"US is one of the top western countries on Amnesty International lists regarding Human rights..."
Ah, but is that statement still true if you remove the word "western?"
Yes, indeed it is. For example I found this on the Amnesty International homepage: The vast majority of executions worldwide were carried out in a tiny handful of countries. [...]
So it doesn't matter whether anyone has free speech, or freedom of movement or choice or freedom of religion - human rights is all about whether people who brutually murder others get executed for their crimes, or "merely" locked away in a high-security prison for their rest of their lives?
what about the people who've been innocently killed by the death penalty? Did the death penalty help them somehow?
What about the people who were innocent, but died in prison? Maybe not by a nice humane execution, but by a cruel gang of thugs? Or maybe just spent thirty years in souldraining situations before dying of old age?
All justice systems make errors; all serious punishment systems take away something that can't be given back. If there are too many innocent people on death row, then it should be fixed by improving the justice system, not by making these innocent men spend their life in jail.
And if you think that you cannot compare them because the USA justice system is so infallible, you may like to refer to the study of error rates in death penalty cases "A Broken System: Error rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995" by James S Leibman, Jeffery Fagan and Valerie West (2000).
The numbers are depressing, I know. But the death penalty is probably the only reason some of those men are alive and free today. If it weren't for the death penalty, no one would have cared enough to find out that they were innocent.
Can you name one person executed in the US under the age of 18 in the past fifty years?
Sean Sellers was 16 when he committed the murders he was executed for.
I've seen this a few times in the newspaper, and it took me fifteen seconds to find on Google. (Of course, it helped knowing that Oklahoma was one of the states.) Texas has executed 19 juvenile offenders since 1976.
But when a grown adult man daydreams about living in an underground wizard cave instead of about girls, money, and cars, I believe that there is a problem.
I don't doubt he dreams about girls; but some of us need other, more realistic dreams. Cars just aren't everyone's thing. He who truely dreams about money is lost; they get to spend their life in the cold and heartless chase of cash.
I doubt any of us live on grounds that are vast and mountainous enough to actually build one of these holes.
You doubt that any one of the tens of thousands of slashdot readers lives near a hill? Go back to geography class; just because you live in Kansas, doesn't mean we all do.
being a hero and saving everyone from a death by drowning. [...]imagine that you're a sexy, long-haired Mel Gibson.
Because these are such realistic goals. Instead of dreaming we're a hero in the ancient past, let's dream we're a seductive commoner in the recent past (who, IIRC, only saved one person) or a sleazebag who lies, and steals his way to the top and is a complete cad, but it's all right, because he has charisma and is Mel Gibson.
You offer us the sad myths of the modern world instead of the great myths of fantasy. Sorry, not interested. I'll try and take my modern world straight, and let my fantasies go where they may.
Cripes, if nothing else, haven't you figured out that you can't take what politicians say at face value? Soundbites are about morality, but the underlying geopolitics aren't, and never were.
But you yourself used the word evil repeatedly in your post. How about you believe the crap you're spouting about morals being irrelevant, and then you can tell us.
* You are in the middle of a divorce procedure. Suddenly the opposing counsel produces your `personal profile' in court.
Do you think that a judge is going to accept the output of some stupid AI? Do you think your ex wasn't going to drag in your movies and books and TV shows if they could held against you, with or without the help of Amazon or Tivo?
* You order a book about the islam. Then the Statue of Liberty gets to be blown up. Next you are dragged out of your home, [...]
Your friendly neighborhood mailmen know what you order too. As does Amazon, whether or not their doing profiling. You buy books about Islam, somebody knows and will be in a position to tell the police. That's old news; the problem is the police digging for that data and kneejerk reactions to that data. That's what you need to worry about.
(And honestly, if you buy Islam and the Jihad, An Inside Look at Al-Quada, The Chemical Properities of C4, and How to Build a Bomb (for entertainment purposes only, wink wink nudge nudge), and something goes boom in your local area, the police should be looking at you.)
we all wanted to see Iran defeated. Iran came out of an Islamic fundamentalist revolution
Why did Iran have a revolution? Becuase the Shah was corrupt and the people didn't want to live under the Shah's regime anymore, a regime supported by the rest of the world despite its history of human right abuse. Their government has serious problems - even the Iranians know that - but it's much closer to a government of the people, by the people and for the people then the Shah's ever was. But the concept of the rights of a people to choose their government seems alien to European and American nations, despite their excersize of that right.
immediately engaged in a war of conquest with Iraq.
