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The End of the Bar Code
valdean writes "The University of Wisconsin RFID Lab, principally funded by a dozen Wal-mart suppliers including 3M, Kraft Foods, and S.C. Johnson & Son, believes that RFID could spell the end of the ubiquitous bar code. The big draw? Speeding up supply-chain management. Wal-mart's warehouse conveyor belts presently move products at 600 feet per minute... but they want to be faster. And better informed."
Zoom. That's 10 feet per second. Reminds me of the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel were newly employed at a candy factory with them packing boxes while trying to keep pace with the machine producing chocolate candies.
Man, better not blink if you work in a Wal-Mart warehouse...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I like to know if the bar serves alcohol or just wine and beer, whether the waitresses are topless or merely scantily clad, if there's a cover charge (and how much), if there's a band or a lame jukbox, and finally if they have pool tables.
Oh, you mean those thingies with lines? Nevermind.
6.81818... miles per hour. That's a brisk walk.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Things like this are fun to experiment with, and in some applications they're very useful and make people's lives better. But what do we really have to gain by developing RFID in our personal lives? So we don't have to "deal with" the cashiers at a store? We're eliminating the need for human contact .
"... but they want to be faster
" Why do they want to be faster? So they can continue to work a 40-hour week and rush home to...to what? The internet?
Sorry, but my life is too fast-paced as it is, the last thing I need is another thing to expedite my trip through life.
I don't know about the article, but that's the same summary that's accompanied every RFID story for the past 3 years.
To our Slashdot Overlords:
..." section?
Can we get a "The End of
The End of the Bar Code
Yep, the bar code is dead. Right after BSD dies. Should be any day now.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
I hope that means someone will release a low cost tcp/ip enabled RFID reader, suitable for home/small business use.
Knowing what's in one's cupboards might be useful. Be great if the best before date is encoded as part of the sequence.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"And better informed."
I went to apply for a walmart credit card whan I was 18 - they already had my information and SSN - I was shocked.
They know too much already!
In other news, the shares of tinfoil makers have increased.
Speaking of which, can you read the price tag on my new hat?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
For example, if I'm writing a registration program, it is trivially easy to create a bar code on the registrant's invoice that they then print and bring to the event. Until that magical RFID printer is developed and marketed, I don't see Bar Codes going away.
Also, that bar code on all those pieces of snail mail ("postnet") will not be replaced any time soon.
Yeah, right.
Did anyone else see that commercial a while back that had this guy in a long trenchcoat walking through a supermarket, stuffing things into his coat. He take a whole bunch of stuff and sticks in inside his coat and then walks out, and as he walking out a employee stops him and hands him his receipt for all the stuff he just bought.
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
.. so that you can get home and watch porno faster.
If you relish your time waiting in lines to check out, you're life isn't going to be one anyone will miss.
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In the UK the supermarket giant Sainsbury had problems with their stock in warehouses after barcode scanning software turned out to be less than reliable. Cages of goods were going into their warehouses and literally getting lost as no one knew they were there. Lots of fresh produce was going to waste and shelves were suspiciously empty as a result.
And meanwhile their main rival Tesco were busy building up a large market lead...
An RFID lab funded by huge companies thinks RFID will do away with barcode? No shit!
A basic printer and barcode scanner can still be had for under $500. You can print as many barcodes as you want - your only limits are paper and toner.
An RFID reader (the kind you would need for warehousing applications) will cost several thousand dollars, and each RFID chip will cost a dollar at the very least. Then, if you want active chips (so you don't have to be within feet of the item), you'll have to pay $20-ish on volume.
I sort of wonder when we'd use stuff like RFID to make it so when you get to the checkout counter you'd pile your stuff on the conveyer belt and it will automatically detect everything that goes over it and charge automatically. You'd have the checkout girl/guy packing bags at the other end. The ultimate speed checkout.
I don't see how this will work. Wally World supposedly has all this great technology but it all just falls apart at the end of the chain, the store level. I work in one of the busiest, highest profit stores in the company and it's nearly impossible to find a scanner even to check a price, much less do anything else. Doing our jobs is very difficult because Wal-Mart just doesn't want to put up the money to give us the equipment we need.
So RFID may be a wonderful technology and all that, but if they do it half-assed, it won't be any better than a bar code.
