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Bug Microsoft

PCs Use More Sick Days Than People 306

Posted by michael from the pcs-need-nyquil-too dept.
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."
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PCs Use More Sick Days Than People More

PCs Use More Sick Days Than People

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  • My computer is perfect (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:51AM (#9529385)
    It never has any problems and is always worki

  • Traffic stress (Score:5, Funny)

    by SIGALRM ( 784769 ) * on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:51AM (#9529388) Journal
    42 percent say they found it less stressful fighting their way through rush-hour traffic than finding legitimate e-mails among the spam

    Living in Seattle, they might think differently.

  • Weird comparison (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:53AM (#9529410)
    I can't really remember the last time I got sick, but I'm pretty sure the treatment was not to re-image myself.
    • If that was the treatment, how would you tell?

  • 99.84% pure pork fat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brokenwndw ( 471112 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:53AM (#9529416)
    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?

  • sick days. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Guano_Jim ( 157555 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:55AM (#9529432)
    Bah. It's a proven fact that 40% of sick days are taken on Mondays and Fridays. Why should my PC be any different?

  • Should we be suprised? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Collestonpie13 ( 789170 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:55AM (#9529433) Homepage
    What would you excpect with most corparations running Windows adn IE?

    • Re:Should we be suprised? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bbdd ( 733681 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:12PM (#9529643)
      one of the networks i manage runs windows and ie, and if it had a downtime of 9 days per pc, i would be replaced in short order. with 30 client machines, that would be at least one machine down for 270 days!

      the last machine down was for 2 days, due to needing a new part that i didn't keep on the shelf. (can't stock them all!) i ended up just replacing the whole machine, since i couldn't get the part faster. thats the only machine that's been down for longer than an hour during the past year (maybe longer). and, it was due to hardware failure, not windows/ie.

      the windows risk is manageable, but it does require extra cost and work to mantain. in this case, the company is willing to tighten things down to keep the machines running well and keep the less-experienced users out of trouble. call it big-brother if you want, to them its good policy to keep business running.
    • 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 ne
      • Umm, the 9 days was an average, and it didn't say it was per incident.

        Slashdot really needs to hire some statisticians who know what the fuck they're doing, to prevent comments like this from happening.

      • Re:Should we be suprised? (Score:4, Informative)

        by spooky_nerd ( 646914 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @01:46PM (#9530916)
        That sounds great, but as a desktop support drone at a major company (40,000 people) I can tell you it doesn't always work out that way. Here's what really happens:
        The user has a 4 year old CPx laptop the company won't replace because it doesn't have the budget (unless you're a director or higher). The OS gets fried from spyware, adware, viruses, etc. All the spares are ancient systems too.
        Backups and restores take longer because no one seems to keep files on any network servers. The 350 MB limit on storage space doesn't help. Those 4 year old hard drives sometimes fail, and we don't have a budget for data recovery, so it's up to desktop support to make a best effort.
        Systems are often out of warranty, so we have to scavange parts from reclaimed systems. If we can't fix a system, then we have to order another reclaim in from the warehouse, which takes at least a day.
        We have a couple loaners, but they won't have the user's files or custom programs. If it's not too busy we can transfer data from the old hard drive pretty quickly. But if there are a lot of tickets, take a number and expect to wait a few hours.
        All that adds up to a lot of downtime over a year. I had one poor guy who went through 3 laptops in 2 weeks because of this. By then I just gave him a loaner to keep since we where getting DOA reclaims.
        Oh, and as for viruses, our team here is pretty good, but we did have one virus where we had to go desk-to-desk with a patch CD. Some people where down for the entire day.

  • and the avg Mac or Linux system? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ezavada ( 91752 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:55AM (#9529439)
    How many days were they "absent".

    I bet it was a lot fewer than 9, especially if most of those "absences" were because of viruses.
    • I migrated a large office to Mac OS X last month. Unfortunately, the stupid cluebies peppered me with questions like "HOW I USE MY OUTLOOK NOW????" and "i cant see my explorer were did u put it."

      We had to spend nine days training these clueless morons about how to use Mac OS X, despite the fact that Mac OS X is substantially easier to use than Windows.

      I still laugh every time I get a message saying "MY FREND SENT ME A GAME BUT I CLICED IT AND IT DIDNT WORK CAN U HELP ME" from some retard in finance.

