I'm a lifelong fan of HP calculators. I have a 15c in front of me right now that I've had since the mid-ish 80s. Still works perfectly.
But the 15c 'Collector's Edition' had some issues, and I wonder about the build quality and reliability of this new one, too. Plus: my guess is you can get an original working 16c on eBay for less than this is going to cost.
My wife and I were mid '80s chemical engineers. She liked her 15c, but I went on afterward into fundamental numerical analysis and was extremely happy with my 32S. I recently asked qwen3.6:35b|qwen3.6:27b|gemma4:31b (can't remember which one) all about the current state of replacement LR44 batteries for an "HP 32S Scientific Calculator". It was fucking adamant, aggressively so, that the calculator required 1 battery. LOL no, it sits before me and yes it needs 3. A 6 pack cost I dunno $6 off AMZ? Anyway I have now replaced the batteries in my daily tactile basic algebra calculator for the third time. If I don't have it in hand I use Free42. I... regret not remembering how to program these things, it was so intellectually elegant.
I logged on for the first time in a while to actually talk about nerd things. God I loved the 80s-2000.
> But the 15c 'Collector's Edition' had some issues, and I wonder about the build quality and reliability of this new one, too.
Build quality deteriorated (from impressive heights) more than 25 years ago, when HP's calculator manufacturing moved to China. Not on account of China itself, but it was definitely a cost-cutting measure, and higher-end calculators were becoming an endangered species even then. For example, keycaps used to be double-shot injection molded, so the legends could never wear out; no more, now they're silkscreened like with everyone else. The new key mechanism could never reach the robustness and reliability of the old one, which is a problem if you're used to every keypress felt in your fingertips being correctly registered.
(Not everything was premium quality. On my late 15C, the faceplate logo wore out and the soft sleeve crumbled to dust after a couple of years. But the machine itself continued to work flawlessly until an unfortunate accident with a space heater.)
Additionally, the new Voyagers (1x series) are not running on the original, custom HP "Nut" CPUs, but on ARM microcontrollers, presumably via firmware emulation. It's impressive that the whole things works so transparently, but as I dimly recall, there were problems with that emulation in the first 15C Collector Edition runs, supposedly fixed now.
So, if you buy a new Voyager these days, you're getting a convincing replica of the originals from the '80s, nothing more. Caveat emptor.
They really had no choice, Japanese brands like Casio and Sharp were making dirt-cheap scientific calculators in the '80s, I had one in high school and used it through college. The HPs were intriguing but I could never afford one.
They could have kept their standards up and sold a few to the few people who would pay for them, but that would have been a number that went down every year. A calculator as a veblen good probably would not have worked.
Yep. I showed this to my wife, also an engineer, and her first response was, “oh, the buttons were so satisfying!” We both had HP calculators. I had a 15C that got me through high school and college engineering. I was sad when it finally died (replaced the batteries after years of use and it never turned on again).
It's not a framework, and it requires no diagram. It's just trusting and empowering people to do the job, then getting out of their way. People tend to rise to your level of trust.
I wrote about this, because after a long career I've come to see that most people have no idea what leadership is, or how it works:
https://thinkhuman.com/the-leader-ship/
This approach is great for peacetime and for when the team is already reasonably functional and performing. The really hard leadership problems occur during wartime (the business is in crisis, or shrinking, or responding to a serious competitive threat, or must aggressively cut costs, or must integrate an acquisition, or...) or when the team you have is routinely underperforming at scale.
These two situations require different techniques. Applying peacetime techniques during wartime does not work: you'll rapidly accumulate debt from unsolved organizational problems, politics you've lost control of, competitive pressure you failed to respond to decisively enough, or an underperforming team you've failed to correct enough. Or all of the above.
But, similarly, applying wartime techniques during peacetime also does not work. You'll alienate your high-performing team and suffocate critical innovation that will grow the business.
Confusing the two situations is a major category error that managers often make. It often happens because they've only experienced one of the two categories before, they were successful previously, they don't fully appreciate the extent of the existence of the other category, and when they encounter it for the first time they rely too much on their prior experience and have slowed down their own learning too much (because of said prior success).
