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Barcodes: The Number of the Beast
Boomzilla continues: Barcodes were first developed in the railroad business to keep track of which cars went with which engine. The barcodes were imprinted on the side of the railway cars. The barcodes on each car could then be read together to compile information on that particular grouping; what station they came from, where they were headed, etc. thus automating the process of marshalling. When the business world realized how well this system worked, these railway barcodes evolved into the UPC system with which we are all familiar. To really be able to take in the wonder that are bar codes, check out the excellent FAQ created by Russ Adams and an article from the BBC.
Coming full circle, the clever folks at Bekonscot Model Railway in the UK have utilized barcodes at every turn of their expansive system. For example, an MP3 player is driven off barcodes attached to trains. The trains are announced before they arrive and when they are leaving, stating their destination, route and at what stations they will call.
Want a barcode of your name?
What about all those games that came out a year or so ago with commercials exhorting kids to run around grocery stores ripping things off of shelves in an attempt to "power up" their videogame creatures? Those were cool...er...stupid.
I got a big tattoo of my SSN in barcode format right on my forehead.
That way people know who I am.
It is unclear from any of those links if this makes me cool or not.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
The use on train cars was not without problems. Some roads ran the cars through a sprayer before trying to read the codes. Union Switch & Signal installed competing systems that used inductive loops; obviously more expensive but high reliability.
Barcodes: The Number of the Beast
It never occurred to me that Satan might be living in my UPC symbols. Now I need a priest to accompany me to the grocery store.
The coolest voice ever.
Standard UPC bar codes consist of a set of lines to mark the start of the code, the left hand part of the code itself, another set of marker lines, the right hand part of the code itself, and a third set of marker lines:The marker lines are "0101", "01010" and "1010" respectively, where 0 is white and 1 is black.
Now, the encoding scheme is complicated, but it just so happens that "0101" if treated as data on the left hand side would decode to the digit "6".
Similarly, "1010" on the right hand side would decode to a "6" if it were data. The middle also has a "1010" or a "0101" depending upon how you want to look at it.
Hence every UPC bar code has "6...6...6" built into it.
There are some technical niggles with the theory. The middle marker has that extra white bar on the left, but this can be explained away by saying that a gap is needed before the next coded part starts, or that it is to make the thing scan both ways. Yup, it even reads "666" if you play it backwards.
In "The Master of Space and Time" Rudy Rucker jokes about this theory by having an alternate universe where people pay for their groceries by having the checkout operator swipe a UPC code that's tattooed on their foreheads.
Does anyone remember the game barcode battlers??? You used bar codes from anything you could find and swipe them through a reader and they would give you stats for your character to fight other characters. Really neat idea. Ahh early 90's technology... hehe.
So exactly what does that bar code on the back on my neck mean? I had it scanned at the grocery store, it seems I'm cheap and can be bought for $6.66
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Mediachest.com lets you scan in the UPC's and ISBN's on the back of DVDs, Games, CDs, and video games and keep track of your collection. You can even use an CueCat to do this.
http://www.mediachest.com/
My DVD and Game Collection Tracking L
The 666 rumor comes about from illiterate, non-mathematical conspiracy theorists.. On a barcode, the black bars represent 1 and white bars represent 0. Most of us, I hope, understand that. When the barcode scanner reads the barcode, it must know when to start reading and stop reading, and it does this by finding the code "101" you see at the beginning and end of the barcode. Also, in the middle of every UPC is a 01010 combination, which basically tells the scanner that it has reached the middle of the barcode. The beginning, middle, and end lines are longer than the rest, and some people think that these longer lines represent the number 666. Actually, 101 in binary is 5, so if you are that paranoid and into conspiracy theories, the longs lines on the barcode read "555"
Andy Deck has reinvented classic literature with Bardcode
Did anyone else read that as Andy Dick? I thought the only things andy dick did was get naked and fall down a lot.
I can't all your questions but I can tell you unequivicolly that many UPCs in the U.S. are not unique. I worked for a while as a pricing analyst for Safeway food and drug. Dealing with duplicate UPCs was a problem.
