First SP2 HotFiix Available

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SYMPTOMS:
On a computer that is running Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2), programs that connect to IP addresses that are in the loopback address range may not work as you expect. For example, you may receive an error message that says that you cannot establish a connection.

CAUSE:
This problem occurs if the program connects to a loopback address other than 127.0.0.1. Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) prevents connections to all IP addresses that are in the loopback address range except for 127.0.0.1.

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Source : http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=884020
Download Link : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

P.S. First Download Link I see with the Genuine Microsoft Software that we talk about on this thread

Here it starts ,
forever saga of patches,hotfixes and then SPs. Why they don't do a thing that they must have done in first place , get a thing right and working? Don't they have all the money and test facilities to check a software?
I admit that nothing is perfect ever and a software once developed is not perfect for ever But atleast it must work for some time before being taken care of.
Even my bike is more reliable than that despite being engine made up of 50 year old design.
(now, let me check if Internet explorer is there in program files :-) it is only way to access windowsupdate)

SDK,

Thanks for the info on both of your threads.

cheers


Rider,

Being the king, the various masses will make significant attempts to conquer or at least hammer away at the king’s software (find bugs, vulnerabilities, etc.). And the king will get the feedback he needs to make the changes (patches, etc.). Although his court most likely completes rigorous testing of the software releases, in reality, they won’t find/fix all the bugs in the castle for a multitude of reasons. However frustrating as it may be to us, their logical is not only remarkable, but also very cost effective. We will finish the testing for free (find the bugs, exploits, etc.) and report back (complain, publish). He provides the fixes at his convenience and doesn’t have pay for additional testing.

Regardless of how it comes about, we do end up with a better product.

;)

edit: Rider, point well taken, but it doesn't mean I approve of his methods though!

The king offers a kingdom with a price and then make them firmly beleives that it is secure for them. masses beleive and come to his kingdom overall making his kingdom strong. But if king wants to have largest kingdom in world he needs to face enemies, which he do but only after he has suffered several casualties of his masses and he secures his kingdom and this continues. now king get good kingdom to run with thing he must do ultimately done by masses and he also gets gudwill for doing his own job and for which he was paid taxes(price of product). hmmmm..
sorry relyt this is way i see things but i think everyone has a right to havea viewpoint. so i did like your point though

We end up with a better product at what expense? A novice user that tries to tackle a problem that should have been fixed at programming time instead of when they try and do something only to find that it doesn't work (again!) I guess when you are "King of the Hill" you can do whatever; to me it doesn't matter. I get all fixes etc. from HFNetChkPro usually before they are released on Windows Update.

Hi Rider - to answer your research issue -

Please understand that no system is ever completely secure. No electrical path is 100 percent efficient, no plumbing is completely leak proof, and no software is 100 percent bug free. As much as we the users hate to see it, software companies consistently ship their software in an incomplete state, knowing what flaws already exist, and shortly thereafter release a patch or two to fix them. In the case of Windows, because it's of such a large magnitude, huge holes tend to exist. Others get found on down the line and are fixed as they're discoverd by the users. Hence we get SP1, SP2, and now the hotfix. The reason the companies do this is because they understand that the cannot make money fixing all their holes before a software is shipped out. Either they'll wind up blowing too much money into r&d to fix them, or, more commonly, their software will be out of date when it hits the market. There you have it. I hope this explains a bit more thoroughly for you. As to why softwares ship so late (the next question begged by this), I can only guess that perhaps the larger companies are learning that users won't tolerate constant updates, so they tried to find a happy medium for them - that being later shipping software with less holes.

Just my 2 cents, I could be wrong.

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From Microsoft KB article
This problem occurs if the program connects to a loopback address other than 127.0.0.1. Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) prevents connections to all IP addresses that are in the loopback address range except for 127.0.0.1.

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I wonder why they didn't include the whole loopback address range or if this was simply an oversight. Or is this another example of Microsoft not following standards (**Please no flame war here...just a question/observation**).

I guess the other question is what program doesn't use 127.0.0.1 for local loopback address?! Why would they use anything else?

i see this as a good point, instead as bad news. It proves that MS is moving on trying to fix bugs quicker. Sounds good to me.
As a large service pack (SP2 looks more as a XP 2) it seems to be expected new bugs. Its the way of life.

I support MS in them trying to make better products through patches, hotfixes, what have you. What I do not support is when they sacrifice performance, efficiency, and possibly break other programs when they A: bring a hurried patch to the table to B: fix a problem that could've and should've been fixed prior to the release of said program and C: starts an endless saga of hotfixes and patches, which when presented in this same manner, they're in the hole for life, never able to get out from the ridicule of the media over said problems.

It's like the announcement about Longhorn and how they're scrapping features so they can make a deadline of release in 2006 (need to find that statement somewhere, I could be totally wrong). Why make that statement when you can just SIT DOWN AND GET IT RIGHT. They've GOT the money, they've GOT the time, they've GOT the desktop market cornered, they've GOT the ability to hire the best so with all that, it's simply dropping the ball if, with all that, they still do things the way they've done them before and that just leads to "too many fingers in the dike" problems.

