KDE 4.11 Haswell Desktop Effects Performance

[Luke_Wolf]

i wonder why western people despise homeopathy this much.. from where i come, we have big universities and colleges teaching only homeopathy. i dont think they are teaching about "memory of water" there for all these years..

Pop Science basically, which is to say skeptics philosophy in disguise with some popular conceptions about how the world works including strong biases against anything considered not mainstream no matter if it's actually in use or the basis for other things or not. Add on top of that that it really makes no sense and the explanation for why homeopathy is supposed to work is basically akin to magic (which is why I'm leery of it personally and am waiting to find some legitimate studies before I make a decision on it) and yeah... The other schools and particularly herbalism, accupuncture, and massage actually do on the other hand make sense.

[Luke_Wolf]

Which again is a whole lot of bullshit, with no evidence of anything ever functioning that way. Since the homeopathic nutcases seem to believe "the more you dilute, the more potent it becomes", they dilute their liquids so much that it ends up as nothing but water, with a stray molecule floating around in some doses.

and that's why I have issues with it

Try learning the meaning of the word "strawman".

Strawman: taking the extreme of an idea an going to argumentum ad absurdum in order to befuddle the point and knock down an idea that you try to portray the other individual as pushing

Aka exactly what you were doing.

Massage as such doesn't belong in the list, as it has demonstrable benefits. When used therapeutically as part of medical treatment, it is usually called "physiotherapy". It is not alternate medicine, as it is recognized as a working treatment, whose efficacy is backed by evidence. As long as you stay with actual massage and don't go into chiropractic quackery...

Massage certainly belongs on the list, just because you are now acknowledging that it works (you weren't before) doesn't mean that it suddenly merges into allopathic medicine.

Herbalism is a vague term which you need to define. Many people who are into alt-med quackery fall into the naturalistic fallacy: Just because something exists in nature does not make it good or beneficial: cyanide exists in nature, and it's very deadly for you. (Although one form of vitamin B-12 contains small amounts of it.) The entire dichotomy between natural/unnatural chemicals is entirely artificial, and I'll tell you why.

Herbalism isn't vague in the slightest it's the school of medicine that derives medical products (consumables (such as teas and pills), poultices, etc) from organic and mineral sources although primarily from plants. Also yes there are certainly poisons in nature and things that will kill you, belladonna being a perfect example however that said Thyme for instance has components that on their own would be bad for you but you suffer no ill effects when taken from the actual plant.

That is because willow bark contains salicylic acid, and aspirin is acetylated salicylic acid. There's a hydroxyl group on salicylic acid which forms an ester with acetic acid, forming acetyl salicylic acid.

I'm well aware of that thank you, the question was whether you were aware of that.

Big surprise! Many chemicals have precursors that come from plants etc. In fact, ALL chemicals have precursors that come from nature! No chemicals are synthesized by waving a magic wand and making "chemicals" appear from thin air! Ergo: ALL chemicals are natural!

you don't say? let me highlight the particularly important part from this

Many chemicals have precursors that come from plants etc.

now let me ask you this: which school just happens to have entire books related to the effects that plants have on things that have developed over time... oh right herbalism, which then goes on to inspire drugs like Asprin when they note the efficacy of certain plants on various problems. Asprin wasn't developed on it's own you know it was created as a result of the recognition of the efficacy of willow bark tea.

For that matter, many herbs also contain chemicals that are inconvenient or impossible to take in their natural form, either because the rest of the plant is poisonous or otherwise harmful, or because the concentrations are so small that it's not feasible without heavy distillation, or because the rest of the plant has some other non-desirable side effects. In many cases, we can, with science and chemistry, even improve the chemicals found in plants (or animals or fungi or microbial life).

while that's true the reverse is also true see Thyme. Now I will say that the issue with heavy distillation is part of why Herbalism has Tinctures, which are also incidentally not something you just throw around.