Nothing I've read indicates that Iran attacked Iraq; rather the other way around.
It's not about morality and no one ever claimed it was.
It's always about morality. Morality is always the final judge of human behavior, whether singly or in large groups.
I assume all those Spanish and French emails that bogofilter trashes without reading are from Europe. One of the first spams I got was for a Russian carpet cleaning company.
Software Engineers do not optimize compilers for free. Giving away the work of well-paid engineers is not a very intelligent business decision.
Then why does Apple work on optimizing gcc? Because giving away the work of well-paid engineers can be a very intelligent business decision. The deeper response is that ia32 dominates the field, and it's hard to optimize for Intel chips and not AMD, and that Intel makes enough money from its compiler that it offsets the need to have the best compilers for their chips.
I don't know about FreeBSD, but the history of Linux (the kernel) and GCC has too many incidents of a GCC upgrade breaking the kernel, and the GCC hackers and the kernel hackers having a nice flame war over who's at fault. I'd rather let one of them test it out, rather than become a roasted guinea pig.
Guess that means glib, emacs, and oh, say Linux are not of significant value?
I don't know the authors of glib off the top of my head, but I don't think Linus has anything against copyright (Linux is a copyrighted work, of course) and I know that RMS approves of limited copyrights - beyond works written under the GPL, he's written many texts under a no-modify license. He just believes in shorter copyright, more orientated to protecting creative works then functional works like software.
I'm sure that there are many movies made now, with the knowledge that they'll *eventually* make money, if help long enough.
I've never heard anything like that. What I've heard amounts to, if it doesn't pay off at the box office, write it off. How many movies are made that aren't a success at the box office but are a success eventually? I can think of two: Plan 9 from Outer Space and It's a Wonderful Life. Neither was made for the long run, and both became successes for idiosyncratic reasons that made little money for their owners. The rest, usually, if it bombed at the box office, nobody wants it on DVD or on TV. (Sure, there's late night spots to fill, but do you really think TNT pays good money for a spot that could be filled by any of a hundred movies?)
If copyright were shortened, to say 5 years, anything that couldn't make a sizeable amount of money very quickly wouldn't be written/made
Five years is shorter than I've ever heard suggested. In any case, a large majority of books printed five years ago aren't in print today, and will never see print again. About the only stuff where people would be worried about the five years is scholarly stuff, like series that dribble out one book every five years (or every twenty, if your name starts with Kn and ends with uth) or graduate textbooks that may sell their first print run in five years.
The 1st and 3rd reason you gave are valid ones, the second needs explanation...
I think by "Is not GPL", he meant "is a brain-damaged PIA license that is fundamentally intolerable to most modern Linux distributions." PINE doesn't let you distributed patched binaries, meaning that distributions can't put files in LFS-compliant places or fix bugs. So Debian, and others, don't want to mess with it, and it ends up outside the packaging system for users.
The word "small" seems perfectly fair when the competition is Hindi, Mandarin, French, English, or Spanish.
You said "small group of people", so we aren't talking about a language, we're talking about a movement. Name a cause with two million people who have spend a hundred hours of their life on it. There probably aren't two million people who know what the DCMA is, much less are willing to spend a lot of time on it. Does that make the movement against the DCMA infinitesimal?
The Korean woman at the tailor shop where I used to get my uniforms worked on has an accent thicker than pitch when she speaks English
But she spent more than two weeks learning the language, and spent time talking to actual speakers in actual situations, unlike the actors in Incubus.
I'm really curious why a language that was supposed to be the "wave of the future" wouldn't have figured a way to route around accent issues.
Because the science of phonetics was not well developed when Esperanto was created. Because even now, it's a hard problem, and solving it has negative side effects elsewhere.
