Weekly Edition
Return to the Press pageSponsored link
Vyatta –
Linux & Open Source
Alternative to Cisco –
Advanced Routing,
Firewall, VPN, QoS..
Free Download ->
| |||||||||||
Healthcare Experts Question Open-Source Apps (LinuxInsider)
LinuxInsider
discusses a reluctance in moving to Linux and open-source code
by the health care industry.
"Health-care organizations are not planning to replace their Unix or Microsoft operating systems with Linux, said Massimiliano Claps, senior research analyst at IDC Canada, adding if that's going to happen, it's going to happen first with Unix. Despite the much-touted advances open source is making in various government IT projects around the globe, it's not even on the radar when it comes to electronic health records, said panelists at the recent e-Health 2005 Conference." (Found on
LinuxMedNews.)
(Log in to post comments)
Healthcare Experts Question Open-Source Apps (LinuxInsider) Posted Jul 21, 2005 16:30 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Umm... to the editor: you might want to remove the IBM ad from the middle of the paragraph there.
Healthcare Experts Question Open-Source Apps (LinuxInsider) Posted Jul 21, 2005 16:38 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Is it just me or does the self-styled "LinuxInsider" site (whose title makes no sense because I doubt highly that Linus or Alan Cox or anybody like that have much of anything to do with the site...and anybody who wants to title their site as an "insider" already has advertised that they're not...but I digress greatly) have a lot of "lots of people have big scary doubts and fears and uncertainties about Linux" articles?
LinuxInsider's Motives Posted Jul 21, 2005 20:21 UTC (Thu) by sir99 (guest, #3286) [Link] Linux Insider has been discussed before. It's been intimated that they are paid shills for Microsoft, but I don't recall if that claim was ever substantiated.
LinuxInsider's Motives Posted Jul 21, 2005 21:22 UTC (Thu) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link] I've exchanged a few flaiming emails with someone who supposedly doesn't work for LinuxToday but had two, (2) of his news submissions posted yesterday! Often they are blatantly pro-Microsoft. LinuxToday has been dropped from Mandriva site twice for carrying and promoting Microsoft products.
This is all is looking more and more like how Microsoft paid people to work in the OS/2 usenet groups. At first giving out helpful advice then subverting entire threads pro-Microsoft.
So when the noise exceeds the sound ratio, consider that maybe but not always there is a Microsoft $ behind it. Hence M$.
Healthcare Experts Question Open-Source Apps (LinuxInsider) Posted Jul 21, 2005 17:50 UTC (Thu) by thompsot (guest, #12368) [Link] From the article: It didn't take long for the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals in the U.S. to reach the same decision, said Louise Liang, Kaiser's senior vice-president of quality and clinical systems support. "We looked at open source and saw there was no support for continuous upgrades," she said. "It was a 30-second, 'Oh, right,' and there was a whole list of reasons why open source was not a good choice." I'm stunned. Way to abstain from near-ubiquitous information there Louise... I'm sure Kaiser is proud to be the beneficiary of those research skills.
Healthcare Experts Question Open-Source Apps (LinuxInsider) Posted Jul 21, 2005 19:00 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] It is at least possible that "no support for continuous upgrades" was a poorly-phrased way of saying "no support for patching or upgrading a running kernel".
Healthcare Experts Question Open-Source Apps (LinuxInsider) Posted Jul 21, 2005 21:58 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link] "It is at least possible that "no support for continuous upgrades" was a poorly-phrased way of saying "no support for patching or upgrading a running kernel". This seems sufficiently implausible the we can safely consider it to be impossible. Neither Windows nor any major versions of UNIX have this capability whereas there have been some unofficial patches (kexec()) for Linux that have explored the possibility. In fact I think we can safely say that the whole statement was a red herring, an excuse to justify a foregone conclusion whose only real basis was an existing prejudice. At this point the IT for large healtcare institutions is ensconced. The major concerns are political rather than financial or practical. There is quite alot of concern about liability, HIPAA and regulatory issues which are a fertile breeding ground for a culture of over-priced, under powered, egregiously complex software and service offerings which are long on vendor lock-in and very short on flexibility, robustness, or other features.
JimD
Healthcare Experts Question Open-Source Apps (LinuxInsider) Posted Jul 21, 2005 23:31 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] There are more options in this world than Windows and Unix/linux. Some of the major systems here at the medical institution where I work are counterexamples to your conlusion of impossibility. They are OpenVMS clusters, and yes they can be upgraded on-the-fly because the cluster runs continually while individual machines are upgraded. You may scoff if you like, but this is indeed seen as an important feature.
Linux has a way to go before it can support this level of clustering, and I'm not sure it's really aiming in that direction anyhow. CPU hotswap is being worked on, so hardware upgrades may be possible on-the-fly, but so far as I know this is a separate issue from continuous operation across a kernel upgrade.
Healthcare Experts Question Open-Source Apps (LinuxInsider) Posted Jul 22, 2005 0:30 UTC (Fri) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link] OH PLEASE!
Not another tired old "Linux can't myth"!!
Geeze these people have been doing it for AT LEAST five years:
http://www.scyld.com/platform_overview.html
And stop this "Linux can't" crap! If you can imagine IT, someone else has done IT, just because you've never heard of IT, doesn't mean that someone else hasn't already made IT, the cornerstone of their business!
Got IT?
Geeze..
Scyld is a master/slave system. Posted Jul 22, 2005 1:04 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] It's not clear to me that the Scyld system allows a live kernel upgrade or migration of the 'master node' -- I'm wading through white papers and I haven't found it. This is a supercomputing cluster rather than a symmetric load-balancing database cluster, which is what medical information users would require.
Master Node Redundancy is a Future Enhancement Posted Jul 22, 2005 1:18 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Got it, in the Future Enhancements section of the technical overview pdf:
So it's a planned feature, not an exising one.
Continuous operation across a kernel upgrade Posted Jul 22, 2005 0:47 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Process migration tools exist for Mosix clusters which allowa "single system image" to continue to exist while individual machines are taken down and brought back up. I'm not sure if Mosix allows the machines to be running incompatible kernels though.
Xen or VMWare would allow the clustering tools to be used
Continuous operation across a kernel upgrade Posted Jul 22, 2005 6:33 UTC (Fri) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link] > I'm not sure if Mosix allows the machines to be running incompatible kernels though.It doesn't. Furthermore, I doubt that SSI clustering is necessary for these kind of applications. Probably the Linux-HA project would be more relevant. From the FAQ: HA (High availability Cluster) - This is a cluster that allows a host (or hosts) to become Highly Available, that means if one node goes down (or a service on that node goes down) another node can pick up the service or node and take over from the failed machine.
|
|||||||||||