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Bar Coding The World Away
778790 writes "The Bar Code, long used for inventory classification and sometimes feared as a tool of social engineering, has been regulated in the name of globalization, and the globe has defeated the United States. Bar Codes in America will now have more digits, to match the global bar code standard: the European Article Numbering Code."
12-digit bar codes aren't quite going to be retired, but US and Canadian retailers will be expected to be able to tolerate 13-digit codes as of January 2005. This sounds a lot like the Y2K situation... anybody whose database and/or software assumed it was a 12-digit field is now going to have to account for an extra digit and that's going to mean patches and code rewrites all around.
It's good news for the geeks... more work for us to do.
And the Antichrist causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
And that no man might buy or sell, save except he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
-- Rev 13:16-18 KJV
I doubt that hardware is going to be the problem, but rather the software that accepts the data. There may be a few applications where the logic is burnt in, but by and large, the barcode reader is just another input device, and it's the software that needs to change.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Why not take the time to implement a flexible sytem which may allow to encore an arbitrary number of characters?
I imagine it has to do with simplifying the amount of work done by barcode readers. Similar to IPv6. Bigger, longer... but still fixed-length.
That last bit makes me feel dirty.
Also on our radar screens should be the fact that the US PSTN numbering scheme keeps getting more lines and is coming closer to the point that the (xxx)-yyy-zzzz numbering format is about to hit the wall. The rule that declared the center digit of an area code had to be 0 or 1 fell years ago. If an extra digit ever gets added anywhere, a lot of PBX systems are going to not like the new numbers.
IPv4 is also in trouble in this area, and IPv6 is waiting in the wings to take over. However, NAT seems to be good enough in stretching out single IP addresses to multiple computers so I don't know if we'll ever be forced to convert over.
Other inevitable and overdue US switchovers:
1. GSM mobile phones.
2. Metric. (*)
3. Standard international dialing. (00 + country)
And one I won't be holding my breath for:
4. A universal healthcare system.
(*) Laugh all you like, global corporations are gonna use metric for everything, not stupid US-only units. Eventually this will trickle down to everyday life. It may take decades, but...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
private sector floating the cost versus the us gov't paying to re-do all the highway signs and whatnot.
Bigger, longer... but still fixed-length.
Fellows' Law: All fixed-length fields are too short.
it's time to be rid of the old British system... EVEN BRITAIN DON'T USE THEM ANY MORE!!!
Oh, how I wish that were true. Britain still marks road signs in miles, sells milk in pints (this is a recent thing - it's getting so that it's difficult to buy litres of milk), and even has "Metric Martyrs" refusing - still - to adopt SI units.
New Zealand switched to Metric in the space of a few weeks - Britain is currently aiming for "a few decades...and counting".
...Not that I care, I just think the US approach - give people a choice - makes more sense than the UK approach of "half-arsed adoption of the Metric system followed by 30 years of whinging". Bloody poms ;)
This is where the serious fun begins.
Well, speaking as someone else on this side of 'the pond' I really can't understand why Americans fight to keep their complicated, quirky and backward system when metric is JUST SO MUCH FRIKKIN' EASIER! The metric system is used by the majority of scient communities all over the world people, learn to use it!!
But for some reason it's fine for other countries to simultaneously complain about US cultural imperialism and mandate the US submit to the other country's own boring lifeless units.
No one voted in IEEE (except for US and a selected few organization), but their standards on numbers, integer, ASCII, and various file formats plus wireless communication and TCP/IP are adopted by all as a necessity, why?
Because it's necessary, internet cannot possibly have form without a standard. No, European standards are not anymore global that US standard, but European standards are much widely adopted then the US standard. And having one standard allows everyone to do things more efficiently. Heck, having one standard language would be nice, we could invent one and call it the Common (French... too complicated. English... too ambiguous. Chinese... again, too complicated. Japanese... same problem with Chinese since they use some Chinese characters.). Hm... Tolkien's Elvish...
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
It's amazing how many Joe Sixpacks think that the metric system is "hard". Personally, I prefer to work in metric, even though I am an American. The whole system is much more organized...and I only have to memorize powers of ten rather than 24, 12, 16, 3, 5280, etc. Of course speed limits and such I'm still stuck with non-metric. I support the switch.
Some AC wrote:
>Do you think the US actually cares if you have to pay extra for putting a sticker on something?
Obviously not.
>Compared to translation costs and the like (most of the EU does not speak English), adopting UPC is not that big of a deal, and less so now given the standard.
EAN is actually the standard everywhere, not just Europe, except the US. There are other countries in the world that publish in English, you know (the UK, Australia, NZ, for a start). When they export books to the US, they had to either print a special edition or sticker them with UPCs.
Well, while decimal has it's advantages because it is aligned with base ten which is the most commonly used numbering system, units of measure using other bases like 12 and 60 have advantages as well in that they have more factors. 60, for example has factors of 2,3,4,5,6,10,15,20 and 30.
For example, if an hour was 10 minutes, a quarter hour would be a fractional number of minutes. Not so in the base 60 system. Likewise, the foot, being 12 inches can be divided into more parts than a decimal foot could be.
We might want to consider getting rid of decimal numbering and going to duodecimal, and then adopting a self consistent set of units in the new numbering system as a superiour alternative to that crazy scheme developed by the cheese eating, wine drinking, unbathed, Godless French.
Dude, what about my Cue Cat? How's it going to be any better than the 20 year old IBM scanners that are so common? IBM and others might have a service to upgrade their machines but could easily abuse the situation. If there's a Microsoft system out there, the answer is going to be "buy another system" like any other piece of the upgrade train.
I expect that custom software owners will be in much better shape. It's not as good as free software, but people who are in touch with the software's writer will get fixes quickly and at reasonable cost.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You'd be suprised how easy it is to get used to new values. It's been only a few years since we switched from our national currencies to the Euro, and already I hardly ever convert a price back to my former currency (Belgian francs). In the beginning it took a bit getting used to, and the first few months everybody was constantly converting to old currencies, but since all prices are now in Euro, you get used to it very fast.
Your example about one hour makes little sense: if an hour was 10 minutes, half-an-hour would be 5 minutes...easy. One quarter of an hour would still be one quarter of an hour. And instead of rounding everything up to multiples of 2 or 5 minutes, we would have learned the length of time of one minute, and we'd all be speaking in minutes instead of trying to find a higher meaningful multiple value. So actually this would even work nicely :-)
Don't attribute something to malice that can easily be explained by stupidity. After all, it *is* the government.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad