Doc here: do you run a subversion client or an IDE on the same machine you check email or browse the web with? kind of weird to do that, right?
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 actually freelance with a group that is making a web app for viewing medical imagery. Has a Flex-based frontend, though.
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.
What if the doctor reading the scan is in another city/country? That's becoming increasingly more common.
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).
Absolutely not. I use a virtual instance of windows for that stuff. I'd never do web browsing like activities (or much network connectivity at all) on a machine that was about to compile a binary that might be duplicated thousands of times to thousands of places.
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.
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.