It's like a Blizzard game...I'll GLADLY WAIT till it's DONE. Sure, it takes longer..sure, they still get patched, but guess what? The patches WORK and they don't break my ability to play D2 when I'm patching WC3 or whatever...

rider_royal :

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Here it starts ,
forever saga of patches,hotfixes and then SPs. Why they don't do a thing that they must have done in first place , get a thing right and working? Don't they have all the money and test facilities to check a software?

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Right. Because every other OS is completely secure and perfect, and thus none of them have ever needed upgrades or security improvements.....

Come on now, anyone who knows anything about programming knows that no matter how many men and money you throw at a programming problem, there will still end up being glitches and bugs. This is because the human mind is not perfect, nor are our actions. People who program understand that there are multiple ways to solve the same coding problem, but we may learn too late that the solution could have been replaced with a better one. It happens, so don't pinpoint out Microsoft just because you have an illusion about how programming should work. They are responding fast to this fix, just like how the Linux 2.6 kernel had a 2.6.1 "hotfix" within a week or so to fix a chuck of code they fsckered.

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I admit that nothing is perfect ever and a software once developed is not perfect for ever But atleast it must work for some time before being taken care of.

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It does work. In fact, I've been using SP2 for a long time now (prerelease beta testing) and it still works. Don't confuse the facts that SP2 does work and Microsoft want's to release a patch to fix a glitch or two, with SP2 not working whatsoever.

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The king offers a kingdom with a price and then make them firmly beleives that it is secure for them. masses beleive and come to his kingdom overall making his kingdom strong. But if king wants to have largest kingdom in world he needs to face enemies, which he do but only after he has suffered several casualties of his masses and he secures his kingdom and this continues.

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What in the... did you think battle tactics for seige protection came out of thin air? Guess how battle tactics and army formations came to where they are now? Errors, problems, and casualties. The "Opps, that didn't work. How can we improve it?". The kingdoms of the oldem times had the problem you describe because that is a natural part of the learning process. You can't honestly ask why they didn't have water-protected-skid-resistant-self-inflating tires back in the stone age when they created the first wheel, do you? Everyone has to learn from their own experience or others, that includes security. We can feel something is secure and properly coded, but there will always be something we can't account for.

Without error there is no need nor ability for innovation.

I just see your entire viewpoing not somuch as flawed, but ill-informed.

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It's like a Blizzard game...I'll GLADLY WAIT till it's DONE. Sure, it takes longer..sure, they still get patched, but guess what? The patches WORK and they don't break my ability to play D2 when I'm patching WC3 or whatever... [/B]

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Nah, blizzard did the same mistakes as MS.

You cant even compare making a game with making on OS, but:

a) they did a lot of mistakes on D2, fixing a problem and introducing 100.
b) now d2 is good but now is too late (it lost the glamour because its old)
c) They really impact your ability to play, since they introduced a series of "tricks" to avoid cheating, but turns the game sometimes hard to connect.

so everybody on software development make the same mistake. They cant wait until its perfect because when that times comes NOBODY will still using that software.

I should've said that in comparison to other game makers where patches are few and far between or are filled with trivial "fixes" (read: Dice's "patches" for BF1942 which are 95% consisting of the movies that everyone deletes), or simply don't come at all (read: PoTC). Sure, it's not a comparison between an OS-maker and a game maker, but MS has failed in more areas, especially considering security and stability (gotten better with XP) when they're "improving" ease of use and glitziness.

Bah... Most game are full of bugs! Most of the game are rush into the market except for highly wait game like World of War Craft, Doom 3, Hafe Life 2

You can't say that it is impossible to build code that is for the most part free of defects.. The Carnegie Mellon SEI Capability Maturity Model gives a very detailed path that a company can work through to be able to have the capabilities to build almost completely error free software... Most experts agree that 3.4 defects per million is considered to be almost perfect code, and probably the highest "perfection" that we can hope to obtain. Six Sigma is another quality paradigm that is sometimes used to measure the outputs of CMM. Six Sigma dictates that a perfect application would be available 99.999999% of the time. The six comes about because of the six trailing 9's. If you are 99% available you could have as many as 10k defects per million.. Quit a bit... 99.999999% is where the 3.4 defects per mil. number comes from.

The only companies who use this method of developing software are companies like IBM, AT&T, Boeing, Lockhead, etc... Mainly companies that develop software for the government and for aerospace. NASA is a huge proponent of CMM. Even then, on a project such as WindowsXP which has approximately 40million lines of code that would be 136 total errors in WinXP. Definitely a lot less than we have now. My targets for the machines I manage are 250 DPMs per year.

If you could come up with an affordable and functional way for a company to rapidly develop consumer grade software while adhering to the standards dictated by level5 of the CMM you would more than likely be a billionaire before you died... Right now it just isn't cost effective for the consumer grade software companies to undertake a huge project such as trying to get CMM level5 certification for their development cycles..

If they did get to level5 their predictions as to when the software would be done would be tremendously accurate and they would be able to better gauge when to start working on new products. Gone would be the days of saying it'll be released Q4'04 and then it really coming out in Q2'06. There are currently some projects underway to try and integrate some of the RAD software development cycles into the CMM-I stucture.. So we may start to see better consumer grade software from the companies that are keeping their development models up to date.