      Sinc

    • So, are these average? Well, they're my data! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Roadkills-R-Us ( 122219 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @02:05PM (#9531124) Homepage
      Absence per year:
      At work:
      ~250 Linux systems: 1-2 hrs/yr
      ~20 Solaris systems: 1-2 hrs/yr
      ~25 Windows systems: 2 day/yr?
      ~10 Macs: 2-3 hrs/yr
      Then again, we have serious firewalls, and bought a Barracuda spam/virus filter. The Linux downtime is almost all hardware-related (old, dying PS, cheap memory - yes, we're getting away from these). Mac downtime is mostly hardware, and one flaky OS9 app.

      At home:
      2 Linux systems: 1 day/yr
      2 Win systems: 1 day/yr
      Good firewalls, only the Linux systems have internet access. Linux systems are always on, Windows are on mostly when used, so guesstimate is for lost time. Down time for Linux systems is mostly trying something weird or adding hardware. About half the Windows downtime is for that.

      I also have a production Linux server at a colo. It's been up 499 days, and was down for maybe 2 hours the previous year. So 1 hr/yr.
      I have a good firewall for this system, too.

      Lessons? Even Windows systems can show up *if* you have a secure environment and educated, trustworthy users. We have, just today, though, implemented a "no IE" policy. And without Windows, life is even easier.

      (For the record, TCO/system at our site, and my house, is *much* lower for the non-Windows systems. 8^)

  • OS's (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blackmonday ( 607916 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:55AM (#9529440) Homepage
    I didn't RTFA (this is /.), but I wonder what the breakdown is for diferrent operating systems: Linux, Mac OSX, OS 9, Windows flavors.

    Where I work the primary reason for PC's going down is hardware, not software.

    • Re:OS's (Score:4, Insightful)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:05PM (#9529572) Journal
      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:OS's (Score:2, Insightful)

        by haystor ( 102186 )
        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.
      • 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.

        If you were running a large machine shop and one of your assembly lines breaks down, would you really want the 3rd shifter item loader to start tearing it apart looking for the problem? In most companies a computer is a tool your employees use to perform their actual job, and they have a separate sta

      • Re:OS's (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dustmite ( 667870 )

        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. normall

    • Re:OS's (Score:5, Funny)

      by lacrymology.com ( 583077 ) <[moc.gnitupmocruatonim] [ta] [mapson]> on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:12PM (#9529649) Homepage
      LINUX is that geeky guy that never takes days off, but instead sits in his lonely office with the lights turned off pounding out incredible amounts of code in record time.

      OSX is that hot geek woman that tries really hard to show everyone that she's not just a piece of meat, but instead has a brain. She never takes off either.

      OS9 is that old guy on the edge of retiring who doesn't give a $hit about doing the job. He goes to the doctor alot because of cruft, complains about new technology, and talks about the old days to anyone that'll listen. He takes off quite a bit to visit the urologist.

      WINDOWS is that guy who managed to get far in the company by taking pictures of the president of the company with a goat. He doesn't really do a lot on his own, but instead steals most of his ideas from the hot chick and the old guy and presents them to his superiors. He takes off all the time to play golf, visit his mistress, and to sleep off hang-overs.

      -m

      • Re:OS's (Score:2, Flamebait)

        by dylan_- ( 1661 )
        You forgot:

        DOS that guy who has two machine, one running windows that he never touches, and one still running DOS that he does his Real Work on. Mutters under his breath about the good old days when they still had the Novell network in place before that upgrade ("Hah!") to NT...
      • One more thing about Windows:
        He is constantly saying how the Linux guy is overpaid because you gave him $50,000 up front and you're only paying the Windows guy $10,000 a month.

        /me is looking forward to going home to my smart, sexy geek woman. [apple.com] And my fiance, too...

      • You left one out... (Score:5, Funny)

        by paranode ( 671698 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @01:41PM (#9530856)
        BSD is the guy everyone ignored. He died yesterday.


        (hey it's ./, I like BSD too!)

  • Not really sick days (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:56AM (#9529455)
    These PCs are spending more and more time binge drinking on the weekends. Macs are notorious for ending up dancing with a lampshade on its head.

  • Time well spent? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SIGALRM ( 784769 ) *
    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.

  • Yeah its always taking sickies (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:56AM (#9529460)
    My PC just cant handle its liqor at all. Damn Mac boozes all night and gets up in the morning no problem though. Its killing me trying to keep up.