I'm sure they would still have people working at the store in some capacity, so I think that particular fear is unfounded :)
Personally, I would be glad if these systems were introduced and saved time at stores. To me, spending time at home with my girlfriend and horses is more important than standing in a qeue waiting for a cashier to process everyone's purchases.
Liberal Ontarians and French Quebecers are draining Western Canada's wealth. Stop them now! Support Western separatism.
Does this mean that armageddon isn't coming? Or does this just mean that satan is joining the computer revolution and will be embedding us all with RFID's encoded with 666?
The story may have been here before in other forms, but RFID is nothing new and while we don't like the fact that big brother keeps getting their tech-house in order, the simple truth is that every tool can be used for good or evil, just not RFID, right?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Bar codes supply other niceties, like when shelves get stocked a little off from the labels on the shelf, or when something gets put back by a consumer, or very similar items are right next to each other. With all of these you can match the bar code up with the code on the label. Hopefully they'll keep something similar around if not used for determining the actual prices.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Bar codes were invented in 1952 but only became really widely used in the last ten years, thanks to ink jet printers and laser scanning at many checkouts. It's going to take RFIDs decades to replace bar codes and probably it won't happen until a RFID chip can be literally micro-printed onto a paper receipt, onto an egg, or onto a newspaper.
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Such a reader would also probably enable you to read what's in your neighbour's cupboard as well.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
There is very little value-added by RFID on individual product packages, considering the costs involved. A bar-code is essentially free, while they're going to be hard-pressed to make a RFID tag under $0.10. So they might be useful for large palettes and such, there's just no clear advantage over a regular barcode.
And what's this nonsense about barcodes and speed concerns? 600ft/minute is nothing. Standard barcode readers can easily do 700 scans/sec.. So these scanners could handle speeds of 3500 ft/minute.
Wal-Mart executives have cloven feet.
Laws are for people with no friends.
This technology isn't going to replace barcodes. Many companies (like UPS or FedEx) would have a difficult time adapting their systems because of the large amounts of accidental "scanning" of RFID tags. If companies can use it effectively, that's great, but for many companies, barcodes are a more ideal solution.
How would they attach tags to things like plastic bags (frozen/fresh veggies) individual pieces of produce (they're now starting to use lasers to etch barcodes onto the skin of fruits), and other small or unusually shaped items? Barcodes can be put on almost anything no matter what the shape or size. Can the same be done with RFID tags?
And what about boxes that have multiple barcodes? Cell phones are one example - they have serial numbers, ESN's, etc. that all need to be scanned at different times for different reasons. How do you do this with RFID? I suppose you could say that the RFID that begins with one prefix is a serial number, with another prefix is an ESN, etc. but then you put a lot more in the way of constraints on the manufactureres, and I doubt they'd like that.
who got a barcode tattoo because they thought it would look cool and anti-corporate are gonna be pissed off!
RFID can be advantageous to suuply-chain and distribution management, but there are still several problems that need to be addressed before the bar code will die out.
Standards -- For one thing, there are many different standards (the US & Europe, for example, use different frequencies). Increased globalization of supply chains will make this a royal PITA, and probably not cost-effective, for many retailers.
RFID signals are easily blocked -- often accidentally. Soda Cans, for example, can interfere with RFID to such an extent that only tags on the outside of a pallet will be read.
Developing technology -- as RFID tech becomes more advanced, new capabilities will be put into play, and a lot of these may require software and hardware upgrades both for the tags and the readers. This, of course, can be expensive.
Unreliability -- while bar codes are relatively exensive to use (since they require active scanning within line-of-sight), they are very accurate. RFID tags have a misidentification rate that is higher, and can be compounded by improper placement of the scanned goods, or many other causes (like cell phone and walkie-talkie usage).
IMO, bar codes will be around for a very long while. Sure, Walmart will use RFID for supply-chain management. But, the real reason they are implementing it is:
RFID can be used to track consumers inside a store.
Better product placement, better loss prevention, better tracking of purchases.
Only the plus side, RFID is blocked by tinfoil hats.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
they figure out a way only I can scan my items.
At the moment, barcode scanning is obvious enough that I know when I'm being sized up consumer statistics-wise. RFID could allow the lady at the end of the aisle to scan from a distance, and loudly pronounce that you buy X brand and that Y brand is better - there's no limit or control over who could scan what you have...