Accents will exist whenever two people pronounce something differently. Any language with enough sounds and complex ways of putting those sounds together will have sounds and combininations of sounds that are hard for speakers who didn't grow up with the language, and someone will tend to pronunce things the way they're pronunced his native language if not careful.
The solution may seem to be going with a smaller set of sounds. This won't completely solve the issue - sanol and zemur may have equivelent sounds and hence be the same word, but an English student will have a hard time understanding someone who chose the other alternative. You lose the ability to adopt words from other languages without mangling them beyond recognition. Languages with few sounds tend to be verbose by necessity; to counteract that, speakers tend to elide whatever can be left to context, making things more ambigious, which is not a good feature for a universal language.
So you're left trying to pick a set of sounds that everyone can learn easily, but is large enough to discourage verbosity and ambiguity. Esperanto has quite possibly too large a set of sounds, but gains the ability to adopt many words faithfully, and to communicate much in a few short words.
the (small) group of people who still study Esperanto
One fairly well regarded count of speakers of world languages came up with two million speakers of Esperanto. The 1997 World Congress had 45,000 visitors. The word "small" seems unfair.
want it to replace, well, everything.
That was never the goal for Esperanto. It's an auxilary language, not a primary one, meant to supplement native languages, not replace them.
From everything I've read, Incubus is almost impossible to understand, because the actors have such thick Californian accents. How much Esperanto did Shatner know? I could probably speak some random Esperanto and German if John Stewart asked me to, but I certainly don't know enough to be of much use.
Here's a good question: How many Israeli suicide bombers have you read about?
How many Nazi suicide bombers have you read about? How many Soviet suicide bombers have you read about? If you have tanks, you don't need suicide bombers.
It's not terrorism when you're responding to an attack, and trying to localize your response to the perpetrators.
They take out their entire neighborhood with tanks. Imagine your neighbor went nuts, so they rolled up tanks on your front lawn. Would you feel that that was a localized response?
I'm not arguing that Israel is in an easy position, but they are far from lily-pure here.
The X11 text handling was designed in the early 1980's--even if the designers had wanted to, there simply weren't any good standards around.
If you're blazing new ground, get all the information you can and pay attention to where you're going. Arabic and Hindi and Hebrew have been written the way they have for at least a thousand years. They could have written the functions in such a way that could have been extended to handle those languages, even if they didn't right from the start.
they just have to add a server-side extension as a dynamically loadable module.
Which, of course, every X server supports, and does so in a simple consistent manner.
if people go through all the trouble of upgrading huge, complex software systems like KDE or Gnome.
A sysadmin can download a few 10 MB tarballs, start them compiling, have lunch, install it in/usr/local/luser/linux/gnome and forget about it. Where as adding an extension to the X server is meddling with something that could break non-Gnome and non-KDE usage of X. Personally, I'll install random beta debs of KDE and Gnome, but I won't go messing around with my X server; that's deep magic, and it works, so I don't want to mess with it. I would expect that it would be even worse for a newbie.
Windows 3.1 also doesn't support many Windows XP functions.
But people don't seriously write for Windows 3.1. They do seriously write for non-XFree86 servers. Furthermore, the fact that Windows programmers have to work around the bugs and missing features of earlier versions does not change the fact that so do X programmers.
That's all they were intended to do: satisfy the needs of what was probably 99% of the users at the time.
There's no way for the international text functions to concievable handle the native languages of 20% of Earth's population. The APIs alone don't allow it. That's seriously brain-damaged. To blame the toolkit authors for working around the problem is wrong.
The new X11 text handling functions do.
Ah, good. It would have been nice if they had been added before every toolkit got around to solving the problem, or if they were in present in something besides the latest and greatest XFree86 version.
If there is functionality that's missing from the server, different toolkit authors shouldn't replicate it, they should create an extension.
You cannot simply tell everyone who wants to run KDE 3 or GNOME 2 to upgrade their system to the latest version of XFree86.
if I were to start up some memory demanding app, or really just about anything (mozilla with 4 tabs open) it will drop into swap and slow to a crawl.
