting small embedded systems and GLIBC is so large, plus there are the issues of licensing."

No, that's not the reason. The reason is that building GLIBC in a cross-compilation environment is well-nigh impossible.

First, there is the inconsistency on the cross-compilation setup itself. For binutils/GCC or just about any other package, you specify TARGET="your-target-arch" to say "Yes, I may be BUILDING on an x86, but I'm going to be RUNNING on an armel-linux-gnu". Not GLIBC - there you either specify HOST="your-target-arch", or better still you specify what compiler, linker, library archiver, such you want to use and GLIBC "figures it out itself" (because specifying several different but related pieces of information isn't error-prone or anything like that). Indeed, setting the TARGET= for glibc won't do ANYTHING (not even throw a warning that it won't work). Nice, guys. Way to be consistent.

Then there is the fact that as of glibc-2.7, even when you get that right it WON'T BUILD. You get the following errors:
make[2]: *** No rule to make target `/USER/src/arm-linux-gnueabi/build/glibc/dlfcn/libdl.so.2', needed by `/USER/src/arm-linux-gnueabi/build/glibc/elf/sprof'. Stop.

Go ahead, search the web for that error (you'll want to strip out the "/USER/src/arm-linux-gnueabi/build" part as that is specific to where I am building it).

This problem has been around since 2000. This is not a problem that I alone am seeing. Do you see any solutions to the problem listed in that search? I don't.

This is a pretty severe issue. If you cannot build glibc, you cannot build the C++ compiler. You cannot link programs. You are dead in the water.

And don't bother asking on the crossgcc list. I've done so, and I got one basic response - "you can't do that".

Now, there is a tool called "crosstool" that purports to handle all the patching, hacking (in the pejorative sense) and general screwing around to allow you to build glibc. Pity it doesn't have support for the latest compiler and glibc.

Doesn't it say something when you have to have a tool that patches and generally fiddles about to make the glibc compile? Something like "THIS NEEDS TO BE CLEANED UP!"?

"Oh, but GLIBC is *special* - it has to know about the kernel, and the C compiler, and lots of other things. It's going to be tricky to build." Tricky, yes - if there were GOOD, step by step instructions on how to build any given revision of GLIBC I could forgive that.

Search the Web - I've not found any.

OK, skip it. Like some of my college professors would say, "Assume the existence of the compiled library." So, let's cross compile some programs.

Nope. While many programs can be compiled on a wide range of architectures, they cannot be cross-compiled at all. They MUST be compiled on the same architecture as they are being built for.

Look at the Openembedded project. They way they purport to work around this is to have "recipes" that tell them how to build given programs - some get cross-compiles, many get compiled under qemu emulating the target processor.

(Not that I've been able to get Openembedded working, either. All my questions have been met with "Oh, the released version of the tool is busted - get the good version from Subversion" Of course, the Subversion version doesn't work either. And we won't talk about the fallacy "Fixed in $REVISION_CONTROL_SYSTEM := fixed" - that's a separate rant.)

Does it seem crazy to YOU to spend the time coming up with kludgey work-a-rounds for broken Makefiles? Why not simply identify the areas in the Makefiles that are making the broken assumption that the CPU that will run the code is substantially the same as the CPU building the code?

"oohhh, but that's *hard* - and some upstream package maintainers won't accept our patches because they don't feel it's important."

In my opinion, what needs to happen is that *somebody* - Redhat, Debian, Canonical, IBM, Google: I don't CARE who! - needs to make cross-compiling a priority. Imagine what would happen if Canonical said "OK, as of Limpid Llama no packages will be accepted for Ubuntu that don't cross-compile successfully for x86, ARM, PPC, MIPS, and x86-64. Just compiling ON those platforms is not enough - you HAVE to be able to cross-compile FOR those platforms from a different platform as well."

Consider the emerging non-x86 netbook market (which also will include things like the Dell asymmetric processor laptops with an OMAP and an x86) - do you REALLY want to have to build all of Debian on an OMAP just to get that platform supported? Shouldn't it be possible to do the builds on a nice many-core i7 box instead?

I think many of us who follow Free Software have fooled ourselves about the state of support for different architectures for far too long. I think that needs to change.

Obligatory, pre-emptive MFD strip -- I know it's unlikely anyone from EA will read this. But I'm not the only one, I hope.

I live in a small town, with low cost of living. I'm single. I make a reasonable wage, so I have a ton of disposable income.

I'm a computer professional and enthusiast. I tend to spend a decent amount on hardware, and I do game. I also tend to download custom mods and such, even toy with level design from time to time -- in other words, I take full advantage of the fact that I'm on a PC, and not a console.