  • This is a poor test... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by marnargulus ( 776948 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @11:58AM (#9529482)
    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:This is a poor test... (Score:5, Informative)

      by dylan_- ( 1661 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:08PM (#9529604) Homepage
      Not really. 2500 is plenty people; what's more important is that the sample is representative (of whatever group you want to talk about). As long as your sample is representative then 250,000 people will not give you significantly better results than 2500.

    • Re:This is a poor test... (Score:5, Informative)

      by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:09PM (#9529611)
      An online poll could have gathered more like 50,000 on a well traveled site.

      That's a bogus way to conduct a poll. By definition, you are only getting data from people who go to that site.

      It's called a "self-selecting sample" and in statistics it's a no-no.

      2,500 randomly selected sample points will give very accurate results, and in fact a lot of poll-takers would be envious of such a large sample.

    • 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.

      That's not how statistics works. Online polls are not random samples, they're self-selected, so results obtained in the manner you propose would almost certainly be inaccurate. Conversely, if you ha

  • A Tale of woe.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:00PM (#9529496) Homepage
    I'm right in with this. So far this year I've had

    2 different PCs

    3 complete PC rebuilds

    No VPN access for 5 months and authentication issues due to an Active Directory migration.

    I work in IT, go knows what the poor buggers who just have to work WITH IT have to put up with.

    As Computing professionals we should all be ashamed of the quality standards that we have allowed, and continue to allow, to be considered a production ready release. Until we have the same standards of excellence that Engineers have in the construction industry we might as well have arts degrees.

    • Until we have the same standards of excellence that Engineers have in the construction industry we might as well have arts degrees.

      Damn, that's a good line. Mind if I snag it as a SIG?

      "If contractors built homes the way programmers build software, the first woodpecker who came along would destroy civilization."
    • Actually, I tend to find the number of days that buildings are not fully functional due to pipe repairs, heating out, ac out, flood damage, etc to be highly comparable to the number of days that my PC has issues.

  • Paid Sick Days? (Score:5, Funny)

    by scoser ( 780371 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:00PM (#9529508) Journal
    If my office computer doesn't use its sick days, can it use that money for upgrades?

  • In the UK yes... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jaghatarjankare ( 787372 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:01PM (#9529517)
    the average employee was out sick seven days a year

    Oh really. The average Scandinavian is out thirty days a year and the per capita GNP is still higher. I find that figure way too low, considering the 'socialist' system in the UK that's even survived Maggie.

  • Even if that is true... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My computer will still get promoted before I am!

  • This sounds way high (Score:5, Interesting)

    by L. VeGas ( 580015 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:02PM (#9529531) Homepage Journal
    Nine days?

    That's the problem with averages. They can be calculated in so many ways. I know that I've never had a workstation down for nine days out of a year.

  • Variety (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:02PM (#9529536)
    I'd be out sick more often too if 99.84 percent of what I ate each day was spam.

  • Wuh Oh (Score:5, Funny)

    by lhpineapple ( 468516 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:04PM (#9529561)
    Looks like the machines are beating us! Come on folks, we've got some catching up to do!

  • Unreal... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:06PM (#9529575)
    9 days?? I mean, I slam MS as much as the next guy, but the AVERAGE is 9 days???

    How long does it take a tech to reimage a PC?

    Or even reload an OS??

    Are these shops with no Virus Protection at all???

    That number is so far out as to be totally unreal...

    Heck, I don't use anti-Virus software at home, just safe email practices and Firefox instead of IE, and I have yet to get an infection (Deleted plenty of attempts tho..); and my PC has never been out of service more than the few hours it takes to run a housecall scan for Virus checks..

    desiv
    • Well, average reimage time at the gov't agency I'm at is 3 days. That varies, though. Gave them a laptop in March, got it back in June.

      OS reloads take longer, because you've got anywhere from 2-5 days before you get the box back, and then usually a whole day reinstalling all your tools and apps that aren't part of the Common Computing Environment build (IBM Websphere Studio, for example, which takes 2+ hours to install on a 2Ghz P4 with 1G of RAM).

      All machines run here run AV software and are updated ni

  • Did the submitter RTFA? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Strange Ranger ( 454494 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:06PM (#9529581)
    There is nothing in the article that says the survey was for PCs in workplaces.

    It just says "A survey of 2,500 UK e-mail users found that 70 percent of users had been infected by a virus in the past year." It then relates that to average UK worker sick days. Nothing says the PC's were in the workplace.

