Although that date should really only apply to the `m6502.asm` file. I think for a historical archive accuracy should be important. For example when was it licensed under the MIT license, I assume fairly recently. The file date should reflect that.
TIL about the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index and I wanted to test it with a weird corner-case that I remember.
At one point in the late 1980's Microsoft had a GREATER than 100% market share of the Macintosh spreadsheet market.
How is this possible?
Market share (for a given period) is the participant's sales in the market divided by total sales. It just so happened that Lotus had more returns than sales of their failed spreadsheet, Lotus Jazz. So Lotus, had a negative market share and Microsoft had more sales of Excel than total sales in the market, resulting in a greater than 100% market share.
I don't remember the exact numbers and I believe there was at least one other competitor in the study. But let's just say the numbers were:
Microsoft: 102%
Lotus: -2%
In that case the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index would be 102^2 + (-2)^2 = 10404 + 4 = 10408.
So, in this pathological case it is possible for the HHI to exceed 10,000.
Edited: Added (for a given period) above, for clarity.
I have diligently searched for this article online and have been unable to find it. (It might be on microfiche somewhere...)
I did however, find this humorous anecdote:
> A Lotus executive later joked, "The first month we shipped 62,000 copies, and the following month we got 64,000 copies back. It was such a failure they sent us the bootlegged copies back."
That's not a thing. Market share has no time period. It's an instantaneous measure of the state of things right now. How many of your company's units are out in the wild right now being used, vs. how many total units (sold by any company) are out there in the wild right now being used.
That number can and will be different at different points of time, as people buy and return your products, and buy and return your competitors' products[0]. You can certainly say that your market share increased by 300% or by -40% over a given period of time, but your actual market share is always a number between 0% and 100%.
> Market share (for a given period) is the participant's sales in the market divided by total sales.
No, that's a company's share of sales as compared to the industry/product category as a whole. Not market share.
[0] You also should take into account people who throw your product in the trash (or for software, delete it) without returning it. Depending on context, you might even want to take into account people who put your product in a box in their basement and never use it again. Assuming you could actually divine those numbers, which of course you likely can't.
There are multiple methods of measuring multiple (related) things. What you are describing sounds more like the share of the installed base, which only works for certain types of products. (i.e. it doesn't work for consumables like apples or electricity)
It gets really interesting when you look at the precinct and county level in the US, and similar types of views in European countries where they do real representative government.
It's ironic that national level politics mirrors the kind that the founding fathers did not ever want happening, while local politics has the kind of representation that they actually had in mind (in most places).
> The only way that makes any sense is if you subtract returns for sales made in a different period to the sales period you are considering
Exactly. That's the way accounting works. They did not know in the previous quarter that the product would be returned in the following quarter, so they end up having negative sales in the current quarter.
Yes it produces "garbage output", which I find amusing.
There are multiple ways of calculating market share (e.g. units vs dollars or for different time periods) but assuming it is measured in dollars for a quarterly time period, how would you calculate the market share based upon my sample data above?
That is how it was calculated in a published trade magazine (either Infoworld or MacWeek, I think) I'm not sure if the the analysis was done by a market research firm or the magazine.
The story sounds fishy, but one way to have returns exceed sales is to ship 1,000 to stores on consignment, the store sells 500 of those for cash, the buyers return their 500 for refunds, and the store returns the remaining unsold 500. So 500 actual sales but 1,000 returns.
The 500 sent back by the consignment store aren't "returns" though, as they were never sold. That's just the equivalent of moving inventory from one warehouse to another.
The article focuses on a comparison between GUIX _system_ and NixOS. It would be interesting to see an equally thoughtful comparison that just focuses on GUIX vs. NIX as package managers used on another Linux distribution (e.g. Debian.)
In this case, GUIX might fare better as you won't have to worry about the complexities introduced by binary blobs needed for boot, etc.
Personally, I’d really like a crossplatform declarative package manager in a mainstream or mainstream-style language, where the nixpkgs equivalent can be JITed or AOTed including the shell scripts, so it isn’t painful to work with and can switch into an environment almost instantly.
Though nix the language syntactically isn’t that complex, it’s really the way that nixpkgs and things like overrides are implemented, the lack of a standard interface between environments and Darwin and NixOS, needing overlays with multiple levels of depth, etc that makes things complex.
The infuriating thing about nix is that it’s functionally capable of doing what I want, but it’s patently obvious that the people at the wheel are not particularly inclined to design things for a casual user who cannot keep a hundred idiosyncrasies in their head memorized just to work on their build scripts.
The key layout on the calculator (DA or desk accessory) exactly matches the numeric keypad of the Lisa keyboard, but the big '=' key is labelled 'Enter' on the physical keypad. You could use the keypad to use the calculator, which I remember doing on a "Macintosh XL" (a Lisa running Mac OS) Having the big key be '=' was a nice usability feature since 'Enter' didn't make much sense in the calculator DA.
If you search for pictures of "Original Lisa Keyboard" you can see that the layout is the same. However, in the pictures I found the key that corresponds to the small '=' in the screenshot in the article is labelled '-' and there appear to be some other differences. I don't remember these differences or any rationale for them.
Update: They screenshot in the article exactly matches the Macintosh Plus keyboard -- which is a keyboard I actually owned. Although I used Mac XL before getting my Plus, it's probably this keyboard that I'm remembering:
It’s odd because the original Macintosh had a smaller keyboard without a numpad, however one was offered separately. It’s interesting because this “original” keypad has different placement or operator keys than the Plus keyboard.
Hmmm... Disappointing that the static methods are no longer imported as of JEP 512. I thought that was the whole point of the new IO class. If we can't write "println" we might as well just write "System.out.println".
