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Wal-Mart's Data Obsession

Posted by timothy on from the what-do-you-want-today dept.

g8oz writes "The New York Times covers Wal-Mart's obsession with collecting sales data. Fun fact: 'Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.' That much information results in some interesting data-mining. Did you know hurricanes increase strawberry Pop Tarts sales 7-fold?"

4 of 581 comments (clear)

  1. Correlation doesn't imply causation!!!!! by Baldrson · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Did you know hurricanes increase strawberry Pop Tarts sales 7-fold

    Correlation doesn't imply causation!!!!!

    I mean what if a third factor caused both the hurricanes and strawberry Pop Tart sales to increase 7-fold????

    Somebody was going to blurt that bromide out at that statement, so it may as well be me.

    --
    Seastead this.
  2. Re:economies of scale by Sexy+Bern · · Score: 5, Insightful

    More to the point - how do they back it up?

  3. Re:So, if Walmart put up a web interface... by Frnknstn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Firstly, there is no way they can be talkinging about all the data availible on the internet. Filesharing networks alone have WAY more data than this, and when you add all the FTP servers and mirrors, the webmail archives, the home Windows users with insecure shares...

    There is no way this can be true. Even if you ONLY take publicly availible WWW pages, it would far exceed their measly estimate.

    --
    If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
  4. Re:I would have thought that the Internet had more by Brynath · · Score: 5, Insightful
    But the Internet Archive is on the internet right?

    That means that the internet has well over a petabyte of information on it, much of the information is probably the same but it is on the internet>