Tidbit... I've seen a conveyor belt spin the items slowly to allow the barcode scanner ample time and angles to read every item.
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
I wonder how do I scan a RFID that has been faxed to me from the other side of the world? Guess not... BAR CODES will still be quite useful for a very long time...
What will happen is that there will be Bar Codes AND RFID Tags in the product.
Bar Codes are here to stay. They are easy to read, are human readable (at least the ones that have the numbers below the bars) and are easy to implement with current tech.
There will be a time where RFID will be human readable, but i hope to be long dead by then...
There are many limits to RFID -- for example, how well do those thing withstand extreme cold? I'd like to use them for Artificial Insemination samples in our labs, but I just don't think those things would work too well at temperatures approaching absolute zero. Even if they did, you'd still have to open the insulated containers to get a signal since they are line of sight. I doubt they would work to well in meat or frozen foods either or anything shipped in winter.
Moreover, their biggest limitiation is bad data design. For example that chip Tommy Thompson seems to be backing away from inserting... I heard on Wisconsin Public radio it only gives a unique 8 digit identifier to be entered into a website to obtain the medical info. A number that small wouldn't come close to being able to give a unique number to the US population let alone the world's -- it seems like it would be too easy to get the wrong info on someone, let alone be able to wardial the database for fun and profit.
RFID seems to be a great way to manage drygoods, but medical applications can be dangerous. What do you do if the chip gets lost in the body as frequently happens with dogs? Even worse, what do you do with the thing when you get an MRI? Would it rocket out of your body to the strong magnet?
I think down the road there will be many useful applications, but we are still trying to figure out how to do simple things with them -- which is why Walmart's deadline to have everything RFID is long gone and forgotten as even the big players are trying to figure out how to get the things to work. Ethical concerns aside, the technology is still too new to be reliable but it does show promise.
Ok so the barcode wasn't the mark of the beast but I know for a FACT that this RFID contraption is. REPENT!
that will result in even greater efficiency when used together.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I dont know about you, but over here ( Estonia ) we can for example purchase movie theatre tickets online and print them anywhere. The very same barcode-carrying tickets lets you in through the gates in cinema. How's RFID going to replace so simple and cheap system ?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
If they can use item-level RFIDs to do inventory management, then so can you. Think of being able to quickly determine a "household manifest" of your consumables, compare that against a desired manifest of what you would like to have when the household is fully stocked, and generate a grocery list instantly. What has really held back the would-be Amazons of the grocery business is that the consumer doesn't know what they want until they see it on the shelf, and sometimes not even then. The supermarket managers do know what the consumer wants, but only in aggregate. So there's this big information crisis between the wholesale level and the items on your shelves, and this information crisis is why the markup at the retail level is a signifcant fraction of the final consumer cost: it pays for people to nicely array the items on shelves, for the parking lots and big wide aisles where your car and you have to sit while you make up your mind as to whether you want something or not, all because there is no better way to determine whether you want something than having you look at it and make the decision. When the price of RFID technology gets down to the point of practicability for this, the smart entrepreneur is going to give away the scanner, becasue the cost and convenience advantages of being automatically inventory your house and order replacements will be self-evident. Heck, when the adoption rate gets high enough, it is self-apparently more efficient for a delivery vehicle to go through neighborhoods than for each household to send a representative to a centralized location.
You put all your groceries in the cart, you push the cart into a machine, you are checked out instantly. No longer do you have to have the person scan every single item. Grocery shopping will be 1000x better :o
The joint official press statement of the World WildLife Fund, Greenpeace and the ATTAC movement follows:
We, the animal-loving people of the world strongly condemn the capitalistic, imperialistic death edict issued against the bar code by Wal-Mart and its greedy servants, 3M and Kraft.
The welfare of zebras must always have priority over the desires of the ver more profit hungry retail industry which only serves to turns peope into ka-ching consumer automatons all over the world!
Will we be taping the chip to the form instead of the bar code?
At an already 600fpm and wanting to improve, am I the only on thinking that Wal-mart should have designed the Denver International Airport Baggage System?
