[nycbug-talk] interesting read

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Sun, 22 May 2005, Jay Savage wrote:

> The pacemaker argument is a bit disingenuous, though.  The post was
> about healthcare IT, and since the author is involved with jsyncmanager,
> etc., I read that as infrastructure.  So the real question is: when you
> walk into an emergency room and the workstations at the nurses station
> are running Windows 95, does that give you a great feeling of
> confidence?  When the screens above the station showing the EKG output
> from various beds are XP desktops with consipcuous blank spots and
> windows that say "this program has committed a sharing violation", is
> that a good thing?  I've had both happen in the past six months, and the
> answer in both cases is "no".  I don't want the workstation where the
> doctor is looking at my medical records to suddenly display BSOD.  I
> don't want it to have a kernel panic, either, but which is more likely?
The above is hardly IT. I've made this point before: There's healthcare 
IT, which is no different from all other IT environments - and human lives 
do not depend on it. Open Source is just as applicable there as in any 
other IT environment.

What you've described above, particularly EKG output, *is* life-critical, 
as in, malfunction of software can result in death. There, I would say 
there is far less benefit of using open source software.

That's all.

-alex