" i've seen management say 'yes' to every demand and timeline from a client, then go to the techies and say the client is clueless and stubborn and insist that corners be cut to meet the deadline."
My experience is a little more insidious in terms that the things I want to do are 'not what the customer wants'. Speaking to the customer, you find out that there's a huge translation problem in terms of hitting their expectations. Removing the manager has meant more targets hit.
These days I try to get up as far as I can in the food chain so I can actually judge what the customer wants and needs...this would be nigh on impossible in a true corporate setting.
One other cute one was when I was asked to quote for a job, told my estimate was too high and had it overridden...only for the job to cost a bit more than my estimate because I wasn't told all the parameters.
Yes, I'm looking for another job, but not because of pink slips, but because I can do better.
"Thus they do things like spend half the license fee [a tax on TV owners in favour of the BBC] on Premiership football [ie Soccer] which is a huge advert in itself."
Bear in mind that the reason why Soccer became so expensive was because of Sky outbidding everyone else in an effort to corner the market; just after the dotcom bubble burst, the prices started to fall, but not within the reach of ITV, so the BBC is essentially the only real bidding entity in what would otherwise be a fairly nasty little monoculture. Sky family pack subscribers subsidise the sports channels to the tune of 50-60%, and while I'm with you on supporting the multimillion wage cheques, it's just how things have played out. Sooner or later a change will come.
"However, they advertise their own programs"
Yeah, that's 'branding'. It's one of the things that they do to increase their viewership figures to stop the government talking about more reforms, because the government hates having an independent body that might be critical of it and they're just looking for an excuse. That was the terrible thing about the Hutton report and it's effect on Greg Dyke.
"If I remember correctly, the crew compartment is supposed to be able to survive and land independent of the shuttle itself."
You don't. There is an SOP for bailing out, but it was removed fairly early in the history because a need to bail out would be outweighed by the survivability.
"I'm sure there are at least one or two other countries COUGH N. Korea & China COUGH who would like nothing more than to code a functional exploit."
Why? Because they're 'evil'? You really have to calm down those blanket generalisations
"Can you imagine how trivial this will make corporate espionage?"
Corporates. Big places, lots of money for security, tend to know a little about encryption? Corporate espionage is a little more about approaching employees with wads of cash and reverse-engineering than it is about hacking.
"The effort required to break MS's implementation of RC4 is trivial"
And getting more trivial with each increment in speed. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that the recent SQL worm went from 100K portscans per day, to just under a million in _three_ days. That's significant, as is the size of botnets. Soon we'll have distributed computing botnets doing bruteforcing. Just logically extending the horizon, because for every couple of thousand spotty teenagers, you have a couple of talented types who crack becaue they can.
"You didn't really go there to "extend freedom and democrocy". You went there to catch terrorists who had attacked you and to topple a regime which harboured these terrorists, and world agreed that you had the right."
Wiping out the poppy crop and getting rid of the miserable gits that were trying to blackmail the US government was a side effect. The former didn't happen because rebuilding funds got diverted, and the poppy crop has increased because it's cold hard cash. The Taliban used to burn the fields when they could be bothered.
"You seem to be the only one buying into your fairytales about "extending freedom and democracy", when in reality you just support dictators usually."
Chill out a little. The situation is one of extended propoganda being fed to people who desperately want to be on the side of right, good and democracy. It shouldn't become personal because someone believes what their country is doing is right.
"Last I checked one of them actually became an ally despite having WMDs and caught profilerating the nuke technology *and* being a dictatorial regime, which had actually toppled the previous democratic government via a military coup."
Apart from the proliferation, you could have been describing Iraq from 1982-1992. Qassim was the anti-west proponent that wanted foreign troops out after he killed King Feisal II. Hussein was considered more 'west friendly'.
"If you read official NASA stuff, you will find that the space suits are there to keep the guys warm in the cold of space. That is total BS."
No, they're for temperature _regulation_.
"One of the other things is that your blood will boil or explode in space. Thats not true either."
If you put blood in space, it would boil if there was temperature input due to a lack of pressure. If there was no temperature input, it would freeze.