As I understand it-- there is a newer standard with longer barcodes and europe has moved to it but the u.s. still uses the older UPCs.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Even cooler than barcodes is RFID. You don't even have to aim to get it to scan correctly. The only problem is the printers that you let you arbitrarily mark the tags are expensive; about $1000, whereas barcodes can be printed on anything with black ink.
BUT!!... optical scanners are expenive ($250 and up). Yet you can get a RFID USB reader for about $60. It comes with a few premade tags. You can buy pre-signed RFID tags for less than $1.00 each, and a sheet of them can usually be run through a printer; then you could have barcodes AND RFID.
We're considering using such a system to do inventory control. Fun!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
At the grocery store where I shop, they put removable UPC codes on the large items like 25# bags of dog food so that you can peel it off to hand the cashier, rather than loading it on the conveyor and watching them try to flop it around to get the UPC side facing the laser and then dragging it quickly enough over the sensor to register. You could theoretically peel the lablel off of the generic dog food and load your cart up with Alpo, but that would be illegal.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
...with the recruitment policy of our local hardware superstore.
:
B&Q is a large DIY chain in the UK. They might be in the US, I don't know. They have a policy of only employing people over 95 years of age.
So you get to the checkout with your self install kitchen. A little old 97 year old lady has now got to try and
a) locate the barcode on each item of your self-install kitchen, containing many items that are several orders of magnitude BIGGER THAN SHE IS.
b) having located the barcode, get her scanner to it.
O.k. - I never thought I'd find a forum where this story might even have the slightest relevance but here we are.
For a few years I worked for Safeway Food and Drug as a File Maintenance Clerk. I printed pricing labels and hung them on the shelves. I made price signs, applied the batches to change prices, etc.
Safeway has a system in place on the registers where certain activities require a manager with an override card. Checks of a certain amount, large voids, all kinds of stuff.
Since I worked on the computers all the time I was the one who changed the message on the bottom of receipt tapes- with the manager name- when we got a new manager. One day I'm moving around in the file that contained that information and I find all these long numbers in one location. They were all the managers override numbers.
Here's where the barcode part comes in. I wanted my own over ride card. I went into the software I used to print price labels and took a single record and changed the UPC of a product on the label to an override number. When I printed the label- the barcode in the corner for ordering now read the override number.
I cut the barcode part out, peeled the back and stuck it to a card I carried in my wallet. Now any time I needed an override I could just scan that card over the register scanner.
On a side note- I called company security and told them that all the manager codes were in plain text where anyone could see them in the machine. They told me it was o.k. because noone would ever look there. Kind of funny. It is probably still that way.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
but here you go:
Microsoft's latest wall poster
No, I don't remember who sent it to me. And I'm turning off the webserver in half an hour so I can go back to getting real work done, so somebody mirror the damn thing and stop hammering my home DSL. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Please try again Mr. AC troll...
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Sally: How'd your research go?
Harry: Great. I was at the grocery store and... watch this: [holds up a can of corn] fat skinny skinny fat fat skinny fat skinny... $2.49. I cracked the bar code!
Sally: Good work!
c-hack.com |
This site has an interesting article that fully explains how classic barcodes work, how you can decode the bars, etc. An interesting read.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
ART lacks a satisfactory definition. It is easier to describe it as the way something is done -- "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others" (Britannica Online) -- rather than what it is.
i st s.html
http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/artartists/artart
By that definition, the barcodes (and the sink) are art. I think you underestimate the amount of art in our world, and simultaneously overvalue your concept of an artist. I personally don't find any reward in looking at a Van Gogh or a Monet, but I can lose myself in an Ansel Adams picture, and all he did was press a button, right?(it took a long time for photography to be considered "art") We each have tastes, and we each value certain things as art or not. And in someone's opinion, we're wrong.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
There are loads of cars in the UK these days with 666 in the registration. I should point out, for non-UKians, that UK car registrations used to run , then switched to . It's changed again though. Incidentally, you will never see the three-letter group "BAS" on a UK number plate - because the "AS" part means "Inverness-shire", where people speak Gaelic. And "bas" in Gaelic (actually should have an accent over the "a") means "die".