Haha, no, you dork. Surgeons wash their equipment and hands to keep the bacteria etc. in them from entering the wounds and infecting the patient. Nothing whatsoever to do with homeopathy.

Nowadays sure, but that is actually a very modern development, back during the war between states (aka the civil war) allopathic practitioners didn't bother cleaning their hands or their equipment it required homeopaths forcing the issue in order to get them to just do even that. While I can't vouch for the rest of homeopathy they did benefit us historically by doing that.

Nope, no strawman. Once again, learn what the term means. I suggest wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman

see above

And yes, this thing is still things going on - thousands of endangered animals are getting killed, in fact some species are endangered because of these superstitious beliefs. The mentality behind an asian man wanting to treat his lacking erection by eating a tiger's gallbladder is exactly the same as someone who buys "homeopathic remedies" and wears magnetic bracelets and healing crystals...

yes and it has nothing to do with the other schools of medicine and everything to do with culture. The spanish for instance are still eating bulls balls for this reason, and during the 1900s people surgically replacing their balls with that of an animal was actually a thing and apparently relatively common. The simple fact of the matter is people are trying to "enhance" themselves irregardless of there being any medical theory involved.

Easy for you to say when you don't have cancer. And the thing is, Steve Jobs didn't say "oh, I don't want to go through all those treatments, I'd rather live what life I have left comfortably". He didn't refuse treatments to choose to be with his family, or job, or anything. No, he refused medical treatment, because he believed in alternate medicine, like homeopathy, miracle diets and such. He didn't say "ok I know I'm going to die but I'm ok with it", he wanted to be cured, but he was convinced that he could beat cancer by only using "alternate medicine".

of course he wanted to be cured that's why he was taking treatment period, but you see I'm not arguing for homeopathy or miracle diets I've been very clear in what I support which is all rather soundly based.

Later on, when the quackery wasn't working, Jobs went to get medical treatment, but it was too late by then. So it wasn't a question of not wanting to go through the treatment, it was a question of putting your faith in quackery, then coming to your senses too late and paying the price.

And yes, cancer treatment is imperfect currently, there's a chance it won't work, there's a chance the cancer can come back later... but you know what, it is the best we have - it certainly works infinitely better than alt-med quack treatments. You know what else? You know how cancer treatments are advancing all the time, how we're making big advances constantly on finding new and better ways to cure cancer - those advances are all made thanks to evidence-based medical science. Not homeopathy, naturopathy, healing crystals, astrology or alchemy...

Imperfect is an understatement at best, and it working best is a teniable statement at best as other schools are kind of lacking in the study department for effects on cancer, because studies are expensive and such schools aren't profitable for the drug companies who fund most of that work.

Again, define what you mean by "herbalism".

see above

Big news! All chemicals are derived from nature in some way. Of course, we look for new chemicals in nature. The difference between pharmaceutical chemicals and traditional herbal medicine is that the traditional medicine is a trial-and-error thing, it's based on tradition and folklore: some herb may be known as a "cure" for some illness, and it may actually work, or it may be a placebo, or it may work but also be harmful in other ways - they don't know. Because it takes medical science, pharmaceutical chemistry, neurochemistry, biochemistry, etc. to actually figure these things out, how they actually function, and which chemical (if any) in the plant (most contain hundreds) is the active ingredient responsible for the desired effect.

Just what part of medicine and science for that matter isn't trial and error in terms of development... There's a reason that medical sciences always advance whenever there's a war it has to do with the massive increase in wounded and dead thus allowing more trials a lot of which end up as failures, but then we randomly get stuff like the Sulfa drugs.

Which is an electric field and has nothing to do with any quackery concept of "vital energy".

There's energy everywhere. E=mc^2. Light is energy, motion is energy, heat is energy, sound is energy... everything in existence has some kind of energy. But none of these are the "vital energy" that is described in quackery.

