KDE 4.11 Haswell Desktop Effects Performance

[chrisb]

And just what does "that you try to portray the other person as pushing" mean to you if not trying to assign and attack an individual over a position they do not hold?

Your definition said: "Strawman: taking the extreme of an idea an going to argumentum ad absurdum" - that was the bit that seemed wrong, since the definition of strawman does not involve taking the extreme.

[mgraesslin]

I'm very sorry if I hurt anybodys feeling. In German the word "homeopathic" has a figuratively meaning (see http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/homoeopathisch ) which I applied here.

[erendorn]

The problem with that Martin is that you don't intentionally misuse a term outside of it's normal meaning with intentional slight against that term without expecting a response. Be it Mark's use of Tea Party, or your use of Homeopathy.

or maybe this?

[Luke_Wolf]

No, you're here trying to defend it by silly anecdotes about surgeons.

It's not really a silly anecdote it was a really serious problem historically, and the point there wasn't so much to defend the homeopaths as to point out that allopathy like all other schools has issues.

That's not what a strawman is.

Mommy, mommy!

yes it is or do you have an actual complaint with that definition beyond Chrisb's missing or misinterpreting "try to portray the other person as pushing"

Are you an idiot? Massage is used as a part of actual medicine. It's called physiotherapy. And this classification of "allopathy" is a made up quack term, no one gives a flying fuckstick what you include in it.

I would like to know what you're defining here as "Actual medicine"

In that definition, there's nothing wrong with herbalism. It's the other definition, when used by untrained cranks, where untested herbal "traditional remedies" are sold with little to no concern to actual effects of the plants. Traditional herbal systems like chinese or indian medicine, which are full of bullshit terms like chakras. Or aromatherapy. When speaking of "alternate medicine" this is usually what is referred to.

While I'll give you chinese and indian herbalism I disagree that that's what's generally referred to and is certainly not what I'm referring to. What I'm referring to is more specifically known as Western Herbalism, and once you remove the newagers is what is normally being referred to. I will grant you though that the new agers have been a loud and obnoxious voice trying to change the definition and tarnish the school.

Actual scientific herbalism, when used properly, is not alternative medicine. It's simply medicine. The difference is, actual medicine is supported by evidence. How is this difficult for you?

It's not difficult, my issue here is two fold
1). you went and declared as a whole the fields of: Osteopathy, naturopathy, herbalism, accupuncture, massage, and homeopathy to all be quackery in a massive negative for all without even taking time to differentiate between them.
2). Just because something hasn't been studied doesn't mean that it automatically is wrong, particularly when there are things that can't actually be studied.
3). I take issue with you pushing the idea that science has absolutes even effectual absolutes when the most important core principle of science is that there are no absolutes. Even at 99.999999999...% probability you still can't say that something is an absolute, you can say that you're extremely sure that this is probably it but you can't just say that it's correct, and because this is science and not philosophy we're talking about here this isn't just some academic point, it's a core fundamental part of the identity of science.

Well you didn't seem to be, you seemed to think aspirin just naturally grows on tree bark. It doesn't, it needs to be purified and reacted with acetic anhydride. You know, sciencey stuff.

not even close and it would take quite the creative mind to interpret that from

Just for an example one of the most common NSAIDs in use: Asprin is derived from a herbal remedy of tea made from the bark of willow trees.

Bullshit again. These are "traditional remedies" part of chinese and other traditional asian medicines, ie. traditional herbalism. Bear gall bladders, tiger spleens, etc. These are all part of traditional medicine, also called alternative medicine or chinese medicine, endorsed by quacks everywhere, bought by gullible fools everywhere. Superstitious asian men want to harden their boners and tigers suffer.

Again no, that has nothing to do with herbalism at all, and everything to do with a misconception that showed up in all parts of the globe as part of the culture. Need I remind you that allopathic medicine also incorporated this misconception and as a result animal gonards were transplanted into humans.

That's why you need science, biology, chemistry, pharmacology, neurochemistry, to separate the actually working cures from the quackery. Traditional herbal remedies may sometimes work, but many of them are mere placebos and some are plain harmful. You need science to separate out the ones that work from the ones that don't. The ones that do work go on to become actual medicine, while the ones that don't keep being sold as "alternate medicine" to gullible fools, because "who needs evidence, the doctors are just trying to take your money" (says the snake-oil salesman).

