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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."
It never has any problems and is always worki
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.
Sigs cause cancer.
I can't really remember the last time I got sick, but I'm pretty sure the treatment was not to re-image myself.
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?
Bah. It's a proven fact that 40% of sick days are taken on Mondays and Fridays. Why should my PC be any different?
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What would you excpect with most corparations running Windows adn IE?
Coffee, you can sleep when you're dead!
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 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.
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.
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.
Sigs cause cancer.
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
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.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
If my office computer doesn't use its sick days, can it use that money for upgrades?
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.
My computer will still get promoted before I am!
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.
Best Windows Freeware
I'd be out sick more often too if 99.84 percent of what I ate each day was spam.
Looks like the machines are beating us! Come on folks, we've got some catching up to do!
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
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.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
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 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.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
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.
How To Get Humans To Mars
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.
Apparently even the poster didn't RTFA - the article states:
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...
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
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 to www.hotwetsluts.com), and I've yet to get spammed on it in 4 years. No filters, either. Only one guy in our company has spam problems, and because he's an asshat who regularly "works late" ie; downloading porn.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
I like those days at the office when PCs are down. It's far more enjoyable fixing those problems than doing actual work...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
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...
.. it have its permanent dose of penicillinux.
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.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
We send them to the Steve Wozniak Clinic to detox.
I don't make much sense, do I?
--- Ban humanity.
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.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Psssh. Come out here, I'll introduce you to the 405. If the gangbangers don't kill you, the soccer moms surely will.
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
9 days of downtime.Patches = 1.5 hours/year
Virus Scan = 50 hours/year
Help-Desk - 4 hours/year
Total: 63.5 hours/year @ avg workday = 7 hours;
I was sick a total of 2 days last year.
Karma, We don't need no stinkin' karma!
if the pc's are down that long, the IT staff starting with the CTO needs to be fired. In my 3 years as a network admin I haven't had all the pc's put together down for 9 days. Especially not for something as simple as viruses.
presmike
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*
BSD is the guy everyone ignored. He died yesterday.
./, I like BSD too!)
(hey it's
I'd say that the average machine I maintain for corporate cluebies takes about an hour a week to run through scandisk, and another hour to defrag. Add on an hour to run through an Ad-Aware sweep (how the hell do they get some of this stuff on their machines... it's about time to just say 'screw it', and disable any and all forms of ActiveX, program downloading, or scripting) and you're up to three. Add an hour for the weekly full system virus scan. Add fifteen minutes to add any new Windows Updates, and another five for associated reboots (a minute here and there add up).
That gives me a total of 4:20 a week in regular maintainance. (insert pot reference, here) Over the course of the year, that comes out to just over 9 days.
Keep in mind, though, that normally this maintainance would be done during off hours. The business I have in mind, though, is open 24-7. Any maintainance has to be done while the machines are potentially in use.
My point, though, is that I can have 9 days of downtime on a machine, even without the user screwing it up.
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^)
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.
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:
PS: Don't listen to people who tell you it has a high rate of false positives. 99.84% effective, man!