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FPO

I was chatting with one of the perf guys last week and he mentioned something that surprised me greatly. Apparently he's having perf issues that appear to be associated with a 3rd party driver. Unfortunately, he's having problems figuring out what's going Read More...
Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 9:44 AM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

Why was the ability to specify an allocator during CoInitialize removed from the system?

Yesterday I talked about CoGetMalloc . One thing I didn't include was why the ability to specify an allocator was removed from the system. If you've read Raymond's blog, the answer should be obvious. I suspected it, but wasn't sure, but after I submitted Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 08, 2007 12:30 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

The Sad Story of CoGetMalloc

Ok, I admit it. I'm a geek. I'm actually one of those people who rants over the loss of the printed version of the platform SDK documentation (I still have some of the original Win32 Platform SDK documents in my office and use them regularly). One of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 07, 2007 10:39 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Remembering old CPU bugs.

I was browsing through the Bonus Chapters for Raymond's book and I remembered an old CPU bug we encountered with the early 286 processors. Back in those days, it was common to manipulate the processor directly, especially from inside the operating system. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 06, 2007 12:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

Vista Ship Gifts

Our ship gifts for Vista came the other day. We got a fleece pullover and the final DVD for our DVD cube. Fully updated, the cube is a collection of 4 DVDs, containing the bits for Vista Beta1, Vista Beta2, Vista RC1, and Vista RTM. There's also a booklet: Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:38 AM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

The dreaded "beeping death"

Anyone who's been at Microsoft for long enough (long enough to use DOS on a day-to-day basis) remembers the deadly "beeping death". The "beeping death" was an artifact of the MS-NET product that we deployed for networking here at Microsoft, and I was Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 09, 2005 8:57 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Beep Beep

What's the deal with the Beep () API anyway? It's one of the oldest Windows API, dating back to Windows 1.0. It's also one of the few audio APIs that my team doesn't own. The Beep API actually has its own dedicated driver (beep.sys). The reason for this Read More...
Posted Friday, November 04, 2005 10:55 PM by LarryOsterman | 40 Comments

Dos Ain't Done 'til Lotus Won't Run

I was originally going to do a post on this, but Adam (who interviewed me on the topic before he came back to Microsoft) just posted this article and did a far better job of it than I could have ever done (he actually went out did research and stuff). Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 02, 2005 7:58 AM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments

Why is the DOS path character "\"?

Many, many months ago, Declan Eardly asked why the \ character was chosen as the path separator. The answer's from before my time, but I do remember the original reasons. It all stems from Microsoft's relationship with IBM. For DOS 1.0, DOS only supported Read More...
Posted Friday, June 24, 2005 3:15 PM by LarryOsterman | 29 Comments

Nathan's laws of software

Way back in 1997, Nathan Myhrvold (CTO of Microsoft at the time) wrote a paper entitled " The Next Fifty Years of Software " (Subtitled "Software: The Crisis Continues!") which was presented at the ACM97 conference (focused on the next 50 years of computing). Read More...
Posted Friday, June 17, 2005 11:58 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Faster Syscall Trap redux

Raymond has a funny historical article about how Windows made system calls on 386 processors. What he left out was the 286 version of this story. Microsoft and Intel had a similar meeting to the one that Raymond described with the 386, but in that case, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 08, 2005 10:45 AM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

Slavish Compatibility

It's no secret the levels of effort that Microsoft goes through to maintain software compatibility. However, it's not as well known that Microsoft's hardware division has a similar passion for compatibility Back in the early 1990s, Valorie worked on printer Read More...
Posted Monday, December 06, 2004 10:58 AM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments

Why is the compiler flag for symbols -Zi?

If you want the compiler to emit symbols for your application, you need to specify the " /Zi " command line switch. But where on earth did they chose "i" for the flag to enable symbols? It has to do with the original Microsoft symbolic debugger. Way back Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 02, 2004 11:08 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

How did we make the DOS redirector take up only 256 bytes of memory?

In one of my early posts , I mentioned a status review we had with BillG for the DOS Lan Manager redirector (network filesystem). I also talked to Robert Scoble about this in the last of my Channel9 videos . One thing that somehow got missed in both the Read More...
Posted Monday, November 08, 2004 1:22 PM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

Hey wow, I'm famous :)

Wow, what an amazing evening. Earlier this evening, Valorie and I had the opportunity to attend my 20th anniversary dinner at the Newport Hills Golf Club (this place has the most unbelievable views of Seattle, Bellevue, and the Olympics). We got to hang Read More...
Posted Monday, November 01, 2004 11:59 PM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments
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