"All thats needed to protect the skin is a thin layer of something like a cheap wet suit."
You mean porous, non-protective neoprene which is generally used as an insulator by divers rather than it's ability to keep water away from the skin, which is why it's called a 'wet suit'?
"There have been studies that show thick rubber gloves would work fine for the pressure"
Lack of pressure...
"The real mechanical problem is keeping the head protected along with proper containment of everything the body is trying to get rid of.
Of course the real problem is all that radiation."
Nice. But I think they real thing that we need to know is which school system let your parents down this badly?
"actually creating hybrids (which will inevitably has a short and painful life) is really sick."
Tell that the the St Bernard, bulldog and other species of animal whose lives are short and riddled with painful conditions brought on by inbreeding and reinforcement of negative traits.
"Somehow, I'd take an army of manual labourers and people who can survive in harsh environments over a group of people who dwell in darkened basements anyday."
Unless they start giving them gloating lessons and severe self-esteem issues.
"Here's one for you: would the American revolution have succeded without the financial backing of slave owners?"
...was the question posed by the 2042 copy of the encyclopedia galactica referring to the 2012 American revolution.
Anyway, don't be silly. The market for cotton at the time was largely domestic, and the real finance for the revolution came from overseas contributors, most notably the former ally that people called cowards a few years ago for not bombing an industrial country back to the iron age. We'd term them 'foreign fighters' nowadays, an they'd slip into the grey area between 'human' and 'vegetable', because veg don't need due process.
History is the thing you learn from, or you repeat the process. Good thing that most of the plaudits go to football stars.;)
"I think most of the "let it die!" crowd has either never seen the third season"
I gritted my teeth through all of them, but Season 4 jumped the shark with 'Philadephia Experiment II'. In fact, if you consider that some of the educational channels are filled with sharks and Nazis, there's a bit of a link there.
However.
Season 4 has picked up a lot. Arik Soong was a great addition, there's been a turning point for the vulcans and we've just met the Organians. They're dealing with canon, rather than introducing a race that noone has ever seen before and get into the time-travel lark early, which seriously, seriously annoyed me. The story should be about the foundation of Starfleet, not improbable odds; it just makes it feel tacky.
"Oh, Archer's dead. No he isn't"
"DON'T TAKE THE TREK UNIVERSE TOO SERIOUSLY."
Then let it die.
"Well, how crappy, bland, and predictable do you think the show would be if everything went exactly as foretold?"
Oh, do the flipping research. Stories are split into three parts, with the last half of the last part being the solution and wrap up. Apart from the multi-part episodes it's a reduction to set pieces within the context of a soap-opera in a spaceship. Compare that with the multi-arc monstrosity that was Babylon 5, the hidden agendas of BSG or even the compelling moral dilemnas introduced by DS9. Enterprise isn't even on a par with the quality of storytelling those series showed. Hell, it even took Voyager a couple of seasons until Seven arrived. T'pol whipped her shirt off in one of the first episodes.
That's unpleasant when you consider that the grab pot contains battles between every major concern right up to the intervention by the Organians and where exactly is Starfleet? At the moment it looks like Archer has his own Admiral. These are the critical events in the ST canon, not a temporal cold war that nobody knows about...there's a huge grab bag of ideas and concepts that they've ignored in favour of flashy effects and 'nudge, nudge' style self-referential masturbation in how they came up with 'Red alert'.
The main problem I have isn't with the ST canon, but the quality of the story told, and Enterprise is coughing up blood if they keep having to try and drag it's seriously obsessive fanbase back with gimmicks like more time travel for old characters.
"Did this guy forget that NVidia is designing the GPU for PS3?"
"Both companies are jointly developing a custom graphics processing unit (GPU) incorporating NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce(TM) and SCEI's system solutions for next-generation computer entertainment systems featuring the Cell* processor."
Joint development means close collaboration; if Nvidia are the first to lever cell into their GPUs, they could nail ATI to the wall.
"Cell based products won't be available anytime soon either."
They'll be announced in March, but not on a 65nm die.
"I love this kind of articles where some future products are compared against current ones and declared as a clear winners..."
