Software: Web, Virtualisation, and Math
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A Mozilla product manager on his career path and what creating safe spaces online means to him
As a staff product manager for Mozilla’s security and privacy team, Tony Amaral-Cinotto thinks a lot about how you can protect your personal information, including, most recently, your phone number.
Firefox Relay has been protecting email addresses from spammers since 2020. Tony’s team just released a new feature applying the same idea to your phone number: You get a uniquely generated number mask so you don’t have to enter your true number on website forms, or in other places like restaurants when making reservations and online marketplaces when putting up items for sale.
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Doodledrop: Open-source Social Media for Doodle Painting
Doodledrop is a free open-source self-hosted doodle creation and sharing platform for artists.
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VMware alternatives: discover open source
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Doing 64-bit math on a 16-bit system
A few years ago, I wrote a command-line math program for FreeDOS called VMATH. It was capable of performing only extremely simple mathematical operations on very small unsigned integers. With some recent interest in basic math in the FreeDOS community, I improved VMATH to provide basic math support on signed 64-bit integers.
The process of manipulating big numbers using only 16-bit 8086 compatible assembly instructions is not straightforward. I would like to share some samples of the techniques used by VMATH. Some of the methods used are fairly easy to grasp. Meanwhile, others can seem a little strange. You may even learn an entirely new way of performing some basic math.
The techniques explained here to add, subtract, multiply, and divide 64-bit integers are not limited to just 64-bits. With a little basic understanding of assembly, these functions could be scaled to do math on integers of any bit size.
Before digging into those math functions, I want to cover some basics of numbers from the computer's perspective.