[mariodiana]

There was an article that appeared in the NY Times, a few years ago, that discusses the malfunctions of radiology equipment. There was one story, in particular, that stood out for me. It describes a, reportedly not unusual, malfunction/crash of a linear accelerator used for Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT):

"An error message asked [the medical physicist operating the device] if she wanted to save her changes before the program aborted. She answered yes."

How many programmers read that and cringe? I know I did. My guess is that the operating system being used for the device is some standard OS (Windows CE, maybe?) that is being repurposed to run the application and provide the GUI for the device. It's not that this is necessarily bad, but I would think the most important thing to do would be to strip the OS (or UI) of the various "user conveniences" that in a life or death situation could have all kinds of unintended consequences.

If a person is coding or doing graphic design -- or typing up cooking recipes -- and a crash happens, it's a good thing to have the opportunity to save your work. If 1 teaspoon of butter gets changed to 1 tablespoon because of some kind of data corruption, big deal. So your cookies come out terrible!

It's quite a different matter if the application is coordinating 120 moving parts to direct a radiation beam onto a human body.

The article is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html?pa...