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I've seen a number of complaints about how Christmas merchandise appears in stores ridiculously early (i.e. frequently as soon as Back To School is finished). The best explanation I can think of is because major stores use computers for everything. How does this cause the problem?
While humans use base 10 (decimal) numbers, computers use base 2 (binary). To make it easier for humans to "feed" computers with binary numbers, a few other systems are used - base 8 (octal), and base 16 (hexadecimal). This means that a number can be represented in any one of 4 different ways, and to a computer, all 4 representations are equivalent.
In programming, a fairly standard way to indicate which base a number is in is to give it a suffix of the first 3 letters of the numbering system. For example, 10 DEC is the ordinary number 10, 10 BIN is 2 (1x2 + 0x1), 10 OCT is 8 (1x8 + 0x1), and 10 HEX is 16 (1x16 + 0x1).
The result of this is that Christmas merchandise arrives in stores before Halloween because the computers handling inventory can't tell the difference between 31 OCT and 25 DEC.
While humans use base 10 (decimal) numbers, computers use base 2 (binary). To make it easier for humans to "feed" computers with binary numbers, a few other systems are used - base 8 (octal), and base 16 (hexadecimal). This means that a number can be represented in any one of 4 different ways, and to a computer, all 4 representations are equivalent.
In programming, a fairly standard way to indicate which base a number is in is to give it a suffix of the first 3 letters of the numbering system. For example, 10 DEC is the ordinary number 10, 10 BIN is 2 (1x2 + 0x1), 10 OCT is 8 (1x8 + 0x1), and 10 HEX is 16 (1x16 + 0x1).
The result of this is that Christmas merchandise arrives in stores before Halloween because the computers handling inventory can't tell the difference between 31 OCT and 25 DEC.