On 2015-01-16 11:04 AM, Virus Guy wrote:
> Wolf K wrote:
>
>>> It's not good enough (or bad enough) that 21,000 hours a year
>>>   are wasted
>>
>> Works out to about ten person years of work. Out of about
>> 150,000,000 person years of work
>
> The great American economic recovery continues to also be a farce, with
> the actual participation rate being 90 million (not 150 million) people.
>
> The labor participation rate is currently at historic lows.

Per US Dept of Labor, the participation rate (16 years +) was about 64% 
as of December 2012, about 63% as of December 2014. Per Wikipedia, there 
were about 246 million Americans 16 years + as of 2012. So there were 
about 157 million Americans working for pay at the end of 2012. My 
estimate of 150 million person-years of work was low, deliberately, to 
account for populations growth and the lower participation rate. I'm 
ignoring part-time work, you may amuse yourself recalculating the stats 
as full-time equivalent person-years, but the results will be of the 
same order of magnitude.

> And of the 90 million that do work, very few of them earn what a typical
> IT person earns.  So your estimation of the worth of those wasted 21
> thousand hours is way off the mark.

OK, so provide the value of ten person-years of IT work as a proportion 
of total personal income in the USA. To get you started: the total is 
about $4 trillion.

> So you can stop being an apologist for the AV/AM industry.

Pushed one of your buttons, did I?

I don't "apologise" for the AV/AM industry, or any other. They can take 
care of themselves, and if they can't, that's not my problem. Or yours, 
either.

I just get pissed off at the goggle-eyed, gasping-for-breath reaction to 
big numbers. I _always_ set reported scare-stats in the larger context, 
I want to see whether the numbers matter as much as the scare-story 
writers want us to believe. In this case, no, they don't. The value of 
10 person-years of IT work is still somewhere around 1/100,000th of the 
total wages paid.

There are serious security issues, no question, but writing scare-stats 
stories about the time wasted on false positives etc won't get close to 
dealing with those issues. The failure rates of AV/AM software is much 
more important. The unwillingness of corporations to spend  the 
resources required to harden their networks is even more important. In 
_that_ context, 10 person-years of IT work spent because of AV/AM 
failures is an indication of pathetically low spending on 
cyber-security. BTW, if any "executives" are truly scared by this 
"wastage" of IT time, then they don't understand stats well enough to be 
allowed to manage any enterprise at any level.

> Others here will note that you did not quote the statistic of the 40%
> failure rate of AM/AV software.  Now imagine the number of additional
> hours being spent by very expensive IT people dealing with the fallout
> of that.

Of course not, that wasn't the target of my satire.

Have a good day,

-- 
Best,
Wolf K
kirkwood40.blogspot.ca
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