Wartime is exactly when centralized control breaks down the hardest, because conditions start changing incredibly fast and communication breaks down. There's a reason the phrase is "fog of war" and not "fog of peace"!
In management, what it means is having to repeatedly make decisions that are in the best interest of the company, but not necessarily in the best interest of the people on your team. This could mean needing to fire people, conduct layoffs, merge teams together and remove redundancies, strip a manager of their direct reports or reduce their scope, replace a leader, drive a major re-org that changes people's jobs in ways they may not like, shut down an entire project or team that isn't succeeding even though it's very popular or well-liked in the organization, own a technical decision that hurts one or two teams but helps the overall organization enough to offset it, etc.
Counterpoint: Name a great victory where top leadership mattered very little.
Or, for that matter, a massive upset where top leadership did not truly contribute significantly.
The "fog of war", AFAIK, tends to refer to general breakdown of communication (as you noted), but even fully localized control (terrorist cells, I suppose) are not highly effectual without coordination and informed assessment of the overall picture. The horrific triple (almost quadruple) attacks of 9/11/2001 would have been greatly diminished, probably by 2/3, if the attacks weren't centrally coordinated.
Wartime is exactly when centralized control is most needed.
Leaders can matter—a lot—even if they do not exercise granular, top-down control. They can provide the right context and motivation, articulate high-level aims, resolve issues and create the kinds of systems and cultures that do not need explicit direction.
A great illustration of this idea in context is Andrew Gordon's book on the Battle of Jutland, The Rules of the Game[1]. He mostly contrasts the leadership philosophies in the British Navy shortly before and during the Battle of Jutland. The British Navy became very top-down and procedure-oriented during peacetime, which did not generalize well to operating in battle.
Great article, people mix commanders with leaders, leaders main job is influencing while others do it their approach, their style, but still align with the goals you influenced.
> People tend to rise to your level of trust.
One of the companies that I almost worked for, had all the “we trust we empower our employees etc”, good promises, and later they were requiring full uninterrupted camera access while you do the work :)
Still the wrong response. Discipline the people abusing your trust.
Part of being a good manager is knowing when to step in and have a private conversation with people before things get too bad. If the bad behavior continues then you follow the process of formal write up’s and eventually termination.
Collective punishment is the sign of a manager who doesn’t know what they are doing and will kill a team.
A year after starting my current job, I had a conversation with the CEO. We were just 15 people back then, 5 devs.
I can't recall what prompted it, but he said he'd learned early on that the best thing he could do was to ensure us devs were happy and otherwise stay out of our way as much as possible.
I think that's at least part of the reason for the success of the company, which has gone from a small player to dominating our niche in the time I've been here.
Most people want to be trusted and given autonomy, and they want to live up to your expectations.
There will always be a few who are looking for ways to cheat the system, but they are the exception, not the rule—and the earlier in life you can get to them with a policy of trust and lifting them up, rather than suspicion and tearing them down, the more likely they will be to turn out well.
Sort of true. But then I've worked with people who seem totally unfazed when they mess up through utter carelessness, and for reasons, won't be replaced. Or people who asked to move a button set off redesigning the template engine to be more functional, time after time.
You could say, and I wouldn't disagree, those people shouldn't be on the team. But equally it's often not that easy. Also good people are hard to find and the mediocre one might be the best you have.
It strikes me that the Google statistical results might be getting the wrong end of the stick. The teams where the leader is hands off and empowering are full of people who can be trusted which is basically the same as them doing the job themselves. The teams where the leader feels the urge to descend to micromanagement are the ones where people don't get things done.
The thing is: it already is the year of the Linux Desktop for me. I don't care about 'OS market share' or how many people use something; I have no control over them.
I also don't care about "OS-maxxing", either--quibbling over 'Wayland', or which OS has the best window manager, arguing about 'gaming', etc.
What I do care about? Freedom and control. Linux gives me that.
So my desktop? It's Linux. The Year of Linux on the Desktop arrived for me years ago. And it can be that year for anyone, anytime. Today.