I love anonymous cowards that skim articles and speak from a position of ignorance. Or stupidity.
"i only pull out MDs to check to see if there are any songs I'm still "missing" in my mp3 collection."
It's part of my digital->analogue->digital route for when DRM kicks off, so mine feeds back into the PC. It's also pretty much a good quality 'lowest common denominator' for interconnecting. I still love my MD player.
"Please explain, then, why I had to fill out a form saying where I would be staying when I flew into London from the US?"
We like to know your movements.
Seriously, this is an immigration requirement for every country because it's the first place they look when you fail to return. The majority of this recent 'security' crackdown is immigration. I once spent 45 minutes in an office when I was fourteen because I was travelling with friends rather than my family.
However, Cory's experience was probably a simple method of getting qualified postal addresses for spamming. How the hell are they going to check those addresses exist?
"But really, all this guy did was complain to his ISP."
Actually he defamed the other party, which is two counts of the lawsuit. The interference with contract was the ISP, but that's covered under their ToS, which it should be fairly simple to produce as evidence. The defamation counts are the real doozy, though, and are why you never get personal in complaints. Admittedly I did report a portscan from home.nl using the words 'They need to learn some networking', but it was absolutely true.
The spammers are learning the loopholes behind the weak-ass legislation, but the most important one is getting the other side to _prove_ opt-in without a shadow of a doubt. Getting their email list through discovery might be handy, though.
"To have Janet Jackson go through her simulated sex show with justin timberlake"
Wow, are you doing it wrong. Just remember that touching isn't sex; A president proved that.
"isn't exactly the behavior parents want children to see,"
But bombing arabs is okay, because you can't see the nipples.
"If your daughter went to school the next day and had her top ripped off, what would you say then?"
As it happened, have the states been deluged with top-ripping incidents? No. Instead you gave MTV a scad of publicity over the glimpse of a nipple.
"Let me guess, you are a liberal UKer and only us USians would get uptight about such a thing right?"
Firstly, you can't apply your perceived value of 'liberal' to the UK. Second of all, YES, get a life and worry about other formative influences that your kids could pick up on rather than a nipple showing incident. FFS, I'm guessing that you reinforced the whole nudity thing when they hit five, so why bother about Janet Jackson.
What makes us worry is that the US tries to apply it's twisted moral code across the world with absolutely great results. And remember, if you're six feet away, it isn't sex.
"list of some things you can do with Solaris but not with Linux"
Hey, you think this could be because Solaris was a closed source product for a while Linux is a re-engineered unix?
"those responses suggested a frightening thought for future exploration: that the knowledge gap between the Linux and Solaris communities might be much bigger than I think it is."
I can see why that would keep you up at nights, but consider that the vast number of Linux users you heard from are the next generation of sysadmins and that software moves on. Or are you still using supercalc?
"Honeypots in no way help you secure your machine against known attacks."
Fusion toroids don't change the price of gasoline, but they're still regarded as a fairly valid research project; likewise honeypot projects are interesting research that is being applied all over the place.
The real question is why you're so vociferously opposed to them. False sense of security?
When all the linux boxen get owned, you can have that warm fuzzy glow that people fell for the 'honeypot scam', but until then, people like myself will take any scraps of information that we can get from security sites, script kiddies and honeypots to keep this lovely arms race rolling and spend an inordinate amount of time explaining hygiene to people with windows boxes.
"Honeypots are good for nothing. Unless..."
Unless? Unless is information. Ignore it at your peril.
"No, there's just more losers out there trying to break into random Windows XP boxes than there are losers out there trying to break into random Linux boxes."
Steve Ballmar said much the same thing, but I'm currently capturing more attacks against my BSD server than I am my windows box. Do you have anything to base your claim on?
Conversely, there are thousands of *nix servers out there carrying web content that represent a fairly easy target for 'crackers'. You might be mistaking the horrendous security profile of windows in daft social engineering attacks (click here to see nude girls) rather than cracking per se.
"If you actually went and asked a representative sample of script kiddies"
Or read what they put on their BBS'. A lot of fun sometimes because the majority have no clue, but it's important to watch the talented ones.
