By "access" I didn't mean you would then have full access to everything on the network. By access I meant you would have an entrance point to the network and then would be able to access whatever other computers that the node you exploited has access to. Through that entrance point you would then be able to scan and attempt to exploit any computers it can access.

So it is claimed, but there are numerous cases of people breaking through heterogeneous systems so this claim is a bit lacking.

But the person has 4 gigs of RAM. 300 MB is barely going to bring up total usage on a normal system to maybe 20% which leaves you with close to 3 GB left. Your other apps are hardly going to be memory starved only 3 gigs.

And it means you are just wasting energy for nothing.

But if you have more than enough RAM to cover all the other tasks along with the torrents you are running why should you care? You seem to be complaining about usage of the system resources that is a pittance in the total pool of available memory and CPU.

Strawman argument. No where in my statement did I say anything about having full access to every other box on the network through that one node. But, once an attacker has an inlet into the network they can then move on to compromise other systems which may have greater access to other parts of the network. The simple fact of the matter is that the systems on the network are going to have to have some level of access to each other otherwise there is no point in networking them up together.

No, some of us actually take full advantage of the resources in our PCs rather than complaining about 1% of our CPU being used.

The power usage difference between something using 1% of the CPU vs. say .5% is going to be marginal at best even on a grand scale.

What's the point of buying RAM and CPU only to have it underutilized all the time? You might as well go back to only having 16 megs of RAM and a 386 if you are going to complain about 1% usage of CPU and 7.5% usage of total RAM.

Because if even one system in your heterogeneous environment is exploitable you have just given them an easy backdoor to the rest of your system. If all systems aren't patched up you've only created a false sense of security and you've increased your maintenance costs many magnitudes higher for some "security through obscurity" scheme.

So the answer is to have a solution that is a nightmare for anyone who has to maintain it? Yeah, that sounds brilliant.