Oh certainly but just because just because there's a lack of studies doesn't mean that they're selling snake oil, and conversely cases where there are studies "proving" efficacy doesn't always mean they're right. For instance Microsoft has paid for quite a few studies at this point to prove that Microsoft offers a cheaper solution than Linux, does that mean the microsoft solution is cheaper than linux? no.

No it's not. You support naturopathy which is nothing but rebranded homeopathy. The red flags are there: magical thinking, vague undefined "energies", vague terms of how it's supposed to work, no evidence or actual evidence-based methodology, no peer-reviewed studies...

Naturopathy has basically nothing to do with homeopathy, homeopathy is based on the principle of like curing like and using extreme dilutes. Naturopathy is based on the principle that good health and positive tendencies continues and promotes good health and that bad health and destructive tendencies promotes bad health. Very simple, very straight forward. Their methodology is to get to know the person, their diet, how much they excercise, things like causes of stress and so on, and then try to make things better. Now let me ask you this... just how do you study the efficacy of something so personal? Here's a hint: You Can't. All you can really do is test the methodologies such as herbalism that they utilize. Which are largely well proven, now yes some do end up trying to use homeopathy but that's not the school as a whole.

It's still the best we got and only one with actual chances of working. Try treating cancer with Acupuncture/Homeopathic/naturopathic medicines, it will not work, because those are bullshit.

Even if the chinese theory behind accupuncture is wrong, accupuncture itself is very effective for pain management. because what is being done is you're causing muscle groups to release stress points as well as releasing endorphins. That said of course it's not going to work on cancer anymore than massage will work on cancer, that's not the point of it. I'll give you homeopathy but naturopathy could arguably work to treat it, it probably wouldn't kill it but you might get a few extra years off of it

The part where millions of money, years of work, tons of resources is used for SAR studies. SAR stands for Structure-Activity-Relationship, it's a way of predicting pharmacological effects based on chemical structure of substances. There's no trial-and-error about it. Existing chemicals and their effects are analyzed and inserted in very complex algorithms to determine what type of new analogues can be synthesized to get desired effects. These are then put into trials, and the ones with best efficacy vs. lowest side-effects go into further trials, etc.

None of the modern pharmaceuticals just happen due to a chemist somewhere going "hmm, what happens if I add a methyl group here, let's try it".

That's nice for stuff based upon pre-existing compounds with known effects but for example the sulfa drugs that revolutionized antibiotics was an effort of trial and error over hundreds of dyes, granted this was the 1930s but the point remains.

Yes, the reason is science. It's the same reason why medical science is advancing at all other times, as well.

Not really the reason is that medicine is a craft, and like any craft when there's high demand people tend to try new things, science comes along later and validates it sure but an idea has to start somewhere.

It is not a theory. Theories are backed by observed evidence. It is at most a hypothesis, and fails even as that.

and their observed evidence would be the bio-electrical field generated by your body, but the purpose and effects of said field are a bit lacking in that regard

BULLSHIT. Evidence or GTFO.

"Invasive treatment" is a fallacy, a red herring. You ignore that treatment is invasive because it's necessary. For example, when your appendix bursts, you need invasive surgery to remove it. You don't heal it with "vital energies" or faith healing. But invasiveness of treatments is always assessed on basis of least necessary, eg. if something can be treated with a pill instead of injection, it's a preferred form of treatment.

I'm pretty sure that I don't need evidence to defend an explanation of a concept. Further how would I find evidence for that without shipping a naturopath to you in a box to explain to you the concept of vitalitae. You'll note that I never said the naturopaths were 100% correct and in fact that I said that all schools have their respective issues multiple times so I'm not obligated to defend their concept to you.

Also for naturopathic definitions the invasiveness of the treatment has to deal with how destructive it is. To go back to your example of an injection vs a pill, an injection causes physical trauma to the site of the injection as part of the course of giving the drugs that way on top of whatever the effects of the drugs, on the other hand a pill may cause immunosupression and some other stuff. Hence the pill would be preferred to lessen the amount of overall damage done to the body.

Now this here is a strawman argument. Your again conflating actual scientifical medicine with quackery by sticking them under the same label. Again, herbal medicines whose effectiveness is supported by evidence are fine. The ones that aren't isn't. The difference is in evidence and actual, rigorous, peer-reviewed and repeatable scientific studies. This isn't difficult you know.