"About the only good thing that could ever come out of The Honeypot Project is previously unknown attack methods."
And IP addresses of the attackers. Sure, some will be proxies, but a nasty email from the ISP would start the cleansing process. I reported five IP addresses last night that belonged to ISPs with my log files.
"They use their zero day exploits to attack specific machines for a specific purpose, because they know that every time they use the exploit the run the risk of it being discovered."
I've never seen a 'zero day' exploit hitting anything but the security sites for Kudos and a method of expanding your CV, but I bow to your greater knowledge of the subject. Incidentally, a local exploit to get root would mean that you weren't jailing users, and you'd be unlikely to ever see the original script that created the rootkit.
"Yes, not knowing the complete morse code and not being able to follow a 20wpm conversation does not mean you can't explain why it works so well."
Okay, I'm guessing that this is the pre-school HAM License, then? It seems a bit redundant to know why it's a good thing without actually studying it, or requiring that people study it. After all, it's the simplest method of binary communication around with dizzying applications in a pinch.
"The fact that I only know a handfull of characters doesn't change that."
So you have no real practical use for the knowledge, but it's handy if it turns up in trivial pursuit?
"I've never understood where this idea that Apple Pie is American comes from."
Like the UK has the idea of 'Merrie England', the US has a fondly recalled sense of nostalgia for the heydays of the 1950s, when the bad guys wore black. This tends to pull in the idea that Apple Pie is quintessentially American, or at least indicative of the culture.
What disappoints me is I get more replies to mildly flamey post than I do to my reasoned and researched ones.
Slashdot Mirror
" i've seen management say 'yes' to every demand and timeline from a client, then go to the techies and say the client is clueless and stubborn and insist that corners be cut to meet the deadline."
My experience is a little more insidious in terms that the things I want to do are 'not what the customer wants'. Speaking to the customer, you find out that there's a huge translation problem in terms of hitting their expectations. Removing the manager has meant more targets hit.
These days I try to get up as far as I can in the food chain so I can actually judge what the customer wants and needs...this would be nigh on impossible in a true corporate setting.
One other cute one was when I was asked to quote for a job, told my estimate was too high and had it overridden...only for the job to cost a bit more than my estimate because I wasn't told all the parameters.
Yes, I'm looking for another job, but not because of pink slips, but because I can do better.
"Thus they do things like spend half the license fee [a tax on TV owners in favour of the BBC] on Premiership football [ie Soccer] which is a huge advert in itself."
Bear in mind that the reason why Soccer became so expensive was because of Sky outbidding everyone else in an effort to corner the market; just after the dotcom bubble burst, the prices started to fall, but not within the reach of ITV, so the BBC is essentially the only real bidding entity in what would otherwise be a fairly nasty little monoculture. Sky family pack subscribers subsidise the sports channels to the tune of 50-60%, and while I'm with you on supporting the multimillion wage cheques, it's just how things have played out. Sooner or later a change will come.
"However, they advertise their own programs"
Yeah, that's 'branding'. It's one of the things that they do to increase their viewership figures to stop the government talking about more reforms, because the government hates having an independent body that might be critical of it and they're just looking for an excuse. That was the terrible thing about the Hutton report and it's effect on Greg Dyke.
"BBC is government funded.. It owes it to the people to have the shows available."
Actually it's publically funded, from the pockets of the likes of me, and I _really_ want them to throw everything open.
Hell, you can listen to radio shows after you've missed them at the moment by nipping onto the website, which is so handy that it's scary.
"If I remember correctly, the crew compartment is supposed to be able to survive and land independent of the shuttle itself."
You don't. There is an SOP for bailing out, but it was removed fairly early in the history because a need to bail out would be outweighed by the survivability.
"I'm sure there are at least one or two other countries COUGH N. Korea & China COUGH who would like nothing more than to code a functional exploit."
Why? Because they're 'evil'? You really have to calm down those blanket generalisations
"Can you imagine how trivial this will make corporate espionage?"
Corporates. Big places, lots of money for security, tend to know a little about encryption? Corporate espionage is a little more about approaching employees with wads of cash and reverse-engineering than it is about hacking.
