Up to this point in my career, I had no major failures – every major project eventually worked as expected. Hardware based content protection broke my winning streak. The only good thing I can say…
Browsing Category Tales In Tech
My Career – Part 14: Multiplane Overlays, Independent Flip, and XBOX One
DirectFlip was a great feature, but it only worked in limited scenarios (which never occurred on a Windows Phone, where the savings was the most important). Hardware that supported multiplane overlays, on the other hand,…
My Career – Part 13: DirectFlip
DirectFlip is a feature which allows the DWM to: This was not particularly hard to implement, but after getting it to work I realized that we had a fundamental architectural incompatibility. To understand the issue,…
My Career – Part 12: Problems Running Windows on Mobile Devices
While the focus of Windows 7 was to fix Windows Vista, the focus of Windows 8 was to make Windows scalable to the point where it could run on tablets and phones. This had always…
My Career – Part 11: Windows 7 (2006 – 2009)
Everybody hated Windows Vista and everybody loved Windows 7. They did not understand how one release could be so bad and next so awesome, and if we could do one awesome release, why not do…
My Career – Part 10: How we Virtualized the GPU (2001 – 2006)
The 5-year period between Windows XP and Windows Vista was a career highlight – partly due to what we accomplished, but also due to the great team that I got to work with. The LDDM…
My Career – Part 9: The New GPU Virtualization Architecture
Before I describe my experience implementing GPU virtualization, I want to first describe the overall architecture. As the internal codename for Windows Vista was “Longhorn”, we referred to this architecture as LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver…
My Career – Part 8: The need for GPU virtualization
After we shipped Windows XP in late 2001, it became apparent that we needed to redesign the operating system architecture that supported the GPU. Before I get into this, I need to explain how things…
My Career – Part 7: Microsoft – The Early Years (1996 – 2001)
Working at Microsoft was a different experience. I quickly learned that while everybody was smart and didn’t suffer fools with any amount of patience, my fellow developers were very cool and very fun to work…
My Career – Part 6: Cirrus Logic Liaison to Microsoft (Bellevue, WA)
So I moved to Bellevue to work more closely with Microsoft, and the first things that we did was setup a meeting with the DirectX team to ask them to add a new DirectDraw feature…