600 (feet per minute)
= 3.04800 m / s
= 10.9728 km per hour
= 6.81818182 mile per hour
says Google.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
So we don't have to "deal with" the cashiers at a store? We're eliminating the need for human contact .
So... do you use ATM machines, or visit the delightfully human tellers every time you wish to deposit or withdraw cash?
I remember when ATM cards were introduced. There were a lot of people then, just like you, wailing and gnashing teeth over how we were de-humanizing our lives, how people were being replaced by robots, etc. etc. We marveled and whispered every time one of dem new-fangled ATM machines popped up on a nearby street corner. Coupla generations later and, what? We wonder how we ever got through life without cash-on-demand boxes.
Lines -- queues -- are inherently bad. Nobody wants to be on a line. It's got nothing to do with human interaction (If any of your meaningful human interaction occurs on a cashier's line you need to be placed on your local constabulary's 'Watch List.') Anything that eliminates or reduces lines is good.
Line the cabinets with RF-defeating something or other and put the scanner INSIDE. Do you really need to know what's sitting on the counter? Not really...you can just look...but knowing whats in the depths of the refridgerator or cabinets would be nice.
Blar.
How fun could it be to stand outside of a wallmart with a modified scanner, and get a list on your handheld of every item in a shopper's cart on their way out. Hell, third parties could scan for a week at one location, and put togeather a very valuable marketing databases detailing the value of an item in a given demographic. Or it could just give you a "heads up" that the girl you were trying to pick up on in the produce section just bought a large supply of anti-fungal cream. Helpful info.
They can always erase it and tattoo a transmitting antenna in its place.
Yeah, radio towers are SO badass.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Line the cabinets with RF-defeating something or other
See, those conspiracy theorists were just ahead of their time.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Is this the end of my cat? Oh, the horror!
In warehouses and manufacturing situations, RFID provides many advantages since it doesn't rely on optics to obtain data about the product moving on the line.
Barcodes have their place in the retail space and in situations where the expense would be prohibitive.
Where I work, we even use a combination of both, to keep different types of information seperate.
Both technologies have their uses and I don't believe either will go away.
Wal-mart's warehouse conveyor belts presently move products at 600 feet per minute... but they want to be faster."
Didn't they see the I Love Lucy episode "The Candy Factory" where she and Ethel worked on just such a conveyor belt for chocolates? The conveyor belt sped up and they couldn't wrap the chocolates fast enough. Eventually they had to start stuffing their faces with chocolate. Would RFID tags have made a difference? I think not.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
man... I used to work at SCM plant that dealt with Ontario Canada, yes that is correct, one location handled every Wal-Mart in Ontario. That place was ridiculously fast, thousands of boxes were running on Km's and Km's track in the ceiling. It was quite the experience just touring around checking out how boxes were tracked with their barcodes and then kicked off onto correct ramps to corresponding waiting trucks for a specific location. Now they intend to make it even more efficient and faster... wow..
If only they could put half of the engineering they put into that plant into every Wal-Mart so checkout lines would disappear. Something like the self checkout at Loblaws combined with this RFID would be very sweet. Walk through a sensor and swipe my credit card and then off to the car in seconds...
Losers whine about their best, Winners go home to fuck the prom queen
It'll be Gaspar from Chrono Trigger or something.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I've studied RFID a bit.
For my industry, the business case (benefits vs. costs) for RFID just isn't attractive right now.
From what I've heard, one of Wal-Mart's real motivations is that they have not-great in-store inventory management- they have problems keeping the front of the store properly replenished from the back of the store, b/c checking for empty shelf locations is time-consuming and slow. And an empty shelf = lost sales.
There are (at least) 2 solutions to this problem: better processes and management, and RFID, which will make it easier to find out where the hell the inventory is in the store.
With 2500+ stores in the U.S. alone, standardizing processes and ensuring a high-quality management and workforce is a tall order (esp. given Wal-Mart's pay and benefits); Wal-Mart seems to have decided that it'd be better to implement RFID, which will let them know how much inventory is on the shelf vs. in the back room.
At least that's what I hear.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Bar codes are often used to track documents and forms in large companies, organizations, government agencies, and so on. I don't think placing a RFID chip on every sheet of paper that has to be tracked is a practical solution, to say the least. RFID is great for bulky things and will no doubt replace the bar code for tracking packages, shipments, and things placed on top of other things, but I this is hardly the death of bar codes.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Yes, you are.