    Which of course makes MUCH more sense. If the average PC atany workplace I know of was down for 9 days a year heads would roll. That's insane. Average PCs at my company are down maybe a fraction of a percent due to viruses because there are professionals making sure it stays that way.

    So this article is basically "70% of random HOME users were infected in a year."
    Businesses seem to have been asked only about spam.

    Doesn't seem like news at all.

  • Do I hear -- An "Apple" a day keeps (Score:4, Funny)

    by vijaya_chandra ( 618284 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:07PM (#9529590)
    you healthy, wealthy and wise!?!

    Hey! No I don't mean the shiny colourful thing on my desk
  • ...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 deali

  • Same General Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)

    by schnarff ( 557058 ) <alex@s c h n a r f f .com> on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:09PM (#9529617) Homepage Journal
    You know, when you get right down to it, computer sick days and human sick days pretty much come from the same root source: failure of proper preventative care. Us people don't go to the doctor unless we're sick, typically, because it takes up too much time out of our days to see one otherwise, and it costs too much to go when not necessary, especially with the rising costs of health isurance. By the same token, most people don't fix their computer until it breaks (and sometimes not even then) because it takes time to keep it up-to-date (yes, I know there are auto-updates on virus scanners, Windows patches, etc., but we all know those are imperfect and not necessarily widely implemented), and for those not using free software, it costs money to have an anti-virus subscription or to get a firewall (since most people don't use even MS's built-in firewall).

    The real irony is that, in both cases, the benefits of cost-preventative maintenance far outweigh the costs -- in humans, we get less sick less often, and thereby lead better lives and create less upward pressure on health insurance costs; in computers, there's less downtime, and considerably less risk of some catastrophic breakdown/break-in. Too bad people can't see this, and as a result don't do preventative maintenance.
  • 99.84 percent spam? Must be asdf.com.

    • Re:99.84 percent (Score:2, Interesting)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 )
      Vbug, a Microsoft developer support company based in the UK with just six employees, received around 720,000 e-mails messages in a month, 99.84 percent of which were spam.

      Six employees, 720,000 spams? Someone there must be a real porn hound/idiot giving out email addresses to the wrong folks. I call bullshit on that one, hell, I call bullshit on this whole article.

      I work for a small company, use my email for communicaiton with clients/colleagues (ie; what it's for - not for signing up for a free trial

  • My downtime experiences (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nukem1999 ( 142700 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:13PM (#9529658)
    I've only had downtime on one of two my machines for about 2 days. The video card self destructed.

    What's really sad is that, in my rather small local area, more than half the people have had actual downtime due to spyware. (It should be noted that all of our machines are preconfigured with IE5 and Netscape Nav 4.7. Guess which one is more popular.) While I'm not sure exactly why, it seems that some spyware can knock out our source control tools.

    IT seems to be pretty decent about squashing both mail and network based V/W/T however. They send out site-wide emails detailing the status of outbreaks too, which is kind of interesting to watch sometimes. Most of the time, an outbreak notice is sent in the AM, and cleanups are done either before I leave or before I get in the next day. Overall, I'd say ad-based malware is much worse on our time than ad-free malware.

  • correction (Score:4, Informative)

    by JustDisGuy ( 469587 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:13PM (#9529659)
    ...the average PC was inoperable due to a virus nine days a year

    Apparently even the poster didn't RTFA - the article states:
    The average UK PC is rendered unusable for the equivalent of around nine working days every year because the owner is cleaning up spam or fighting viruses.

    Our corporate workstations were affected significantly enough by virii last year to be down a total of less than a single day each. Still more downtime than we'd like, but nothing like nine days. Now spam - that's another kettle of fish altogether...

  • It's worse than they say (Score:4, Funny)

    by Crash Culligan ( 227354 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:15PM (#9529677) Journal
    If people got as sick as many computers do, when the workers caught viruses, they would dash around the office, coughing hard on everyone they run into. Everyone infected in this manner would start doing the same thing.

    The worst of them are some of those especially illegal eastern European bioengineered viruses -- if a worker catches one of those, he calls the manufacturer and leaves the doors and windows at the workplace unlocked. And then he starts sending out hundreds of emails hawking penis enlargements, breast enlargements, home mortgages, spyware, and immunizations against the most popular, common viruses.

  • I like those days at the office when PCs are down. It's far more enjoyable fixing those problems than doing actual work...