What are you running?!? I used to run with 128 MB of RAM, and almost nothing noticably swapped. The only thing that swapped was manipulating megapixel pictures (well, there was that day I told dd to copy a 700 MB into memory, but that was my mistake . ..). I don't know what your problem is, but it's not X (which has been running on Unix since the 80s and 4 MB machines) and I seriously doubt it's XFree86.
Run memstat | sort -n, and tell us what the last few lines are, besides/dev/mem and/SYSV* (which will be there, but don't use real memory.) That would tell us what the real culprit is.
As it is, X is the only project that has usable drivers for desktop video cards.... IMHO this gives X a responsibility to write the drivers in a way that other GUIs can use them
That is ridiculous.
Care to say why, or do you not know?
It's ridiculous because it implies an obligation for the X developers that doesn't exist. If you want the code, it's available (for most X implementations.) But there's no reason they should have to put extra work in to support other GUIs if they don't want to.
Let me guess: the system has 512 MB of memory? Linux tends to fill memory with copies of files and libraries, so they are there when you need them, but it's trivial for the system to reuse the memory for stuff that needs real memory. This means things that measure memory often return values of little interest. For a comparison, memstat claims my system is using 30 MB of memory (however it measures that), where as top claims my system is using 358 MB of memory (which seems to be the amount of virtual memory used). Back when I only had 128 MB of memory, doing comparable things, top claimed my system was using ~120 MB of memory.
Slashdot Mirror
"US is one of the top western countries on Amnesty International lists regarding Human rights..."
Ah, but is that statement still true if you remove the word "western?"
Yes, indeed it is. For example I found this on the Amnesty International homepage: The vast majority of executions worldwide were carried out in a tiny handful of countries. [...]
So it doesn't matter whether anyone has free speech, or freedom of movement or choice or freedom of religion - human rights is all about whether people who brutually murder others get executed for their crimes, or "merely" locked away in a high-security prison for their rest of their lives?
what about the people who've been innocently killed by the death penalty? Did the death penalty help them somehow?
What about the people who were innocent, but died in prison? Maybe not by a nice humane execution, but by a cruel gang of thugs? Or maybe just spent thirty years in souldraining situations before dying of old age?
All justice systems make errors; all serious punishment systems take away something that can't be given back. If there are too many innocent people on death row, then it should be fixed by improving the justice system, not by making these innocent men spend their life in jail.
And if you think that you cannot compare them because the USA justice system is so infallible, you may like to refer to the study of error rates in death penalty cases "A Broken System: Error rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995" by James S Leibman, Jeffery Fagan and Valerie West (2000).
The numbers are depressing, I know. But the death penalty is probably the only reason some of those men are alive and free today. If it weren't for the death penalty, no one would have cared enough to find out that they were innocent.
Can you name one person executed in the US under the age of 18 in the past fifty years?
Sean Sellers was 16 when he committed the murders he was executed for.
I've seen this a few times in the newspaper, and it took me fifteen seconds to find on Google. (Of course, it helped knowing that Oklahoma was one of the states.) Texas has executed 19 juvenile offenders since 1976.
How do I make some other page on the otherside of the world not include a prefetch tag to some content I have made?
Same way you make some other page on the other side of the world not include an image tag to some content you've made.
But when a grown adult man daydreams about living in an underground wizard cave instead of about girls, money, and cars, I believe that there is a problem.
I don't doubt he dreams about girls; but some of us need other, more realistic dreams. Cars just aren't everyone's thing. He who truely dreams about money is lost; they get to spend their life in the cold and heartless chase of cash.
I doubt any of us live on grounds that are vast and mountainous enough to actually build one of these holes.
You doubt that any one of the tens of thousands of slashdot readers lives near a hill? Go back to geography class; just because you live in Kansas, doesn't mean we all do.
being a hero and saving everyone from a death by drowning. [...]imagine that you're a sexy, long-haired Mel Gibson.
Because these are such realistic goals. Instead of dreaming we're a hero in the ancient past, let's dream we're a seductive commoner in the recent past (who, IIRC, only saved one person) or a sleazebag who lies, and steals his way to the top and is a complete cad, but it's all right, because he has charisma and is Mel Gibson.
You offer us the sad myths of the modern world instead of the great myths of fantasy. Sorry, not interested. I'll try and take my modern world straight, and let my fantasies go where they may.