"The End Of..." section is a great idea, but I don't particularly care for the name. What if we were to change the name to "Netcraft Confirms..."?
This sounds suspicously like a way to eliminate the rebate checks. "Rebate rejected: you did not return your original bar code"
What does this mean for barcodes? Their "death" is nowhere near imminent. I work in the packaging industry and applications for barcode readers are as prevalent as ever.
"Bar codes" aren't just the UPC codes you see at the store when you checkout. There are a lot of different codes out there--I2of5, pharmacode, EAN, code128, codabar, etc. There are a lot of Fortune 500 companies that have invested a lot of money on systems to print and read these codes, and that process isn't going to go away anytime soon. There are pharmaceutical companies that need to have zero per million defects. That's not going to happen with RFID in the near future.
RFID chips (and readers) still have too many problems with reliable reading to use them in the industry where barcodes are currently used.
(I'm sure it's much lower these days, but I was in a plant a few years ago that laid down RFID tags in boxes on a folder-gluer. Did you know that if the carton is produced on a very humid day at the plant the failure rate of RIFD tags can be up to 10%?)
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Here in Japan I have been surprised by massification in the use of bar-codes that can be read by the cell phones( Services in phones by docomo). They put this codes basically everywhere ( posters , web pages , products ) , and people can recover information from them with their cell phones . For example, in a poster from a cinema they put a web adress in this codes and people makes use of the camera in the phone to retrieve the web adress of the cinema from it and check for the schedules of the cinema. Some telephones as well have the capabilitiy to create bar codes , that can be displayed on the LCD of the phone and read by other phones. But, as I say , here is Japan and japanese people sometimes has trends that dont leave the island.
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." -- Linus
Speeding up the conveyor belts in Walmart's warehouses doesn't mean every box of Kraft Mac & Cheese would have RFID. Only the big brown box containing them. All the consumer products in the big boxes won't have them.
I don't think all the references to how you'll get scanned out of the grocery store faster don't apply.
GreasyBloater
We use barcodes on forms so when scanning them it will pick up the id. But then we realized, new scanners scan to PDF and it's really easy to pick apart a PDF file so the bar code is redundant.
I just wonder about stray RF. As we amateur radio folks are well aware, consumer electronics and to a large part business electronics don't have spectacular shielding. Hell, I note that Nextel's iDen phones tend to spalsh over into the AM band if they're within a couple feet.
...an RFID bomb has been fired at a WalMart in Washington DC... the place looks like it has suffered a major earthquake...
I recall reading something like this in an issue months ago from Technology Review. I'm *pretty* sure it was RFID, but not positive.
They mentioned checkout-free shopping. Now, that would be really cool.
Yes, and it sounds like shoplifters can now get you to pay for their stuff by placing items near your shopping cart while you're busy looking at the chewing gum.
Color me cynical, but I think there will always be a delay at the checkout (whether necessary or contrived) in order to get you in some way to ogle at the M&Ms, the TV Guide, the breath mints. Otherwise all of those products will experience a drastic loss of sales.
The cost of the RFID, in comparison to printing a box which is already done is (relatively) high (yes a penny may not be much but relative to just printing the box anyway, it's a lot). As well, it places the burden on the producer to purchase and attach these RFIDs.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
With RFID, there is the possibly of doing entire cart checkouts. Roll the cart into the scanning area, it gets all the RFID info, gives a total and you pay for your items. No need to remove everything from the cart.
Of course, this means that you likely want to bag the items as you shop instead of afterwards.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Why Walmart conveyors have feet? Or do make robotic feet?
Either your cost estimate is incorrect, OR Wal-mart is only doing this at the wholesale level. If your estimate of a buck per tag is correct, then a RFID tag can not replace the bar code at the retail level.
If they are doing this at the warehouse/wholesale level, then a $1 tag on a pallet with 10 cases of 50 each cans of beans is reasonable (you're spreading 1 dollar over 500 retail units so per unit cost is like 1/5 penny).
Putting a tag on each retail unit however would get hugely expensive. In fact, it would be too expensive to pass on to the customers without the customers going over to the competition. Wal-mart's customer base is extremely price-sensitive and Wal-mart knows it
So I have to conclude that either Wal-mart has a way to mass-produce the tags for pennies each - OR- they only plan to do this at the wholesale level.
