PCs Use More Sick Days Than People

lunarscape writes "ZDNet is running an article about the 'absentee' rate of PCs in various UK workplaces. According to the article, while the average employee was out sick seven days a year, the average PC was inoperable due to a virus nine days a year. The article also discusses junk e-mail's impact on productivity, with one business reporting that 99.84 percent of all incoming mail is spam."

99.84% pure pork fat

[brokenwndw]

99.84 percent of all incoming mail is spam

Is that one of the 86.55% of all statistics which are made up on the spot?

Should we be suprised?

[Collestonpie13]

What would you excpect with most corparations running Windows adn IE?

Time well spent?

[SIGALRM]

with one business reporting that 99.84 percent of all incoming mail is spam

They seem to have expended time/resources to perform such a precise calculation; perhaps it would have been better spent researching and implementing spam filters.

Re:Traffic stress

[Nixoloco]

Living in Seattle, they might think differently.

.. or Northern Virginia!!!

This is a poor test...

[marnargulus]

In the survey only 2,500 people were polled. That's an insanely small number to post concerning such a wide spread thing as computers. That is like taking a group of 100 people in New York and using that as a representitive sample. An online poll could have gathered more like 50,000 on a well traveled site.

Re:sick days.

[Elecore]

I think he meant that as a joke...

Re:This is a poor test...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sure, 50,000 responses, but it would've been a self-selecting sample. Booo to that.

Re:OS's

[stratjakt]

Here and everywhere else too. Most businesses with a firewall and properly configured network don't have problems with the virus' or trojans.

The problems are user incompetence, when some propellerhead tries to "tweak" the desktop on his workstation and winds up with everything all borked. Or the neat freaks who obsessively "clean" their hard drives of all those useless .vxd and .dll files. Or reconfigure their modems or network adapters, etc, etc..

Still, 9 days a year sounds hokey to me. Getting a virus or trojan shouldn't even take the system down a full day, such things are generally easily correctable. Of course, your average cubicle jockey will use it as an excuse to do nothing that day.

Re:A Tale of woe..

[Anonymous Coward]

You work in IT? Sure sounds like you SUCK at it. Mayhaps you're just another paper tiger who figured his crash course at DeVry would net him a six figure income?

No wonder all you folks are being outsourced to india. 5 PC rebuilds in a year. Yeah, whatever.. Blame MSFT for the "viruses" that make you too stupid to know how to make a clean ghost image that can restore the machine in 5 minutes.

It has to be more than just nine days

[upsidedown_duck]

...the average PC was inoperable due to a virus nine days a year.

Do they include all sources for down time or just the PC? For example, a PC can go down due to a local virus/worm issue, or it can go down because an important server on the network is down due to a virus/worm issue. If the e-mail server is overwhelmed with scanning, even if it isn't infected itself, then that is effectively a DOS for every PC on the network (everyone just sits there staring at a blank e-mail client).

One thing about dealing with SPAM is that filtering programs that quarantine suspicious e-mail and then send another e-mail to the intended recipient are worse than all SPAM itself. I'd rather click "delete" on some obviously rediculous e-mail about fun things to do with animals rather than have to read a cryptic quarantine notice and determine whether I need to contact the system administrator about it.

can someone say backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I don't see why anyone should compare sick computer to sick people. While people are basing new computational methods on biological systems, they're not equivalent. Any competent individual should regularly back up their files to a server or another computer. Once the computer calls in "sick", you reload your files and switch to another computer. Obviously, this is rarely the case when a person is out "sick". Even if an individual was to completely document their daily workings, there's still the subtle workings of an individual's thought processes that simply can't be transferred via documentation. And we can't do a brain core dump...yet.

Re:OS's

[haystor]

The virus scanners on the computer I used at my last job used up 3-5 hours of CPU time per 8 hours I was logged on. This means viruses and their solution consumed a minimum of 37% of the CPU hours my computer was capable. Of course running Lotus Notes used up the rest, and I just sat there for a year.

Re:Should we be suprised?

[dasmegabyte]

I would expect them to have IT staff who knew what the fuck they were doing. 9 days of sick time per PC? This is regoddamndiculous. If a PC in our office has even ONE DAY of downtime, it's a problem.

But we're a small business. We don't have a single machine to spare, and most of our staff is smart enough to reimage their own shit. Many corporate offices have a ton of extra machines thanks to downsizing. I suspect these numbers were skewed thusly: the IT staff had their PCs in a sort of queue, with newly imaged machines ready to go at all times. Somebody gets a virus, he gets a new computer immediately. Meanwhile, his virus ridden machine goes at the bottom of the "rebuild these when you have time" pile. If you were to combine all the time those PCs were sick, yeah, I could see that approaching 9 days.

Wait, no I can't. I can't get over this statistic. NINE DAYS to fix a dead machine? It only took 3 days round trip for Apple to replace my laptop's logic board and screen!