Cripes, if nothing else, haven't you figured out that you can't take what politicians say at face value? Soundbites are about morality, but the underlying geopolitics aren't, and never were.
But you yourself used the word evil repeatedly in your post. How about you believe the crap you're spouting about morals being irrelevant, and then you can tell us.
* You are in the middle of a divorce procedure. Suddenly the opposing counsel produces your `personal profile' in court.
Do you think that a judge is going to accept the output of some stupid AI? Do you think your ex wasn't going to drag in your movies and books and TV shows if they could held against you, with or without the help of Amazon or Tivo?
* You order a book about the islam. Then the Statue of Liberty gets to be blown up. Next you are dragged out of your home, [...]
Your friendly neighborhood mailmen know what you order too. As does Amazon, whether or not their doing profiling. You buy books about Islam, somebody knows and will be in a position to tell the police. That's old news; the problem is the police digging for that data and kneejerk reactions to that data. That's what you need to worry about.
(And honestly, if you buy Islam and the Jihad, An Inside Look at Al-Quada, The Chemical Properities of C4, and How to Build a Bomb (for entertainment purposes only, wink wink nudge nudge), and something goes boom in your local area, the police should be looking at you.)
we all wanted to see Iran defeated. Iran came out of an Islamic fundamentalist revolution
Why did Iran have a revolution? Becuase the Shah was corrupt and the people didn't want to live under the Shah's regime anymore, a regime supported by the rest of the world despite its history of human right abuse. Their government has serious problems - even the Iranians know that - but it's much closer to a government of the people, by the people and for the people then the Shah's ever was. But the concept of the rights of a people to choose their government seems alien to European and American nations, despite their excersize of that right.
immediately engaged in a war of conquest with Iraq.
Nothing I've read indicates that Iran attacked Iraq; rather the other way around.
It's not about morality and no one ever claimed it was.
It's always about morality. Morality is always the final judge of human behavior, whether singly or in large groups.
This regime is just bad, unless you think they made up history for Kurds, Kuwait and Iran.
Like America has any moral foot to stand on, considering we funded the war against Iran.
I assume all those Spanish and French emails that bogofilter trashes without reading are from Europe. One of the first spams I got was for a Russian carpet cleaning company.
Software Engineers do not optimize compilers for free. Giving away the work of well-paid engineers is not a very intelligent business decision.
Then why does Apple work on optimizing gcc? Because giving away the work of well-paid engineers can be a very intelligent business decision. The deeper response is that ia32 dominates the field, and it's hard to optimize for Intel chips and not AMD, and that Intel makes enough money from its compiler that it offsets the need to have the best compilers for their chips.
Kernels are a good test for gcc
I don't know about FreeBSD, but the history of Linux (the kernel) and GCC has too many incidents of a GCC upgrade breaking the kernel, and the GCC hackers and the kernel hackers having a nice flame war over who's at fault. I'd rather let one of them test it out, rather than become a roasted guinea pig.
Guess that means glib, emacs, and oh, say Linux are not of significant value?
I don't know the authors of glib off the top of my head, but I don't think Linus has anything against copyright (Linux is a copyrighted work, of course) and I know that RMS approves of limited copyrights - beyond works written under the GPL, he's written many texts under a no-modify license. He just believes in shorter copyright, more orientated to protecting creative works then functional works like software.
I'm sure that there are many movies made now, with the knowledge that they'll *eventually* make money, if help long enough.
I've never heard anything like that. What I've heard amounts to, if it doesn't pay off at the box office, write it off. How many movies are made that aren't a success at the box office but are a success eventually? I can think of two: Plan 9 from Outer Space and It's a Wonderful Life. Neither was made for the long run, and both became successes for idiosyncratic reasons that made little money for their owners. The rest, usually, if it bombed at the box office, nobody wants it on DVD or on TV. (Sure, there's late night spots to fill, but do you really think TNT pays good money for a spot that could be filled by any of a hundred movies?)
