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posted by
hubie
on Tuesday September 30, @02:39PM
from the for-decades-for-freedoms-for-all-users dept.
from the for-decades-for-freedoms-for-all-users dept.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) turns forty on October 4, 2025. The Free Software Foundation will have then been defending the rights of all software users for the past 40 years. The long term goal is for all users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share software.
There will be an online event, with an in-person option for those that can get to Boston. In November there will also be a hackathon.
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Forty Years of Commitment to Software Freedom
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Q: How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master stays out
of the way.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 30, @04:19PM
Well the instant I posted that I recalled a distant memory, haven't thought of this since the late 80s. The electronics magazine EE who ranted about the miracle of postscript for all things EE had inspired me on this path so I obtained a post script smith chart.
I suppose you'd describe a smith chart to a non-EE as kind of a printed slide rule for microwave EE stuff. Technically its a printed nomogram or nomograph but the only people who know what that is, don't need to be told LOL. Tell normies something like "you calculate magic radio things by drawing lines with rulers and following curves on the graphs". You can, like, draw all the parts in a power amplifier and magically determine the matching network to make it work. Sometimes it even worked, rarely it even worked on the first try LOL.
Note that smith charts are copyrighted so I found it amusing to download a presumably free postscript script to generate a copyrighted image using free software, all downloaded from some rando 80s BBS that was mostly full of pirated games as they all were back in the day on my technically pirated copy of msdos that I surely never paid for (presumably some previous owner did?)
Anyway it was a memory hog and promptly crashed, ran out of memory. Rather annoyed. So no it did not work perfectly.
Recursion is elegant until it smashes the stack LOL and sometimes it takes a lot less than you'd think. Also you cant cheat the real world, if you want to render multi megapixel images like a full page graphic of a smith chart, you can't do that very well with 640K which should be enough for anyone.