"Well, consider this community hospital fubared.
IT dudes running around pulling out their hair. If it wasn't affecting patient care it would be a humorous scene-but I can't check xray's, or labs or anything. Took out a horrendously bloody gallbladder this morning, and I can't tell (labwise) if she's still bleeding...not good."
However, what are the odds of someone being able to make special-purpose machines to do everything COTS boxes are used for, and making those machines as fast, cheap, and reliable as COTS systems are now? Some things seem obvious (x-ray machines, lab machines) but accounting and record-keeping? Going back to adding machines and purely manual filing is not an option in a large hospital, especially if it has to maintain modern standards of patient care over a large patient population.
I need to think about how to exploit this to promote the installation of *nix-based systems and get people to hire my company to do it.
I'm all for nix-based systems. Please, oh please, convince these people to go to nix and web app (that aren't slaved to IE: eg, AHLTA, or Fuji's Synapse imaging software). I will give you their numbers.
I guess I don't understand the use case -- I had assumed that the computers needed to tell if a patient was bleeding or not were connected to a machine that did some kind of image-taking or internal measurement, and that that machine was the stationary "is patient bleeding machine" computer. Do doctors generally perform analyses like that one on personal computers or normal workstations? I guess I just got a false impression from medical dramas or something.
Though on the AV front it doesn't make sense to have all of your organization's computers running critical software to update at the same time (no matter what software, it just happened to be the anti-virus this time).
The Parallels windows pc on my mac was hit by this very problem. I had to restore to a 3 day old snapshot just to get it running again. I feel bad for those who were running windows bare-metal who can't just press a button and go back.
Not saying it's better, and in fact it'll be worse. The net goes down way more than the AntiVirus gets a bogus config file. But you'll see cash-strapped facilities get sold on the idea of cheaper clients on-site and a large server with a juicy maintenance package behind it.