If copyright were shortened, to say 5 years, anything that couldn't make a sizeable amount of money very quickly wouldn't be written/made
Five years is shorter than I've ever heard suggested. In any case, a large majority of books printed five years ago aren't in print today, and will never see print again. About the only stuff where people would be worried about the five years is scholarly stuff, like series that dribble out one book every five years (or every twenty, if your name starts with Kn and ends with uth) or graduate textbooks that may sell their first print run in five years.
The 1st and 3rd reason you gave are valid ones, the second needs explanation...
I think by "Is not GPL", he meant "is a brain-damaged PIA license that is fundamentally intolerable to most modern Linux distributions." PINE doesn't let you distributed patched binaries, meaning that distributions can't put files in LFS-compliant places or fix bugs. So Debian, and others, don't want to mess with it, and it ends up outside the packaging system for users.
The word "small" seems perfectly fair when the competition is Hindi, Mandarin, French, English, or Spanish.
You said "small group of people", so we aren't talking about a language, we're talking about a movement. Name a cause with two million people who have spend a hundred hours of their life on it. There probably aren't two million people who know what the DCMA is, much less are willing to spend a lot of time on it. Does that make the movement against the DCMA infinitesimal?
The Korean woman at the tailor shop where I used to get my uniforms worked on has an accent thicker than pitch when she speaks English
But she spent more than two weeks learning the language, and spent time talking to actual speakers in actual situations, unlike the actors in Incubus.
I'm really curious why a language that was supposed to be the "wave of the future" wouldn't have figured a way to route around accent issues.
Because the science of phonetics was not well developed when Esperanto was created. Because even now, it's a hard problem, and solving it has negative side effects elsewhere.
Accents will exist whenever two people pronounce something differently. Any language with enough sounds and complex ways of putting those sounds together will have sounds and combininations of sounds that are hard for speakers who didn't grow up with the language, and someone will tend to pronunce things the way they're pronunced his native language if not careful.
The solution may seem to be going with a smaller set of sounds. This won't completely solve the issue - sanol and zemur may have equivelent sounds and hence be the same word, but an English student will have a hard time understanding someone who chose the other alternative. You lose the ability to adopt words from other languages without mangling them beyond recognition. Languages with few sounds tend to be verbose by necessity; to counteract that, speakers tend to elide whatever can be left to context, making things more ambigious, which is not a good feature for a universal language.
So you're left trying to pick a set of sounds that everyone can learn easily, but is large enough to discourage verbosity and ambiguity. Esperanto has quite possibly too large a set of sounds, but gains the ability to adopt many words faithfully, and to communicate much in a few short words.
Was his Esperanto like his English? :-)
Es...per...an...to
Yes. It was less obvious, given the more surreal environment of Incubus.
the (small) group of people who still study Esperanto
One fairly well regarded count of speakers of world languages came up with two million speakers of Esperanto. The 1997 World Congress had 45,000 visitors. The word "small" seems unfair.
want it to replace, well, everything.
That was never the goal for Esperanto. It's an auxilary language, not a primary one, meant to supplement native languages, not replace them.
From everything I've read, Incubus is almost impossible to understand, because the actors have such thick Californian accents. How much Esperanto did Shatner know? I could probably speak some random Esperanto and German if John Stewart asked me to, but I certainly don't know enough to be of much use.
Here's a good question: How many Israeli suicide bombers have you read about?
How many Nazi suicide bombers have you read about? How many Soviet suicide bombers have you read about? If you have tanks, you don't need suicide bombers.
It's not terrorism when you're responding to an attack, and trying to localize your response to the perpetrators.
They take out their entire neighborhood with tanks. Imagine your neighbor went nuts, so they rolled up tanks on your front lawn. Would you feel that that was a localized response?
I'm not arguing that Israel is in an easy position, but they are far from lily-pure here.
The X11 text handling was designed in the early 1980's--even if the designers had wanted to, there simply weren't any good standards around.
/usr/local/luser/linux/gnome and forget about it. Where as adding an extension to the X server is meddling with something that could break non-Gnome and non-KDE usage of X. Personally, I'll install random beta debs of KDE and Gnome, but I won't go messing around with my X server; that's deep magic, and it works, so I don't want to mess with it. I would expect that it would be even worse for a newbie.
