[CaptSpify]

https://xkcd.com/463/

The whole structure is wrong. I used to work in medical equipment repair. Windows Embedded is running so many devices it's not funny. But it's not just Windows that's the problem.

I put a linux-system on a PACS network to diagnose equipment. It was a headless, and we asked the IT group to block it off from the Internet.

Hospital IT: "Does it have antivirus?"

Me: "..."

[SixSigma]

List of FDA medical equipment recalls for 2016

http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48...

At least three of them are Class 1 - May cause death

And all of those are software related, none run Windows

http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48...

http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48...

http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ListofRecalls/ucm48...

[kosmic_k]

That is astoundingly horrifying, especially the Class 1's which were distributed for over five years.

[SixSigma]

I read every recall, food and medical, from 2000-2015 for a university research project. tbh I'm surprised anyone is still alive !

[icegreentea]

The bar for recall is actually relatively low. Basically, when you find a fault (somehow, maybe in regular QC in manufacturing, or something bad actually happens in the field, or some engineer is fucking around), the question is "can this affect patient safety/outcome in the field". If the answer is at all not a certain "no", then you're probably thinking recall at that point, unless you can adequately root cause and contain it.

Since the nature of "oh oops" is that they tend to affect systems in ways that are not anticipated, there's often insufficient evidence to rule out danger to patients, and therefore there's a recall.

For example, if you sold 10,000 diagnostics machines, and then discovered that because of stack up of tolerances in electrical components, something like 1 in 100,000 machines will have a fault that affects the customer safety. However, because your original analysis (during design phase) did not show this problem, you never bothered recording the actual performance characteristics of 40% of the components involved in the stack up.

Now you're in a pretty awkward situation, that could result in a recall. And it could very well by that all 100,000 machines sold are just fine.

[ptaipale]

Thank you; I hadn't spotted that XKCD quote about teacher and condom, but it will be very appropriate the next time someone asks me about the antivirus in the server software we do (on Linux).