C'mon - /. loves Google, and when talking to a bunch of engineers/IT/software types the last thing you want to lead with is "Your awesome idea isn't sale-able"

My top two guesses are:
1) This is /. click-bait: watch as we all pile on and argue with the summary!
2) This was mass-posted to a bunch of sites by a service. Maybe not the exact same article everywhere, but someone wants people to think that Google isn't all that, and has paid someone else to post stuff promoting that view

What does everyone else think?

- there, FTFY

Although, given how much their market share has been slipping, perhaps anthem is the right word after all?

Exactly! There's no 'quandary' here - the price difference is entirely intentional. In order for there to be a quandary there needs to be some uncertainty on someone's part.

(The book review author doesn't really spell out what the quandary is - the companies may not know exactly what they're going to do but if that's the quandary then it needs to be spelled out, rather than left to the reader to guess at)

What quandary would that be? That they'd face (illegal) competition?

A quandary is a situation where you're confused about what to do. Facing cheaper competition doesn't seem like it would be confusing. Difficult or challenging, yes. Terrifying, possibly. But not so much confusing.

If the pharmaceutical industry had the choice of either selling lots and lots of drugs (through the spammers) at a discount that might put them in a quandary. Should they risk being found out (and potentially have everyone buy the cheap stuff (thus reducing their overall revenue and profit)) or should they NOT sell their product through the black market, thus passing on the money they could get from that. That's a situation where it's not really clear what the best thing to do is.

Interesting book, sounds like. And thank you for the review - I've got it on hold at my local public library now!

So the idea is that there are records in the system about them, but the phrase "criminal record" means specifically that they've been arrested, tried, and found guilty?

That makes sense, but seems like it could/should be phrased better. Maybe something like 9,000 chronic offenders (PDF), virtually all of whom have criminal conviction records.

There's a house in our neighborhood that kinda goes in this category. The residents are low-level ne'er-do-well types. They run a bicycle theft ring but haven't been caught (they're very good about filing ID numbers off bikes, for example), they dabbled in cooking meth, they've hosted a squatter encampment in their backyard, etc, etc. Part of the reason they're such a problem is that they never *quite* get arrested so they're chronically causing more problems.

The main thing that's relevant to this thread is that the article made it sound like they were using lots of 'Big Data' to figure out what to do, but then threw in stuff like "uncooperative witnesses" or "record-free chronic offenders" which both sounded a lot like "people we put on the list just because". I'm glad that the problem was in my understanding, not that they really were doing arbitrary stuff.

How can you be a chronic offender and NOT have a record?

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" :) )