I find some kind of solace in the 100% acceptance of some global standards. We can all agree on at at least some things.
The international standard for identifying postal items
21–28 of 28 posts
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#22With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
Is the serial number even in base 10? the other parts of the number allow letters, the article does not say, but it could easily be base 36. which is close to 3 trillion serials.
Plus a bonus rant: this is one of those things that looks like a number and as such you are tempted to use a number to store it, but its not, it's a string, you will never do math on it so it is not a number. see also: phone numbers, social security numbers, serial numbers.
and sheepish bonus update: there is a checksum, so math is done on it. wonder if the checksum makes more or less sense in base 36? probably less, the checksum almost looks base12-ish, the mod(11), but there are special cases for two digit values so it is probably base 10.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#23With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
The short answer is probably : in-house consolidation.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#24With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
Is the serial number even in base 10? the other parts of the number allow letters, the article does not say, but it could easily be base 36. which is close to 3 trillion serials. Plus a bonus rant: this is one of those things that looks like a number and as such you are tempted to use a number to store it, but its not, it's a string, you will never do math on it so it is not a number. see also: phone numbers, social…
Eh, your comment here was checksummed several times as well crossing the network. Doesn't make it "a number".
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
What helps is that they don’t ship direct from China by mail much. They often send in bulk to the destination country and then mail locally, and local post systems can have their own domestic format. Or they have their own private courier do the last mile delivery too so it never touches any postal operator.
Do they? In Australia usually get them direct from HK or China because it is cheaper to do that even than post it within Australia!
In Southern Ontario Canada, yes, even in the suburbs, most stuff is dropped off by some rando courier for a few years now.
Somehow cheaper than paying bulk international airmail rates.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost will be in updating every legacy postal system that currently has fixed column lengths/input field length limits.
Yes, now, but the person you're replying to was asking about at inception.
Why was IPv4 so pitifully small? I guess most people thought 100 million parcels a year was a ridiculously generous limit that we'd never reach.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#27With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
Yeah. Apparently last year they shipped over two million small parcels to Finland (pop. 5.6M) alone, which is completely bollocks.
> completely bollocks
Do you mean “bonkers”? Because “bollocks” in this case would mean “made up”.