Quarterly profits above all else bby

This week I heard from a network group lead of a university hospital, that they have a similar issue. Some medical devices that come with control computers can't be upgraded, because they were only certified for medical use with the specific software they came with.

They just isolate those devices as much as possible on the network, not much else to do, when there is no official support and recertification for upgrading. And of course nobody wants to spend half a million on a new imaging device when the old one is still fine except for the OS of the control computer.

Sounds like a shitty place to be, I pity those guys.

That said, if you were talking about normal client computers then it's inexcusable.

The criticality of any given service is inversely proportional to how recently released was the technology that it runs on.

This, if you see some ancient machine sitting there humming, don't even make eye contact with that mf, don't even think about it. In fact, try to minimize your time in the same room so when it eventually goes tits up, you don't get blamed.

I used to work in healthcare IT until around 2008ish. Various clinics had things running on 3.11, 95, 98, etc.

For the 3.11 case, it was only controlling the door card/lock system IIRC and was not otherwise on the network, but some of the others, less so. We didn't have direct control over the sites' decisions and couldn't really enforce anything so us removing them was not possible. We did everything we could to convince the site mgmt, of course.

That's because every version of Windows since XP has been kind of dogshit

If this is the US, I believe that is a HIPPA violation