Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Evidence-based medicine (Score 1) 1064

Actually, the whole concept of cancer screening is questionable. For example, you often hear the idea that catching cancer early extends your life span. However, the reality is that cancer has a time line of something like 20 years between the time you get it and the time it kills. If you catch the cancer at year 15, you will have five years to live, even without treatment. If you catch it at year 5, you have 15 years to live even without treatment. This biases the treatment statistics and makes it appear that catching it at year 5 gave the patient 10 extra years of life. This makes everyone think catching early is always best, but unless you take into account the natural life time of the disease, really don't know if treatment helps. Now if catching it early gave you 30 more years of life on 20 year disease, that would be real evidence of successful treament.

Comment Re:CPU Driver Problem? (Score 2, Informative) 542

Actually, a "CPU Driver" would probably contain code to handle specialize features of certain CPU's. For example, in order to take full advantage of Hyperthreading, you would need different code to distribute threads between the two virtual processors. Likewise, there could be additional code to take advantage of extended instructions sets like MMX, SSE, 3DNow, etc. At the very least, it could contain information about which features are available in the CPU.

Slashdot Top Deals

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

Working...