"The effort required to break MS's implementation of RC4 is trivial"
And getting more trivial with each increment in speed. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that the recent SQL worm went from 100K portscans per day, to just under a million in _three_ days. That's significant, as is the size of botnets. Soon we'll have distributed computing botnets doing bruteforcing. Just logically extending the horizon, because for every couple of thousand spotty teenagers, you have a couple of talented types who crack becaue they can.
"You didn't really go there to "extend freedom and democrocy". You went there to catch terrorists who had attacked you and to topple a regime which harboured these terrorists, and world agreed that you had the right."
Wiping out the poppy crop and getting rid of the miserable gits that were trying to blackmail the US government was a side effect. The former didn't happen because rebuilding funds got diverted, and the poppy crop has increased because it's cold hard cash. The Taliban used to burn the fields when they could be bothered.
"You seem to be the only one buying into your fairytales about "extending freedom and democracy", when in reality you just support dictators usually."
Chill out a little. The situation is one of extended propoganda being fed to people who desperately want to be on the side of right, good and democracy. It shouldn't become personal because someone believes what their country is doing is right.
"Last I checked one of them actually became an ally despite having WMDs and caught profilerating the nuke technology *and* being a dictatorial regime, which had actually toppled the previous democratic government via a military coup."
Apart from the proliferation, you could have been describing Iraq from 1982-1992. Qassim was the anti-west proponent that wanted foreign troops out after he killed King Feisal II. Hussein was considered more 'west friendly'.
"If you read official NASA stuff, you will find that the space suits are there to keep the guys warm in the cold of space. That is total BS."
No, they're for temperature _regulation_.
"One of the other things is that your blood will boil or explode in space. Thats not true either."
If you put blood in space, it would boil if there was temperature input due to a lack of pressure. If there was no temperature input, it would freeze.
"All thats needed to protect the skin is a thin layer of something like a cheap wet suit."
You mean porous, non-protective neoprene which is generally used as an insulator by divers rather than it's ability to keep water away from the skin, which is why it's called a 'wet suit'?
"There have been studies that show thick rubber gloves would work fine for the pressure"
Lack of pressure...
"The real mechanical problem is keeping the head protected along with proper containment of everything the body is trying to get rid of.
Of course the real problem is all that radiation."
Nice. But I think they real thing that we need to know is which school system let your parents down this badly?
"actually creating hybrids (which will inevitably has a short and painful life) is really sick."
Tell that the the St Bernard, bulldog and other species of animal whose lives are short and riddled with painful conditions brought on by inbreeding and reinforcement of negative traits.
BTW, there are sicker things in the world.
"Somehow, I'd take an army of manual labourers and people who can survive in harsh environments over a group of people who dwell in darkened basements anyday."
Unless they start giving them gloating lessons and severe self-esteem issues.
"Here's one for you: would the American revolution have succeded without the financial backing of slave owners?"
...was the question posed by the 2042 copy of the encyclopedia galactica referring to the 2012 American revolution.
;)
Anyway, don't be silly. The market for cotton at the time was largely domestic, and the real finance for the revolution came from overseas contributors, most notably the former ally that people called cowards a few years ago for not bombing an industrial country back to the iron age. We'd term them 'foreign fighters' nowadays, an they'd slip into the grey area between 'human' and 'vegetable', because veg don't need due process.
History is the thing you learn from, or you repeat the process. Good thing that most of the plaudits go to football stars.
"low-data-rate wireless mesh networking"
Obvious question, but how does this differ from Bluetooth?
"I think most of the "let it die!" crowd has either never seen the third season"
I gritted my teeth through all of them, but Season 4 jumped the shark with 'Philadephia Experiment II'. In fact, if you consider that some of the educational channels are filled with sharks and Nazis, there's a bit of a link there.
However.
Season 4 has picked up a lot. Arik Soong was a great addition, there's been a turning point for the vulcans and we've just met the Organians. They're dealing with canon, rather than introducing a race that noone has ever seen before and get into the time-travel lark early, which seriously, seriously annoyed me. The story should be about the foundation of Starfleet, not improbable odds; it just makes it feel tacky.