Now, I could tolerate most games being Windows only -- I don't have to like it, but I tolerate it. After all, I can always put it in a virtual machine, and even if I'm running it on the bare metal for performance, I don't game 100% of the time, and I generally don't do anything else when I'm gaming.

You have lost me as a customer because of DRM.

I'm not just talking about Spore.

I'm not fanatical about this. I happily buy Valve games over Steam, play them on Windows, and spend money to do so. I'll jump on anything decent coming through Penny Arcade's Greenhouse project. I play an MMO -- that means I pay a monthly fee, I have to use their software, and they can pretty much terminate my account whenever they want.

I want to give you money.

Here's what you did, in response to Spore -- and in your next game, apparently, not in Spore itself:

  - You upped the number of allowed installations from three to five. Some of us have more than five reinstalls per month.

  - You removed the need for the game to stay online -- that's only needed during activation. I'm sure some users are grateful -- but these users likely see it as exactly as small a gesture as increasing the number of installs. Why force them to be online in the first place?

  - You removed the CD copy protection. I haven't bought a game in years that used CD copy protection. What took you so long?

Here's what else is still a problem, for me:

  - Blacklisted programs. Daemon Tools, among other things -- it has legitimate uses other than piracy. I should be able to run whatever software I want on my machine -- it's mine, after all.

  - Reputation. SecuROM is widely known as the worst, and it isn't getting better. Many people report that it has trashed their system. Why should I trust it this time?

The freedom to do what I want, how I want, without having to solder things, is why I'm a PC gamer in the first place. DRM, by its very nature, limits that.

That's the damage. Here's the impact:

Your DRM, in the long run, does nothing to secure your product. Spore is one of the most widely pirated games ever, despite everything you did to inconvenience legitimate users. A skilled cracker can defeat all of these measures relatively quickly -- sometimes before the game is even released.

And that's the choice it has come to.

I want to play Mirror's Edge, badly. If there's ever a version of it for the PC, I've got money in hand to buy it, and a new computer, and a controller if needed -- I'm not sure how well the unique movement would map to a mouse, but maybe it will.

If Mirror's Edge comes, say, as a Steam game -- not like Bioshock, but actually just a Steam game, with no additional protection -- I'd buy it in a heartbeat. On opening day. Make it DRM-free, and I'll consider preordering.

If it comes with anywhere near the level of DRM you're currently requiring for Spore, even this "relaxed" version, I will head over to the nearest torrent site and download a copy. I have plenty of money to spend, yes, but not plenty of time to waste proving that I own something.

And I am not the only one who feels this way. Keep in mind: An unprecedented number of people gave Spore a low rating on Amazon because of its DRM. An unprecedented number of people have pirated Spore, mostly via torrent. Coincidence?

I think I finally "get" Web 2.0.

It occurred to me when I started talking about The Cloud -- both loving the idea, and hating myself for using such an obvious buzzword. But I think I get it now.

It's about language.

Read 1984. And read about the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis. Maybe you'll see it, too -- our use of language has a profound impact on how we see the world.

There was a great story about how, when Europeans first came to America, some of the natives actually couldn't see the ships, because it was like nothing they'd ever seen before. They didn't have a word, or a frame of reference, for the huge cloud-like things they saw on the horizon -- so they just didn't see them.

I kind of doubt that story is true, but I do think it applies. How long did dynamic websites exist, with the ability for users to alter content, and no one "got it", until we started calling it "Web 2.0"? How long did virtualization exist -- how long did CPU-power-on-demand services exist -- and, while there was some buzz about virtualization, no one really got it until we started calling it The Cloud.

This isn't new -- it's existed, really, as long as abstract concepts have existed, because language is the medium through which we understand and communicate abstract concepts. For an obvious-example, take "Pro-Choice" vs "Abortionist" (or "Baby-Killer!"), and "Pro-Life" vs "Anti-Abortionist" (or "Woman-Hater!"). Quite often, people make the mistake of using the opposition's language in their argument, trying to show its flaws, but really, that only strengthens their argument. Who really wants to argue against choice, or life?

It's not always a good thing, and we should not always embrace new language. But neither should we be so quick to dismiss it as a "buzzword" -- after all, the Internet itself is perhaps the godfather of the modern buzzword. What we're really talking about is just another network -- which is really just a bunch of computers with wires running between them -- but now that we know it's something called "The Internet", our view changes, and it really becomes a world-changing phenomenon.

Understand: Not just appears to be, or appears to become. A random network of computers cannot change the world. The Internet can and has.

I now understand why RMS and friends insist on calling it "GNU/Linux", though I still don't agree with it. But you see... RMS understands the power of language.

(Edit: This could probably be applied to Memetic Engineering, if we ever implement that concept. The Anti-Meme would have to be very clearly defined in language for it to work.)

What happens when a Google camera vehicle needs a fill-up?
Google Gets Gas