Ah but you see that's not what you started this argument over, once again you declared that the following schools

Osteopathy, naturopathy, herbalism, accupuncture, massage, and homeopathy

were unconditionally and universally quackery. You were forced to recognize that massage and herbalism do in fact work and have been moving your goalposts around and are now going with "scientific medicine" as your goalposts

It's turtles all the way down. Philosophers, scientists of their time have known many things that ordinary people haven't. Knowledge wasn't as accessible to the common man in the past as it is now.

except that there's no evidence that anyone of that era thought that the earth was flat, and plenty stating that everyone knew it was round particularly in terms of medieval literature

There are STILL groups of people who seriously believe the earth is flat.

For more information, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth

Those people are a very new movement and fall into the same group as those people who think jews and lizardmen run the governments of the world: Not even worth mentioning.

It is entirely academical. Practically, it doesn't matter at all if there's a 99.9999....% chance of something being true, or 100%. We can safely assume something to be correct if it's 99.999...% likely to be correct. Because if we don't, we'd have to just assume everything to be uncertain, and while technically correct, that's not a useful way of looking things at all from a practical point of view. It's purely a philosophical argument, along the lines of "you never know, the universe might be a computer simulation" or such. Yes, it might be, but since there's no way of testing that claim, what's the point of speculating about it? That's why real science doesn't concern itself with unfalsifiable, unverifiable hypotheses. Because they amount only to thought experiments and speculation.

No No we can't, and yes we do have to assume everything is uncertain, because anything else is not real science. To do anything else results in all sorts of fun little problems like Astronomy had where Aristotle's obsession with perfect shapes resulted in orbits being viewed as perfect circles and so as a result it took until the 1600s for Kepler for this notion to finally go away because people just assumed that he was right and were afraid of being called out for being wrong, and this is exactly why it's not just some academic point it's fundamental.

And to do that checking you speak of, you need peer-reviewed, rigorous scientific studies. You don't do it by just ranting about how "western medicine is invasive we need more body thetans". No. You need evidence. Want to prove naturopathy works? Show the evidence. Show that the concepts are sane. Evidence or GTFO.

since when did I bring a western vs eastern medicine argument to the table or mention thetans?

And this advancement and checking is how we know that homeopathy doesn't work. The basic concept is flawed and unsound. It's based on belief and superstition, not hard evidence. The same thing with "vital energies", "chakras" and "thetans". The scientists have disproven the hypothesis, the claims made weren't supported by evidence, so rational people stopped believing in it. Some are still in denial.

I would love to see those studies, because last I checked it was still inconclusive.

None of this is relevant. Science doesn't make any statements of absolute certainty, but you still can't just assume that anything is equally possible. Again, we go by current knowledge, which is the best knowledge we have so far. Fundamental theories that are backed by evidence, such as the theory of evolution for example, are not at all likely to ever be disproven - they only get small corrections now, small mistakes fixed here and there, but the overarching concept stays the same.

Actually that assumption is the only one you can make in science. Here's the thing... Science itself never ever ever stated that there has to be a rational explanation for everything. That was philosophy. Science says that anything is possible even the impossibly improbable. It doesn't say that the impossibly improbable (such as magic) is correct or likely but it is always an open possibility to science. To take a perfect counter example here geocentricity this was a mainstream scientific idea that got dumped in entirety in favor of heliocentricity.

The same way we already know lots of how things work. That thing about magic is telling. You think there "could be magic". But since the hypothesis of magic is not testable, it's not a valid hypothesis, therefore irrelevant from the scientific perspective.

Not quite let us for a moment for the sake of argument consider a door that operates by magic, now this door can take you anywhere you want to go you just have to think about it as you pass through it. Now although there's no way to explain it's mechanism testing it is most assuredly possible.

Once again remember Science does not infact demand a rational explaination for everything, that would be philosophy.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russel%27s_teapot

Russel's Teapot is a hilarious fallacy, just like Occam's Razor when that's misused, and I'm going to go to the reductio ad absurdum to explain why.

According to Russel's teapot it is the job not of the people trying to say that the holocaust never happened but the job of the people who say it did to provide evidence. Alternatively it is the job of those who say that Abraham Lincoln existed not those who say he never existed to provide proof, and of course those very same people on being provided proof can demand proof that the proof is real and things get recursive from there. why? because according to russel's teapot the proof is on the positive not the negative, this is of course ridiculous and simply a skeptics philosophy circle-jerking tool.

Irrelevant.

not irrelevant, it's fundamental to science

Good grief you're an idiot. You want logic? Medicine that is supported by evidence is called medicine. It's by definition not alternate medicine. Therefore, that leaves only medicine without supporting evidence as alternate medicine. Ergo alternate medicine is not supported by evidence.

