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by wfjackson 4237 days ago
I wouldn't want to risk legacy proprietary medical applications for hardware interfaces into medical devices to be running on an API re-implementation layer that could easily be missing functionality, quirks and bug-for-bug compatibility.
3 comments
derefr 4237 days ago
Why? "Legacy" implies "not a moving target." If you know the software you need to run, you can QA your API compatibility layer until it works with exactly that software.

CrossOver Office (the commercial version of Wine) is basically authored by picking particular versions of particular software that they want to get working, and then treating them as unit tests to write code against. When the program works, the library works. No more or less is needed.

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pyre 4237 days ago
I think that the point is that using this method with MS Office is one thing. Using it with medical software is a whole other ballpark. Using the medical software as a black box and 'getting it to run' on ReactOS might not be up to the level of rigor we would expect for a device that someone's life may depend on...
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stcredzero 4237 days ago
I think that the point is that using this method with MS Office is one thing. Using it with medical software is a whole other ballpark.

According to what an ex-coworker told me, you only wish all medical software using Windows as an OS was remotely well maintained, tested, and vetted as MS Office.

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pyre 4235 days ago
Moving to a different platform with possibly unknown compatibility issues could trigger bugs in the code that were lying dormant.

For example, I worked for a company that was still coming across data corruption issues from time to time after a move between a platform where all memory was zeroed by default to Linux (where it isn't). Plenty of places were memory was allocated, and just used without zeroing it, and then jamming the whole thing into a database as a string.

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cbd1984 4237 days ago
Depends on what your alternatives are. If the medical software isn't going to be rewritten, and the only alternative is an MS OS with a serious bug that's not going to be patched, you start looking around.
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dabockster 4237 days ago
This.

As for most security cases, the best security is at the network level. Endpoint protection can protect after detection, while a good firewall will burn anything that moves in the wrong way.

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Moto7451 4237 days ago
The funny thing is that this scenario exists already in the OS/2 software world: http://www.ecomstation.com/
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