Actually that electrical field is what the concept is based upon, again whether it's ascribed characteristics are true or not are up in the air but if you want to be scientific you wouldn't dismiss such things out of hand but acknowledge that it is one theory on the matter regardless of whether you agree with it or not.

No, if you're actually intelligent you'll see that that is all a huge load of bullcrap.

Okay lets spell it out for you since you're lacking the ability to get the point. The vitalitae concept when you remove the whole energy component of it basically amounts to supporting the body, reducing stress, and being non-invasive about treatment when necessary has a positive effect on the overall individual. Damaging the body, increased levels of stress, and invasive treatment has an overall negative effect on the individual.

Ooh, you use peppermint to treat stomachaches and everyone knows that peppermint works for stomachaches: wow! Now that obviously means that all the rest of the stuff that they do must be correct too, right?

Says the guy who claimed that there was no basis for herbalism and has now been forced to change his tune and acknowledge that herbalism does in fact work even if he is still holding back on it.

Nope. That's a common strategy used by nutcases, religious zealots and the like, when they don't have any actual evidence or rational arguments to back up their views (ie. always). It's the same when the Jehova's witnesses want to convert you, they use arguments like this: "look, the bible says 'don't kill', and obviously we all know killing is bad. So since the bible is right about that, all the other stuff must be right as well!"

says the guy who claimed there was no evidence for any of this and has now been forced to deal with evidence.

No one has said anything about columbus. Flat earth was a myth believed by common people during various times in (pre-)history.

Flat Earth hasn't been believed on record since at least the Pyramids, and the greeks with Socrates I believe it was, and both calculated the circumference of the world, further on that point there is no evidence to my knowledge to support the idea that any significant group of people actually thought the earth was flat.

No. The way it works is that nothing can be 100% certain. In practice however, the distinction between 99,9999% and 100% is merely academic. Since we have to draw the line somewhere, we have to accept that 99,999...% certainty as certain in practice. Which is what is actually done. We know with 99,999...% certainty that the earth is not flat. The error margin in that statement comes from things like, we might be living in a computer simulation in which case it would be impossible to say what anything is really. So mostly just philosophical things that have no real effect on anything.

it's not academic it's fundamental because science holds no pretentions about anything, particularly not about being correct which is why it's so important that it's constantly checking itself.

That doesn't mean that nothing can be disproven. Things can be disproven and are, constantly. When a hypothesis makes predictions which do not match the observed evidence, the hypothesis is disproven, plain and simple. You don't seem to understand a fundamental distinction here: proving and disproving are entirely different things. We disprove things constantly, that's how science works, how theories get advanced.

Not quite... For instance just because physics doesn't work on a subatomic level doesn't mean that physics is disproven it just means that there's an exception, and it could just be that at that moment in time the universe had a hiccup and things went haywire, again science doesn't hold any pretentions about anything. It just says what is likely and what is not.

The fact that we might get new knowledge in the future does not give you a free pass to dismiss all current knowledge. That's not how it works. What is known now is the best knowledge we currently have, and that's what we have to go by for now, until(if) better knowledge appears. If you disagree with some part of it, the burden is on your to show it false, or present a better hypothesis. You can't just assume, "well it'll be proven false in the future anyway so I don't have to believe it". That's putting the cart before the horse.

No you see unlike you I don't have those pretentions of the skeptics philosophy. For me anything is possible even magic (although magic being real... not likely) it's simply a matter of what is more or less probable based upon the data that I have available to me, you know like a real scientist not one of those silly philosophers who thinks that science has any absolutes rather than possibilities that are more or less likely.

Ok, you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

I would like you to look in a mirror

The idea that nothing is 100% certain does not mean that every possibility is equally probable. And actually, absence of evidence can be, in many cases, taken as evidence of absence - particularly, in cases where the claim is unfalsifiable. Furthermore, as it's not possible to prove the negative, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim. That is, if you're claiming that naturopathy has health effects, or that the body contains some kind of magical energy field that somehow reacts beneficently with naturopathic medicines(tm), now only $5 a bottle, or something... then you're making a positive claim and it's up to you to provide evidence for that claim, not for others to disprove it.