"Oh, Archer's dead. No he isn't"
"DON'T TAKE THE TREK UNIVERSE TOO SERIOUSLY."
Then let it die.
"Well, how crappy, bland, and predictable do you think the show would be if everything went exactly as foretold?"
Oh, do the flipping research. Stories are split into three parts, with the last half of the last part being the solution and wrap up. Apart from the multi-part episodes it's a reduction to set pieces within the context of a soap-opera in a spaceship. Compare that with the multi-arc monstrosity that was Babylon 5, the hidden agendas of BSG or even the compelling moral dilemnas introduced by DS9. Enterprise isn't even on a par with the quality of storytelling those series showed. Hell, it even took Voyager a couple of seasons until Seven arrived. T'pol whipped her shirt off in one of the first episodes.
That's unpleasant when you consider that the grab pot contains battles between every major concern right up to the intervention by the Organians and where exactly is Starfleet? At the moment it looks like Archer has his own Admiral. These are the critical events in the ST canon, not a temporal cold war that nobody knows about...there's a huge grab bag of ideas and concepts that they've ignored in favour of flashy effects and 'nudge, nudge' style self-referential masturbation in how they came up with 'Red alert'.
The main problem I have isn't with the ST canon, but the quality of the story told, and Enterprise is coughing up blood if they keep having to try and drag it's seriously obsessive fanbase back with gimmicks like more time travel for old characters.
AC's astroturf.
"Did this guy forget that NVidia is designing the GPU for PS3?"
"Both companies are jointly developing a custom graphics processing unit (GPU) incorporating NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce(TM) and SCEI's system solutions for next-generation computer entertainment systems featuring the Cell* processor."
Joint development means close collaboration; if Nvidia are the first to lever cell into their GPUs, they could nail ATI to the wall.
"Cell based products won't be available anytime soon either."
They'll be announced in March, but not on a 65nm die.
"I love this kind of articles where some future products are compared against current ones and declared as a clear winners..."
I love anonymous cowards that skim articles and speak from a position of ignorance. Or stupidity.
"the system developers seemingly always neglect to put in enough RAM for most games to perform to their potential."
Rambus was expensive at the time.
"PlayStation3 might be able to provide RAM that actually allows games to reach their potential along with this new cell hardware?"
Rambus is much cheaper now.
"i only pull out MDs to check to see if there are any songs I'm still "missing" in my mp3 collection."
It's part of my digital->analogue->digital route for when DRM kicks off, so mine feeds back into the PC. It's also pretty much a good quality 'lowest common denominator' for interconnecting. I still love my MD player.
"Don't think that you can get away with changing it unless you have more money than those who support it."
Isn't there some pamphlet that starts with 'we the people' or something.
"price-discriminate in varying economic climates"
Huzzah for Globalisation! I have the freedom to watch my job move to Mumbai, but I'll be jiggered if I can buy a printer cartridge from there.
"Please explain, then, why I had to fill out a form saying where I would be staying when I flew into London from the US?"
We like to know your movements.
Seriously, this is an immigration requirement for every country because it's the first place they look when you fail to return. The majority of this recent 'security' crackdown is immigration. I once spent 45 minutes in an office when I was fourteen because I was travelling with friends rather than my family.
However, Cory's experience was probably a simple method of getting qualified postal addresses for spamming. How the hell are they going to check those addresses exist?
"But really, all this guy did was complain to his ISP."
Actually he defamed the other party, which is two counts of the lawsuit. The interference with contract was the ISP, but that's covered under their ToS, which it should be fairly simple to produce as evidence. The defamation counts are the real doozy, though, and are why you never get personal in complaints. Admittedly I did report a portscan from home.nl using the words 'They need to learn some networking', but it was absolutely true.
The spammers are learning the loopholes behind the weak-ass legislation, but the most important one is getting the other side to _prove_ opt-in without a shadow of a doubt. Getting their email list through discovery might be handy, though.
"To have Janet Jackson go through her simulated sex show with justin timberlake"
Wow, are you doing it wrong. Just remember that touching isn't sex; A president proved that.
