11 Jun
2009
11 Jun
'09
10:50 a.m.
On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
I shall not mention the hospital, but during my residency I was appalled
to discover the fetal monitors running *original* NT (this was in the days
of NT 4 + umpteen service packs and W2K just around the corner).
This was six years ago, and XP was in full swing at the time. It was made
worse becuase I remembered reading the license agreement for the version
they were using, and it included a statement that said it shouldn't be used
for this sort of task.
Zane
Probably yes - and the frightening thing is that they
are partially
right. There _are_ definitely hospital databases running on Windows
machines. If you count ATMs, then yes, there are Windows machines that
Even worse than hospital databases is the critical monitoring
equipment running on Windows. When our first child was born the
fetal monitor crashed. It was running Windows NT, and guess who had
to get it back up and running when none of the Hospital staff could.
I was not amused. I was even less amused by how ancient of a version
of the OS they had running on a very modern Dell box.