A needed survery

[utlemming]

Something that would be interesting is to calculate the down time of home PC's and compare that to the down time of corparate PC's. One would hope that Corparate PC would have a longer up time. However, I know for a fact, at least in my case, that I keep my home PC (both my Windows and FreeBSD box, although my FBSD box has had an incredable uptime of about 8 months) running better. Even though I have the ability to make sure that my work PC is running top notch, I just don't have the time at work to make sure that it runs top notch. There seems to be a delicate balance between keeping the computer running just enough to get my work done and having a top notch, well optimized system. I guess since I am not an IT worker I can not justify having a pimped-out, well optimized computer. Nonetheless, comparing uptimes of home and work PC's would be absolutley entertaining.

Re:This is a poor test...

[dylan_-]

The article is a news article. They very rarely explain the methodology behind a survey, but since they do talk about a company with its own domain I suspect they didn't just talk to people who "use Yahoo email as their primary email".

And nowhere in the article does it explain where they get this "the average PC is teh broke 9 days a year" business. Methinks they pulled it from their ass.

...or maybe they pulled it from the report from the research company?

Actually, had a quick look at your other posts to this thread. Looks like you're trolling again...oh well...

Re:Weird comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

knowledge != intelligence

I am sick and tired of listening to "nerds' spout out this nonsense. Just because you can compile a kernel or know how to program in 10 different languages does not mean you have some high level of intelligence.

Intelligence is about application of logic. Intelligent people have more of a capacity to understand logic. I am not saying the slashdot croud isn't generally more intelligent than your typical person but computer dorks in all my cs classes think that they are all a genius (while they have trouble with calc 1 and other liberal arts courses). I see this in hundreds of posts on slahsdot. Most people here are mediocre. Just because you are a nerd does not mean that you have attained a more enlightened state. It just means that you have interests in something society unjustly characterized as "special" or "complex." Just about anyone can learn how to do most of the crap we know how to do. They just don't enjoy it as much. And so I Ramble On....

I can't stand elitists.
I wish i was registered so i could see how much i am flamed.
T

Re:99.84% pure pork fat

[Pieroxy]

Given the "+5, Insightful", I'd say there are at least 4 moderators that don't get it either.

Re:Weird comparison

[mbadolato]

Yeah, for this kind of audience. I laugh out loud at least once every time I read /. and I wish other people could understand some of the humor here but it won't happen. I think the majority of readers here are blessed with a higher level of intelligence than the rest of society.

It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with, we're part of the same field of interest and thus understand what's being implied.

If we were sitting at a table and overheard a group of brain surgeons telling a story and one said something like "...and he tried to use a WZ427 blade for the incision!!!!!!" and they all started laughing hysterically, we'd be like "WTF???".

That's because we don't know the subject matter, not because we're less intelligent.

88% = 1.3 million emails a day of SPAM

[Specter]

Coincidently, this morning I happened to overhear our email folks (in my day job) talking about our SPAM rate. We're up to 88% now. That represents 1.3 million of the average 1.5 million messages we receive per day.

*sigh*

Re:Weird comparison

[recursiv]

... My wife, who definitely doesn't fit in with the rank-and-file sheeple that make up the bulk of society, ...

And don't get me started on people who use the word 'sheeple'. Let me give you a hint, buddy. You're not as far above the average as you think you are.

*nix boxes and OS X Macs included?

[grolaw]

I have serious doubts that the survey included machines with stable operating systems.

I would hazard a guess that the wintel world wants it that way...

Somebody gets paid to remove the malware.

Re:Weird comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets look at it like this...

Would you consider an auto mechanic a highly intelligent person?
sometimes maybe they are but generally they are not because most PEOPLE are not. They just know alot of shit about cars. They can baffle me with engine talk just like most of us can baffle them with computer talk. There are a select few of people here are very intelligent and apply that in the computer field (Im not talking about them). Im talking about the average joe that lives at this site only because he likes this kind of crap.
Basically what i saying is that no matter what field you look at there will be close to the same number of really intelligent people and everyone else.
T

Re:OS's

[dustmite]

Still, 9 days a year sounds hokey to me. I would say a badly infected system (lots of adware, spyware etc) can easily take up to a day, especially if you have to install service packs etc. on a system, which takes long just sitting and waiting. But you're right, even if 1 day per incident per machine, 9 such 'incidents' per year sounds like a lot.

But you've missed an important point: the problem with the "the latest Windows worm" hitting your company is that when it does, it tends to hit BIG, i.e. normally nearly everyone gets infected at once (e.g. because it hits before the Windows Updates and/or AV updates for the exploit/virus are available). Now (for obvious economic reasons) the IT department of any company is only staffed sufficiently to handle day-to-day average workload, not hundreds of systems going down at once. So suddenly the IT department is hugely overloaded, a handful of people trying to clean hundreds of infected machines, just not possible, so now 1 day easily becomes 3 or 4 days to get round to all the machines. So now it only takes two major Windows worms per year to reach 7 or 8 days, plus another day or two on average other normal downtime, re-install time etc.