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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."

7 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. 99.84% pure pork fat by brokenwndw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  2. Should we be suprised? by Collestonpie13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    Coffee, you can sleep when you're dead!
  3. This is a poor test... by marnargulus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:OS's by stratjakt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  5. A needed survery by utlemming · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
  6. Re:Weird comparison by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  7. *nix boxes and OS X Macs included? by grolaw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.