If you're blazing new ground, get all the information you can and pay attention to where you're going. Arabic and Hindi and Hebrew have been written the way they have for at least a thousand years. They could have written the functions in such a way that could have been extended to handle those languages, even if they didn't right from the start.
they just have to add a server-side extension as a dynamically loadable module.
Which, of course, every X server supports, and does so in a simple consistent manner.
if people go through all the trouble of upgrading huge, complex software systems like KDE or Gnome.
A sysadmin can download a few 10 MB tarballs, start them compiling, have lunch, install it in
Windows 3.1 also doesn't support many Windows XP functions.
But people don't seriously write for Windows 3.1. They do seriously write for non-XFree86 servers. Furthermore, the fact that Windows programmers have to work around the bugs and missing features of earlier versions does not change the fact that so do X programmers.
That's all they were intended to do: satisfy the needs of what was probably 99% of the users at the time.
There's no way for the international text functions to concievable handle the native languages of 20% of Earth's population. The APIs alone don't allow it. That's seriously brain-damaged. To blame the toolkit authors for working around the problem is wrong.
The new X11 text handling functions do.
Ah, good. It would have been nice if they had been added before every toolkit got around to solving the problem, or if they were in present in something besides the latest and greatest XFree86 version.
If there is functionality that's missing from the server, different toolkit authors shouldn't replicate it, they should create an extension.
You cannot simply tell everyone who wants to run KDE 3 or GNOME 2 to upgrade their system to the latest version of XFree86.
if I were to start up some memory demanding app, or really just about anything (mozilla with 4 tabs open) it will drop into swap and slow to a crawl.
.). I don't know what your problem is, but it's not X (which has been running on Unix since the 80s and 4 MB machines) and I seriously doubt it's XFree86.
/dev/mem and /SYSV* (which will be there, but don't use real memory.) That would tell us what the real culprit is.
/home/mp3/Download/Chicago/Chicago-I_Dont_Want_To_ Live_Without_You... /usr/share/dictd/gcide.index 235 /usr/local/share/dictd/revo.dat 235 /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3.0.5 5364 5367 5370 5373 5375 5431 /usr/share/dictd/wn.dict.dz 235 /usr/share/dictd/gcide.dict.dz 235 /dev/mem 5315
What are you running?!? I used to run with 128 MB of RAM, and almost nothing noticably swapped. The only thing that swapped was manipulating megapixel pictures (well, there was that day I told dd to copy a 700 MB into memory, but that was my mistake . .
Run memstat | sort -n, and tell us what the last few lines are, besides
For example, on my system:
3464k: PID 5364 (/usr/bin/konsole)
3628k:
3804k:
4496k:
5492k:
6760k: PID 280 (/usr/X11R6/bin/xfs)
8392k:
13016k:
24196k: PID 15430 (/usr/bin/sort)
27880k: PID 14965 (/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin)
27880k: PID 14985 (/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin)
27880k: PID 14986 (/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin)
27880k: PID 14987 (/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin)
27880k: PID 14989 (/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin)
27880k: PID 15248 (/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin)
28860k: PID 5315 (/SYSV00000003)
56384k
3886976k:
(Note that due to the multi-threading system that Linux uses, the 27MB Mozilla is using gets mentioned 6 times, but it's still only 27MB.)
As it is, X is the only project that has usable drivers for desktop video cards.... IMHO this gives X a responsibility to write the drivers in a way that other GUIs can use them
That is ridiculous.
Care to say why, or do you not know?
It's ridiculous because it implies an obligation for the X developers that doesn't exist. If you want the code, it's available (for most X implementations.) But there's no reason they should have to put extra work in to support other GUIs if they don't want to.
the system is using 452MB of RAM,
Let me guess: the system has 512 MB of memory? Linux tends to fill memory with copies of files and libraries, so they are there when you need them, but it's trivial for the system to reuse the memory for stuff that needs real memory. This means things that measure memory often return values of little interest. For a comparison, memstat claims my system is using 30 MB of memory (however it measures that), where as top claims my system is using 358 MB of memory (which seems to be the amount of virtual memory used). Back when I only had 128 MB of memory, doing comparable things, top claimed my system was using ~120 MB of memory.