  • Computer downtime/Sickness/Safety connection... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bogusbrainbonus ( 547948 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:15PM (#9529680)
    Hmmm, this is intesting. I know that Toyota and a bunch of other major car companies have figured out that it is cheaper to immunize your employees against the flu/other sicknesses, instead of paying their wages while they're home sneezing.

    The same thing goes for safety, I know at Mercedes they're all about safety and injury prevention, which therefore prevents them from paying workman's comp without getting any value from the worker.

    So this data implies that computer trouble has become as much as a problem as sickness is, I wonder when some company is going to take a major initiative to fix this.

    And you know (, I don't wan't to blame it on windows directly, but sometimes I wonder... How many major auto companies use windows products? Ok, time to stop before I starting getting flamed...

  • My PC had no sick days this last years... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:18PM (#9529706) Homepage Journal
    .. it have its permanent dose of penicillinux.

  • I'm skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)

    by doormat ( 63648 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:18PM (#9529721) Homepage Journal
    My computer at work hasnt needed to be "fixed" by our IT staff in over a year (if you dont count patching it every week and new softawre installs). I attribute 90% of computer downtime to people downloading and installing gator/comet cursor and crap like that.

  • PCs on a Bender (Score:3, Funny)

    by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:21PM (#9529745) Journal
    The PCs where I work always seem more drunk than sick.

    We send them to the Steve Wozniak Clinic to detox.

    I don't make much sense, do I?

  • If patches are equivalent to doctor's visits my PC is one sick critter! I am not sure what a re-install would be equivalent to...
  • Um, I don't quite get the point of this thread.

    Are we trying to illuminate the deleterious effect of computers and the internet to their own improvement in worker productivity?

    Or are we trying to determine whether /. has been usurped as the biggest internet-related time waster in the typical office environment?

  • A needed survery (Score:5, Insightful)

    by utlemming ( 654269 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:24PM (#9529792) Homepage
    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.
  • Whenever I see these reports on ZDnet and the like which cite some unheard of research group found that on average companies loose 30% productivity from their work force due to spam I think of how long it took me to install Spam Assassin (an afternoon) and how long people around the office spend bitching about some popup, or their weather bug, or the v1agr4 spam they got last week (on their hotmail account), or the toolbars they got in IE that wont go away, to them its all spam and they'll spend 1000000% mo

  • Just because the PC (or employee) is healthy, does NOT imply it's being productive. I mean jeez, look at the slackdotters around here.

  • I'm suprised no one has caught onto the big news:
    the average employee was out sick seven days a year

    Considering that we only get 5 days of sick time, this is a travesty.

  • Viruses are not the only thing causing downtime (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Shivantrill ( 654978 ) * on Friday June 25, 2004 @12:51PM (#9530182)
    My personal Tally:

    What about things like BSOD when you try to do more than your "little" OS can handle? This happens to me once a week on average. Reboot takes ~10 minutes.

    Then there's the "really, really critical security patch" (no shit, that's what our IT calls them now). These require reboots many times. And since I am always working on several things at once, see above, the shutdown and reboot may take 15 min or more. I would estimate we get at least 6 of these a year.

    Once a week we have a virus scan program that runs, slowing my machine to a crawl... see above, and cuts my productivity by 30% for at least 3 hours.

    Then at least once a year, something happens where my computer may be spontaneously booted form the network, account locked or some such stuff. This requires a help[less] desk call which takes me down for at least half a day to resolve the problem.

    So the total is:

    • BSOD = 8.2 hours/year

    • Patches = 1.5 hours/year
      Virus Scan = 50 hours/year
      Help-Desk - 4 hours/year
      Total: 63.5 hours/year @ avg workday = 7 hours;
    9 days of downtime.
    I was sick a total of 2 days last year.

  • 88% = 1.3 million emails a day of SPAM (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Specter ( 11099 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @01:20PM (#9530573) Journal
    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*

  • *nix boxes and OS X Macs included? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grolaw ( 670747 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @02:31PM (#9531456) Journal
    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.

  • 99.84%, eh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by moyix ( 412254 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @03:11PM (#9531904) Homepage
    "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."

    I've got a revolutionary system to fight spam that I guarantee will be 99.84% effective for this company! It's simple, free, and uses all existing tools! Here's some sample code:

    root@mailhost# init 0

    PS: Don't listen to people who tell you it has a high rate of false positives. 99.84% effective, man!

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