Sure not every possibility is equally probable but it does mean that every possibility is equally possible. There's an equality on what can be and not on what is likely to be, and on quite the contrary you were declaring a negative for all across things that actually had evidence for them, by the rules of logic any single positive case defeats a for-all and I provided several even if you then proceeded to play them off and dismiss them. So no use trying to pass the buck back to me, it's now up to you to try to prove a negative since that's the base you started from. Good luck.

Also naturopathic medicine as a school can't come in a bottle as the nature of it is a holistic examination of your life and how you can work to support the body, and I didn't know that eating right, releasing stress and trying to be non-destructive towards your body is somehow such an oh so bad idea, I should totally eat mcdonalds every day, stress myself all the hell out and intentionally pound my body with harsh chemicals yeah! Seriously though even if you don't agree with the ideas you would at least agree that the three underlying principles are good ideas yes?

[erendorn]

i wonder why western people despise homeopathy this much.. from where i come, we have big universities and colleges teaching only homeopathy. i dont think they are teaching about "memory of water" there for all these years..

Because it has actually been proven to:
- not work 'in clinical tests).
- result in some solutions with exactly zero active molecules in them (zero, none, just water).

Let's rewrite it differently:
- Nobody has any idea why it should even work;
- Nobody has ever shown that it worked indeed.

I don't know what they teach in these big universities and colleges from where you come, but the end product does not and has never worked (which is, again, proven in repeatable and repeated experiments in many countries around the world).

[erendorn]

wall of text

Again, nobody has any issues with anything that has been proven to work.
It's just that, the fact that something of a given field works does not mean that the whole field is sound and working too.
And also a bit of the fact that something which has not been shown to work should not be relied on as protection against anything (saint amulets to protect you against road accident, incantations and magic to improve your grades at school, etc...) (well, feel free to use them, but DO NOT tell people it works)

[schmalzler]

Weird discussion. But still I have the feeling something's missing.
Wait...
Yes! Honton telling us he does not believe in homeopathy because you have to sign a CLA...

[chrisb]

and that's why I have issues with it


Strawman: taking the extreme of an idea an going to argumentum ad absurdum in order to befuddle the point and knock down an idea that you try to portray the other individual as pushing

Aka exactly what you were doing.

That's reductio ad absurdum, not strawman. The difference is actually covered in that article link. Reductio ad absurdum (taking argument to the extreme) is a valid method of argument and useful for uncovering exceptions and corner cases that invalidate the main hypothesis, whereas strawman just attacks a position the person does not hold and hence isn't that useful.

[tomtomme]

off-topic!!

loooool - have you guys ever heard about something that is called offtopic?
I thought I could learn soemthing about kde4.11 performance on haswell here....

[chrisb]

Again, nobody has any issues with anything that has been proven to work.

Actually they do: placebos. It's a bit more complicated because placebos can actually work for symptomatic reduction, sometimes, but only if the patient believes it will work! And, furthermore, the placebo is more likely to work if the doctor giving it also believes it will work (doctor's confidence increases patient's confidence). It is about treating the perception of an illnesss rather than the actual illness. Even though it may work, a lot of doctors feel it is unethical, and it is not allowed in many western practices. (The most unusual use I've heard of was Sweden recognising "radiowave sensitivity" as a mental illness and "treating" it by paying for patients homes to be electrically shielded)

[valeriodean]

loooool - have you guys ever heard about something that is called offtopic?
I thought I could learn soemthing about kde4.11 performance on haswell here....

Good try, but don't expect too much.
Probably inside some medic-ish forum there are people busy to discuss about compositing and windows manager, who knows, maybe they are discussing about KDE 4.11 perfomance on haswell right now...

[ua=42]

@ mgraesslin & Luke_Wolf, etc.

Congratulations. This is the most off topic thread that I have ever seen on this site.