WARNING, NORTON AV has unsound heuristic scanning.

[hutch--]

Norton Anti Virus

A friend who has regularly used my old web site movsd.com has reported to me that Norton Anti Virus has flagged the site as suspicious because it does not correctly identify two 10 year old files correctly.

Having had to waste time that I don't get paid for just to read their site, join it and post a comment, I wonder how long it will take for virus/anti virus vendors to learn how to read English so they can then read the Microsoft Portable Executable specifications and not deliver false positives to their own paying customers.

As before, if you really must use this type of trash, at least get the best around, either the Kaspersky security products or the Eset NOD32 range and save yourself the security risks of other products that cannot properly detect operating system specification code.

[dedndave]

norton sux rox - lol
although, symantec does put out my all-time favorite program - the "norton removal tool"
i remember peter norton from days of old - what a novice - lol

[GregL]

I have been having good luck with Microsoft Security Essentials. I've been using it since it came out and I have had no false positive problems. By the way, it's free.

[Bill Cravener]

I have removed Norton av from many machines. What a gluttonous hawg!

[hutch--]

To add further irritation to their incompetence, I have wasted the time trying to join their site which appears to have succeeded but when you try and log on to make a comment their site is broken and keep asking you to re-register.

[Neil]

Like Greg I've been using Microsoft Security Essentials. I haven't had any problems in the last couple of months, it runs 'silently' in the background, gets good reviews in all the mags & as Greg says it's free.

[Bill Cravener]

norton sux rox - lol
although, symantec does put out my all-time favorite program - the "norton removal tool"
i remember peter norton from days of old - what a novice - lol

I still have some 50 very old books on assembly language.

I have Peter Norton's "Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC" though it is showing its age.

A couple of my old favorites is Steven Holzner's "Advanced Assembly Language on the IBM PC" and his book "PS/2-PC Assembly Language".

I also have Robert Jourdain's "Programmers Problem Solver" which was also a good book. Used so much it is falling apart.

Many of the old asm books I have still look in pretty good shape last time I checked.

[brethren]

it not just a/v that sucks, i recommend avoiding zonealarm free like the plague. I suppose for everyday computer users its okay but its useless for assembly programmers as it seems to patch every program that's executed to start with the instruction jmp 7FFA0000. Obviously this screws up interactive debugging

I was sure i had some form of subtle virus that was avoiding detection and was about to reinstall the os, thank god i stumbled across this thread
http://forum.tuts4you.com/index.php?showtopic=21878

[dedndave]

Bill - if you look in norton's book, you can see he wasn't really a great programmer - lol
billy gates wasn't all that hot either
i have disassembled miles of code written by both of them
of course, back then, i suppose noone was really good at it yet
what got norton going was the fact that he was a columnist in a couple of the old magazines
back then, i was a big fan of Ray Duncan

[Bill Cravener]

Dave,

True, but Norton knew enough to write other books such as IBM PC, PC DOS and The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM-PC. He and his buddy John Socha where the authors of the Norton Utilities and Norton Commander products way back in the mid 80's as I recall. Peter must be getting pretty close to 70 years old by now.

MHO, Billy Gates and Steve Jobs are both pirates who created nothing and built their empires off the knowledge of others. They are damn good business men though and had the foresight to see that there would be a market for business and home PC's.

I have Ray Duncan's MS-DOS Functions book, his IBM ROM BIOS reference book and his Advanced MS-DOS Programming book. All great books!

There were many asm authors back then such as Michael Tischer, Tom Swan, Terry Dettmann, Allen L Wyatt, Larry Joel Goldstein, Harley Hahn, William H. Murray Jr, Christ Pappas, Frank Van Gilluwe, Leo J Scanlon and Marcus Johnson just to name few. :bg

[hutch--]

Somewhere in the distant past was a tool called something like BAT2EXEC and from memory the author was Keith P. Graham and this was an excellent example of very well written MASM code. It was a .MODEL TINY com file that compiled dos batch files into working COM files. I own a copy of the Norton Socha book and it was a waste of money even back then in the DOS days. I learnt MASM in the old days from the Microsoft literature, the code I could find in the early BBS days and by test piece (many of them).

About the only other classy assembler code that I saw in about 1994 was a leaked copy of Microsoft COMMAND.COM which was a very professional project properly documented and well written. The vast majority of early assembler code was obscure badly written undocumented CRAP.

[dedndave]

The vast majority of early assembler code was obscure badly written undocumented CRAP.

lol - it sounds like you disassembled DOS version 2

DOS v 1 wasn't too bad - it just didn't do much (no directories - lol)

[Bill Cravener]

Somewhere in the distant past was a tool called something like BAT2EXEC and from memory the author was Keith P. Graham and this was an excellent example of very well written MASM code.

I have bat2exec.com and attached it to this post it also includes the source. The one I have was from 1990 PC Magazine by Douglas Boling. Is that the file you referred to Steve?

[dedndave]

i remember that program
i wrote a very small program that would allow command-line machine language code to be executed
it would allow most binary values to be entered as "literal" ASCII
some characters cannot be entered that way because of the way the batch file interprets them
or because of the way the text editor treats them (or both)
use of a single quote or a double quote would switch between literal parsing and hex-byte parsing
if there was no command-line code, it would display the date/time (lined up with DIR disk-space report)
that makes for a very flexible batch utility - you can do a lot with 100 bytes of command-line code
you could expand batch variables lke "%1" inside your program
i still use it from time to time

i updated this one so the date/time string would line up with XP DIR results instead of DOS
16-bit code, of course - 384 bytes   :bg

[dedndave]

try this out - lol
C\> BU ba0801b409cd21c3'Hello World$

i'll see if i can find the source and docs for you guys   :bg