Without actually stopping to look up any details I'm going to say the following: It seems like the memory-management algorithms that operating systems use ought to at least shed some light on this problem. It seems like a lot of the same problems are present in both situations: you can move 'pages' of product into and out of the processing units (i.e., people in the factory, CPUs/cores in a computer), you want to keep frequently-used shelves/pages nearby (as opposed to out in the slower-than-cache RAM), etc, etc.

I guess the major difference is that the factory can arbitrarily re-order the sequence in which it accesses the shelves in order to ensure high efficiency. (Obviously there are limits so that you make your delivery deadlines, but if you wanted to put off packing a particular box for several hours it's probably fine).

(I wonder if the 'longest-common-substring' algorithms are useful here - "For the 15 minutes we're going to pack just boxes that have a Frozen DVD, Barbie , GI Joe Tank as a 'common core' that people then add an item or two on to)" )

Would you have a breakdown of where those 100K people are, what they do and (roughly) how much the get paid?

I'm curious because paying 30,000 people to do minimum-wage, seasonal work for 3 months before Christmas in their shipping center isn't the same as 30,000 programmers earning 6 figures each on annual contracts.

(Also - didn't Amazon try and claim that since they ship a lot of things they should get credit for keeping UPS/FedEx/etc drivers employed? I'd like to know if that's included in the 'indirect' employees or not (and if so, how many) ).

No worries on the search - I embedded the link to the slashdot stories AND quoted it above :)

I agree that the 24 bit counter was incomprehensible. Apparently it's a standard choice in MySQL, though, which explains why it's an issue - one can just pick 'mediumint' and bam - 24 bit integer.

I'm mystified as to why one would want to do that - does MySQL actually pack the integers in such a way as to use those extra 8 bits for something else? On a 32 bit machine you're going to need to either ignore (zero-pack) those extra 8 bits or else extract whatever you put there before every operation (addition, comparison, etc) that you do.

Anyways - those were good times :)

16 bits? Dude, that's ridiculous.

Ok, just so everyone else on slashdot will stop laughing at us I looked it up:

http://slashdot.org/story/06/1...

From TFS:

There we go - a 24 bit index caused the crash :)

Wasn't it a 24 bit field, not a 32 bit field?

I remember thinking "24 bits? Really? What were they saving those last 8 bits for - the alpha value?" :)

It's always refreshing to see stuff like this waft across the front page of /. every now and then - I wish there was a way to re-apply the "News For Nerds... Stuff That Matters" logo to top of the page only on stories like this.

(Pro-Tip: Please mod this "+1 Nostalgic" :) )

Back in college I had a professor who said that he was glad he didn't work in AI. Asked to explain further, he said that the definition of "intelligent" is pretty much "a machine can't do it", so as soon as you've got a program that can do something everyone else immediately says "Huh! I always thought that needed intelligence. I guess not!" He then illustrated his opinion by saying that it had previously been thought that you needed intelligence to take the derivative of something, until someone wrote a program to do it.

Obviously, it was an informal, off-the-cuff, and mostly tongue-in-cheek comment, but there's definitely some truth there too.

Mod parent up. Especially with the de facto salary freeze that's been in effect since our lastlatest recession started in 2007, being able to find a second job is critical to being able to afford to teach

I misread this as

That would have been a much more interesting article to read, methinks :)

Nice! Thanks!

How did you do this?

(I think the most useful thing to share would be the magic Google search phrase that'll let us search for into about this feature. This is really useful,but I've got no idea what it would be called :) )

Oh! Factor like in math. For some reason I assume factor like refactoring code.

Nice!!!!!!