Except that's not even close to how the terminology breaks down, because what alternative means is not that it's not supported by evidence but that it's not AMA approved.

You're trying to move the goalposts, the point is that there's no evidence for homeopathy, naturopathy, traditional herbal medicines, acupuncture, aromatherapy, faith healing, etc. That you try to stick in things that actually work (eg. actual medicine that is based on plants or herbal remedies, modern evidence-based herbal medicines, physiotherapy) and conflate them with the others is just a cheap way of trying to ignore the fact that alternate medicine is not supported by evidence.

says the one who made blanket statement proven wrong, is now trying to strawman and confuse the issue while being the one actually moving goalposts

See also: "oh but of course you agree that murder is wrong and you should love your neighbours! So of course you will now also have to agree that the entire bible is correct!" ie. it's the same old tactic, give a few easy-to-agree details of your dogma, and gloss over all of the crackpottery... once you get the mark agreeing with your dogma, it's easier to convince them of the rest of it, and then you can sell them aromatherapy candles, magical stirring wands, magnetic bracelets and homeopathic foot baths... that's exactly how these quacks operate.

The point quite simply was that even though one might question the energy bit, the fundamental practices and concepts are sound even if sometimes minimal invasiveness needs to be broken at times where you need the really big guns.

No. You can exercise and relieve stress without believing in quackery about "vital energies" or "body thetans" or "chakras". You don't need aromatherapy or needles in your ears to stay out of mcdonalds. That you again try to conflate them just shows either incredible intellectual dishonesty or massive stupidity from your part.

I never said you had to believe in those, in fact all I've said is that there is a bio-electric field which there is plenty of evidence for, I left their interpretation of what the field is as being their concept as just a matter of opinion and went so far as to explain how the vitalitae concept works outside of an energy context.

Now on the other hand you have been constantly misrepresenting what I've been saying, pushing out a definition for alternative medicine which is quite simply wrong and shows lack of understanding of the situation, and in general have been making broad false statements that then are later forced into refinement as you move your goalposts around.

[Luke_Wolf]

It wasn't my intention. I didn't expect that people would start discussing homeopathy. After all I thought this is a technical discussion board.

The problem with that Martin is that you don't intentionally misuse a term outside of it's normal meaning with intentional slight against that term without expecting a response. Be it Mark's use of Tea Party, or your use of Homeopathy, you're going to get a response about the misuse of the term, and you effectively set the world ablaze once those who want to circle-jerk with you on the term begin attacking those taking issue with your misuse of the term.

and "This is a technical discussion board [I thought everyone would circlejerk with me ]" doesn't really excuse it and in fact as a technical discussion board you're going to be even more prone to inducing it because technology (and particularly computers and programming) has it's fingers in all pies.

[Luke_Wolf]

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.

And just what does "that you try to portray the other person as pushing" mean to you if not trying to assign and attack an individual over a position they do not hold?

[mrbumpy409]

It wasn't my intention. I didn't expect that people would start discussing homeopathy. After all I thought this is a technical discussion board.

Haha. Well, back on-topic: I appreciate all the work you do in KDE. I don't think a lot of people realize just how good Kwin (along with the rest of KDE) has become. It's a lot of the little things that I really miss in the other desktop environments. Just today I was using tabbed windows to organize open documents for a class I was teaching (now if only I could get tabbed windows to share a single taskbar entry...). Functions like customizable window buttons (gotta have my pin-on-top button), per-application window rules (I like Dolphin to always open at the same size & my LibreOffice styles window to be slightly transparent), and the list goes on and on.

I've heard some people complain that KDE has too many options, but I've yet to find any other desktop environment--on any os--that can match the control that KDE gives me over my workspace.

[mgraesslin]

I find it funny that the Kwin developer is the one who shows up and sends the thread off topic

It wasn't my intention. I didn't expect that people would start discussing homeopathy. After all I thought this is a technical discussion board.

[mrbumpy409]

I feel very honoured. This must be the first time that I actually trolled a thread into offtopic - and all of that without even commenting to this thread any more. I have to bow to the awesome Phoronix community.

I find it funny that the Kwin developer is the one who shows up and sends the thread off topic

[mgraesslin]

@ mgraesslin & Luke_Wolf, etc.

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

I feel very honoured. This must be the first time that I actually trolled a thread into offtopic - and all of that without even commenting to this thread any more. I have to bow to the awesome Phoronix community.