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[AbuDhabi]

Task Manager says that DF takes up 90+ of the CPU.

[Tormy]

All this on Windows Vista.  Anybody running XP(or Linux!) should be seeing even better performance than I do.

That is not true. Vlited Vista > WinXP in every possible way.

[Zironic]

Only if Toady moved skills into raws, you could make your own weapons, that develop their own skills. Like magic!

[Volfram]

Vista has somewhat steeper hardware requirements than XP, and it runs slightly slower than XP, but if you've got the hardware for it, then the overhead suddenly drops to below a noticeable level.  I did, however, notice that an Ubuntu liveboot runs about 2-3x as fast as Vista, and my little sister's netbook running XP is about twice as fast as my laptop.  Her hardware specs are about even with mine.

Vista is decidedly more secure, though.  In fact, Mac OS has more security holes than Windows Vista, it's just that nobody cares enough to try hacking a Mac.  It's like the difference between a rabbit wearing absolutely nothing and a thirty-foot tall adamantine golem.  The rabbit is an easier mark, but everybody's going to go after the golem.

[Random832]

Vista is decidedly more secure, though.  In fact, Mac OS has more security holes than Windows Vista, it's just that nobody cares enough to try hacking a Mac.

People have been saying this for decades now; where's the proof?

[Volfram]

Macs have generally been unpopular, and the reason they don't get viruses is because hackers almost never write viruses for Macs.  Think about it.  If you write a virus, you want it to become prevalent, widespread.  What are you going to target?  Until only a few years ago(before Linux went mainstream and Apple stepped up their advertising and got cutthroat), Windows had the overwhelming majority of market share.  Even now, as I recall, the numbers still favor Windows, if not as a majority then at least a plurality.  Windows PCs are cheaper than Macs, and as an operating system it's better known and easier to get than Linux.  Naturally, they'll get more attention.  Macs were never particularly more secure than Windows, they just never got any action attention.

Where I get my info specifically, however, is Pwn to Own, a contest which sets up three PCs: one Linux, one Mac, one Windows, and challenges hackers to comprimise the computers' security to win prizes.

Last year, one of the teams shocked tech gurus by announcing that the Mac system had been easier to hack than the one running Windows Vista.  When the dust had settled that year, the Mac was comprimised on day 2, the Vista machine day 3, and the Linux machine had been ignored because it just wasn't a challenge.  Think about it: Linux is an open-source operating system.  Creating a backdoor would be as easy as one of the contributors sneaking one into a release candidate build.  The team that did it said that he'd been expecting Windows to fold like a house of cards, and had focused the entirety of Day 1 on it.  But it didn't.  The Mac had proven easier to hack.

This year, the same team made headlines by gaining control of a Mac within, as I recall, less than a minute from green light to total control using a vulnerability in Safari(Safari on Mac is the least secure browser/OS combination available, currently.  The best is Chrome on Vista.).  Now yes, there was a good deal of research and preparation involved, but once he had that done, he had a way to go from discovering a new Mac to adding it to a botnet in less time than a user would need to realize that something's up.  In the aftermath of this year's competition, he was interviewed, and asked what the best choice for security would be.  I effectively paraphrased his answer in my previous post.

[Random832]

the Linux machine had been ignored because it just wasn't a challenge.  Think about it: Linux is an open-source operating system.  Creating a backdoor would be as easy as one of the contributors sneaking one into a release candidate build.

Um, bullshit. It being open-source doesn't mean people don't look at submitted code to decide what gets in to an official released version.

[Volfram]

It does make it significantly easier for a hacker to introduce vulnerabilities, though.  You can't add a vulnerability to an official Windows or Mac OSX release.  Just because most will be screened out does NOT mean that no vulnerabilities are going to make it in.

Of course, most of those vulnerabilities are going to be only useful to the team that added them.

[bombcar]

the Linux machine had been ignored because it just wasn't a challenge.  Think about it: Linux is an open-source operating system.  Creating a backdoor would be as easy as one of the contributors sneaking one into a release candidate build.

Um, bullshit. It being open-source doesn't mean people don't look at submitted code to decide what gets in to an official released version.

It's been tried at least once: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7388

[Random832]

the Linux machine had been ignored because it just wasn't a challenge.  Think about it: Linux is an open-source operating system.  Creating a backdoor would be as easy as one of the contributors sneaking one into a release candidate build.

Um, bullshit. It being open-source doesn't mean people don't look at submitted code to decide what gets in to an official released version.

It's been tried at least once: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7388

Still - if they had done something like that, why not show it off? And if they hadn't, your reasoning wouldn't apply.

[Volfram]

Showing it off defeats the purpose, like sneaking into a high-security area and then photographing yourself and putting it up on Flickr.

Remember, the best spies are the ones history never remembers.  Hacking is the same way.  If you're caught, you lose.

In any case, I do think we're getting a little off-topic here.

[Greiger]

Vista Security = Getting an access denied error accessing my music folder from the my documents folder as the administrator.  But click the shortcut straight to it and it works fine for any account.

Hell I get access denied left and right when turning stuff off in process explorer.  You would think yer computer would let you use yer own files.  Nope.

[Random832]

Showing it off defeats the purpose, like sneaking into a high-security area and then photographing yourself and putting it up on Flickr.

Which _still_ ruins your claim of it being "not a challenge" as the reason to ignore it in such a contest. Did they even say that, or did you just make it up?

[jaked122]

it's frightening enough with the Core gameplay elements, but all these bloats, I feel sick to my ram.

[Mel_Vixen]

Sure many things look ram-intensiv but very much of it happens in ADV and worldgen and/or over a longer time. Also not everything happens at the same time so i think Worldgen will take more time but game itself will not be much slower.