I love Linux and think it's better than ever to have Linux as your daily driver, especially thanks to the work of Valve with Proton, but I'm gonna be real and say "the year of the Linux Desktop is a personal journey" is a retrofit. The "Year of the Linux Desktop" meme came out of Slashdot in the 90s/early 00s where people were insisting that Linux was due to overtake Windows as the way an average, non-technical user interacted with a computer.
Of course, this did turn out to be true... in the form of Android, which is maybe the most monkeys-paw-curling way YotLD could possibly happen.
Agreed, mostly. To me the effectiveness of window managers is a bellwether of the control aspect. So, IMO, if you compare them on control or on the quality of window managers, you'll get the same result. Linux has ended up with many window managers (effectively catering to various styles and needs), while macos, for example, has a one-size-fits-all approach with no REAL multiple-desktops (Spaces is a joke and a toy). As a result, I can easily manage 50-100 open terminal windows on my linux box, but on macos 5 is too many (and if I use Spaces to fit a few more, I can't get to the terminal I need in less than a second. In linux, even with 100 xterms, I can). So, a macos product manager might probably ask me why I would want 100 terminal windows, to find me some alternative. In linux no one asks me that question, and hence I can have what I want.
> What I do care about? Freedom and control. Linux gives me that.
I think a lot of this comes down to what we're looking for out of an OS. For example, it is orthogonal to what I care about most: "Provides a low friction interface between my body and arbitrary software"
Relevant: I do think about the freedom and control aspect about computing; I (personally) tie it to the software or hardware design instead of the interface. Or in some cases, the use of creative software. (DAW, CAD, document writers etc)
It's not a science. At best, there are best practices--and some of the best, most famous writing has ignored them. "Writing" is broad, means a lot of things, and defies algorithms.
What could be more reasonable than to worship the source of all heat life and light in this world? Unfortunately I grew up in the wrong era/continent for that.
Huh? An operating system, as defined by Andrew Tanenbaum[0], the author of both Minix and of the best operating textbook ever, is a combination of:
- an "extended machine": provide usable abstractions over the hardware to reduce complexity to a manageable level
- a "resource manager": provide for an orderly and controlled allocation of the processors, memories, and I/O devices among all the various programs wanting them.
By that definition, Linux is very much an operating system... unless by "Linux" you meant the kernel only without the additional tooling (systemd, libc, coreutils, shell, etc.) that distros ship with.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
I know that, most technical people know it, but I refuse to call it "GNU/Linux" because that's a dumb name and Richard Stallman is so over the top pedantic to constantly insist on it.
Yeah, I also have a hard time saying that, but I also think it's kind of important, because what I actually like about my OS is that it's a GNU OS, I hardly ever need to tweak my kernel, and if I do need to change a setting, that would still be the same with another kernel. But I think it's not hard to use the term in writing.
Like, I'm glad for the solid kernel, but it's just not what I interface with on a daily basis. Same that I'm glad the car engine is running fine, but I care about the car, not the engine.
"The nonprofit Common Sense Institute reported student interest and enrollment was low — with just eight students in one class. The report said enrollment is unlikely to grow unless the state mandated students take the classes, which is exactly what Republican lawmakers passed."
But despite the overtly Orwellian effort, the Democrats responded in typical ineffectual, tone-deaf fashion:
"Democratic Sen. Janet Petersen slammed that idea, arguing it will drive up costs for Iowa college students and their families."
Iowa produces 1 in 8 eggs, and the 2024 election was about egg margins. It’s more honest to concentrate on relating egg margins to Iowans prosperity, than to try promoting intellectual freedom in a country which already has a first amendment.
"His [Wozniak's] subsequent ventures, including a stint teaching computer skills to students in the Los Gatos School District, were marked by amiability and good nature, not a will to technological power."
But the 15c 'Collector's Edition' had some issues, and I wonder about the build quality and reliability of this new one, too. Plus: my guess is you can get an original working 16c on eBay for less than this is going to cost.
Honestly, it pains me to say it but I'd recommend a SwissMicros DM16L instead: https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm16l
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