"isn't exactly the behavior parents want children to see,"
But bombing arabs is okay, because you can't see the nipples.
"If your daughter went to school the next day and had her top ripped off, what would you say then?"
As it happened, have the states been deluged with top-ripping incidents? No. Instead you gave MTV a scad of publicity over the glimpse of a nipple.
"Let me guess, you are a liberal UKer and only us USians would get uptight about such a thing right?"
Firstly, you can't apply your perceived value of 'liberal' to the UK. Second of all, YES, get a life and worry about other formative influences that your kids could pick up on rather than a nipple showing incident. FFS, I'm guessing that you reinforced the whole nudity thing when they hit five, so why bother about Janet Jackson.
What makes us worry is that the US tries to apply it's twisted moral code across the world with absolutely great results. And remember, if you're six feet away, it isn't sex.
"list of some things you can do with Solaris but not with Linux"
Hey, you think this could be because Solaris was a closed source product for a while Linux is a re-engineered unix?
"those responses suggested a frightening thought for future exploration: that the knowledge gap between the Linux and Solaris communities might be much bigger than I think it is."
I can see why that would keep you up at nights, but consider that the vast number of Linux users you heard from are the next generation of sysadmins and that software moves on. Or are you still using supercalc?
"Honeypots in no way help you secure your machine against known attacks."
Fusion toroids don't change the price of gasoline, but they're still regarded as a fairly valid research project; likewise honeypot projects are interesting research that is being applied all over the place.
The real question is why you're so vociferously opposed to them. False sense of security?
When all the linux boxen get owned, you can have that warm fuzzy glow that people fell for the 'honeypot scam', but until then, people like myself will take any scraps of information that we can get from security sites, script kiddies and honeypots to keep this lovely arms race rolling and spend an inordinate amount of time explaining hygiene to people with windows boxes.
"Honeypots are good for nothing. Unless..."
Unless? Unless is information. Ignore it at your peril.
"No, there's just more losers out there trying to break into random Windows XP boxes than there are losers out there trying to break into random Linux boxes."
Steve Ballmar said much the same thing, but I'm currently capturing more attacks against my BSD server than I am my windows box. Do you have anything to base your claim on?
Conversely, there are thousands of *nix servers out there carrying web content that represent a fairly easy target for 'crackers'. You might be mistaking the horrendous security profile of windows in daft social engineering attacks (click here to see nude girls) rather than cracking per se.
"If you actually went and asked a representative sample of script kiddies"
Or read what they put on their BBS'. A lot of fun sometimes because the majority have no clue, but it's important to watch the talented ones.
"About the only good thing that could ever come out of The Honeypot Project is previously unknown attack methods."
And IP addresses of the attackers. Sure, some will be proxies, but a nasty email from the ISP would start the cleansing process. I reported five IP addresses last night that belonged to ISPs with my log files.
"They use their zero day exploits to attack specific machines for a specific purpose, because they know that every time they use the exploit the run the risk of it being discovered."
I've never seen a 'zero day' exploit hitting anything but the security sites for Kudos and a method of expanding your CV, but I bow to your greater knowledge of the subject. Incidentally, a local exploit to get root would mean that you weren't jailing users, and you'd be unlikely to ever see the original script that created the rootkit.
"Yes, not knowing the complete morse code and not being able to follow a 20wpm conversation does not mean you can't explain why it works so well."
Okay, I'm guessing that this is the pre-school HAM License, then? It seems a bit redundant to know why it's a good thing without actually studying it, or requiring that people study it. After all, it's the simplest method of binary communication around with dizzying applications in a pinch.
"The fact that I only know a handfull of characters doesn't change that."
So you have no real practical use for the knowledge, but it's handy if it turns up in trivial pursuit?
Hey, you got flamebait too!
"I've never understood where this idea that Apple Pie is American comes from."
Like the UK has the idea of 'Merrie England', the US has a fondly recalled sense of nostalgia for the heydays of the 1950s, when the bad guys wore black. This tends to pull in the idea that Apple Pie is quintessentially American, or at least indicative of the culture.
What disappoints me is I get more replies to mildly flamey post than I do to my reasoned and researched ones.