On 26 Mar 2009, at 3:54 pm, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
Note that Leif mentioned medical equipment with embedded Windows
systems. And he's right -- you're not allowed to touch the software
build on those without getting the new build approved by the FDA (at
least, not if you want to use said equipment on real live
patients). And those machines are generally networked so that the
data (images, e.g.) can be uploaded. It is very, very scary. Why
anyone ever made the decision to run medical equipment on Windows
(over the screams of the engineering team) is utterly beyond me.
I suspect the reason is usually that the raw devices the equipment
uses (typically a CCD camera or something similar) are only shipped
with drivers for Windows, and the upstream component vendor won't
support the instrument vendor controlling their hardware with their
own software drivers on some other operating system. It all comes
down to support matrixes. Old ABI 377 gel sequencers used to use
Macintoshes, but that was back in the days of System 7 with a software
stack that was so terrible a single error in the network stack would
cause your entire sequencing run to be lost (which is expensive, and
sometimes unrepeatable) and the ABI 3700 move to Windows was actually
an improvement, at the time...
Tim
--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
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