Posted on 07/12/2008 4:16:45 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative
:-) You sir are no mundane. Eheh.
It claims to have one, but I recall several sources suggesting 3rd party solutions were better back when I got my XP machine.
It didn’t bother Vista - just XP. A bunch of my clients were had problems with this.
Thats like saying "My car works fine. I got gas at your staion, now my tire is flat"
Your not getting it.
MS builds everything based on a set of standards and rules that vendors should follow. Not all those calls may be in use relavant to ZA until MS patches something in accordance with their published set of code rules. If the vendor has broken a rule and the patch breaks it, this is not MS fault. MS must follow the guidelines the put out and they do. It is the vendor who modified the IP stack in some way that did not follow the standard, when the patch was applied, it affected the non-standard code and broke it.
Additionally, there are literally MILLIONS of software packages for windows. MS publishes the standards for a reason; they cannot test every application with every patch, it is not possible. They expect the thrid party code developers to follow the standards and they test against standards.
So if your theory was correct, blackice, symantec, tiny, nod32 and every other personal firewall would have also broken.
The truth is, Apparently, those other comapnies did not violate any code rules that were affected by the patch. Zonelabs did.
Ok, so why didn't they break all the other 500 different crappy software firewalls out there?
Let me guess, they didn't want to attract so much attention, so they will do them all in one at a time over the next year, right?
Geez.
The PC I am using right now has been running XP since the day I got it new and formatted it and put a CLEAN install on it. By doing so, I removed all the OEM loaded garbage and I choose my third party software carefully and avoid junk. That was almost 5 years ago. My PC doesnt crash, run slow or lock up.
Again, its crappy coders like zone labs who don't follow the standards that are the problem.
Linux purist checking it. I know of a couple of servers that had problems after the update. However, a reboot fixed it.
Beer sometimes interferes with typing ability...
Oh, you do go way back! Although I did use punch tapes and cards. I still have some paper punch tape rolls from programs I wrote in the early 70s, for PDP-11's. My Windows PCs will be part of my home computer museum. Things change so quickly now.
Some of that vintage hardware is starting to become valuable. As a collector’s item, my thirty-old Apple II is now valued near the original purchase price. (Of course, the value of the dollar ain’t what it used to be.)
Bullcrap!!
Check this:
Quite a lot of the web notes and emails I got were all over the screen, all because of Micro$oft.
Well, sort of. Microsoft publishes rules that vendors should follow. But they don't follow those rules themselves. So, sometimes, they change stuff that wasn't fully documented and stuff breaks.
MS publishes the standards for a reason; they cannot test every application with every patch, it is not possible. They expect the thrid party code developers to follow the standards and they test against standards.
And that's how it usually works. But sometimes they change stuff that they haven't documented and it breaks third-party software.
So if your theory was correct, blackice, symantec, tiny, nod32 and every other personal firewall would have also broken.
No two of those programs will work precisely the same. In theory, if what they did broke ZA but no other firewalls then it's because ZA did something wrong.
Well, sort of wrong, since most low-level Windows utility programmers know that if you only follow Microsoft's incomplete, conflicting and sometimes flat-out wrong documentation, you'll never get your software to work.
And sometimes when the product in question is a competitor to something that Microsoft provides all kinds of things can go wrong with the competitor's software.
If this was a company where that kind of thing had never happened then you might be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But when it's Microsoft, who have a long and nefarious history of dirty tricks and unethical activity toward anyone that they see as a competitor you tend to assume that Microsoft is just up to their old tricks.
More. I have two Apple II's (and a box full of broken motherboards). I recently saw an eBay auction where an early Apple II went for well over $2000. Shocking. I haven't fired up mine for quite a while now. I still have the original box and packing, red book, etc. from January 1978. Of course, I'll never sell mine, too sentimental.
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