HVW Techologies sells an RFID USB reader for $73US, and you can buy RFID tags for $2... I think that's cheap...
"Never underestimate the power of the Slashdot!"
Saying that RFID means the death of the barcode is like saying automobiles meant the death of the bicycle.
We move more well over 100 million pounds of product into the WalMart supply chain every year. Right now, pallets (a large number of cases wrapped in plastic on one of those big woooden thingies) are identified by barcode, as are the individual cases of product on the pallet. As the pallet leaves the truck, it is scanned into the distribution center and typically kept as a unit and placed in a rack. When it is picked for shipment to your local store, then it is broken down to cases for that magic belt ride.
WalMart wants each case to have an RFID device for the reasons stated before-- efficiency, etc. Because cases get scuffed, printed barcodes don't always work as well as they could. The problem lies in WalMart wanting to scan each case on the pallet when it arrives. Product deep in the pallet is hard for RFID to reach. Likewise, certain products and packaging materials interfere.
Placing an RFID tag on each item within a case will never replace printed barcodes like TFA hints. The margin on a product you sell to WalMart is razor thin as it is. Even if RDIF technology comes down in cost 100 fold, it will never be cheaper than a small printed area on the product's packaging. Barcodes are essentially a zero cost item.
Best example: a pack of chewing gum. What, 30 cents? Foil wrapped? Something like 480 units to the case? Never, ever, ever, ever. For the consumer end of the equation, RFID will only be used for more expensive items-- typically those where it's one to a case. Even then, at the store end it will probably be used more for inventory control and theft prevention. I see barcode guns for the checkouts that have RFID readers built in. Maybe. Separate systems just tracking inventory-- antenna arrays in plastic tubes hanging over the entrance and checkout-- will probably be closer to the truth.
I am in a paperless office, I use static LCD nowadays. It is a bit more costly than paper, a lot heavier, but it still outperforms static CRT in weight and space requirements. And you can recycle them just like paper, really great.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
It sounds easy to create chaos whererRFID chips are used. I'm sure the Teamsters already have boxes of them ready for their next strike.
Seems like a good virus vector. Better than the old "for a good time call..." vector.
Have anybody else read that like in "End of Bar Code ?" with Bar as in Club (Night Club)... wtf is a club code ? And how is that related to RFID ?
The checkout of the future will be accomplished by the simple act of walking through the door. The door will be smart enough to read the tags on everything in your cart and then charge your credit card straight from your back pocket. The credit companies will even share your personal information for you so that the store can pick out the best card to use (if you have more than one). Isn't that nice of them?
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.-Asimov
I can just see Wal-Mart start using this for fast checkout and when suddenly there's an error and suddenly you've bought the entire store.
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
600 fpm isn't that fast in many industries, but it depends what you're doing with it. Are you capping soda bottles, 40 per second? Wow. Are you reading RFID tags to items 12" to 24" apart, five to ten per second? Ho. Hum. Your speed is on the same order of magnitude as a checker, and you should be able to go much faster even with barcodes, provided you use a good reader, either a fixed unit, if goods are in a consistent position, or possibly a camera feeding an image to a PC to read (ones capable of 60 frames per second are not uncommon).
Subliminal thought: Metric? Useless.
Not with the technology that will be in use in the next ten years. That stuff has a practical limit of about 30 inches for reading. The emitter is too small, not directional, and there is this inverse-square issue with RF energy...
Hmmm, they've just got to have some vested interest in this new technology, that RFID lab. If only I could just figure it out!
- Sus Picious.
He's talking about my new pending patent:
The Vertical Assembly Line
It uses newtonian principles in a novel and non-obvious way to linearly accelerate the product along the assembly line. This causes tremendous cost-savings in both electricity and time. After my patent gets approved, I'll license it to Wal-mart and make One Mhillijon Dhollars!!11
If the barcode is going away, what will the anticrist use for his mark of the beast? And worse, what will happen to all those fear mongering video's that try to second guess Gods word?
:-p
For shame people... for shame....
(a right wing fundie wrote this)
The September issue of "Communications of the ACM" has several good articles about the good and bad of RFID. It's comes from a little bit more of an educated and informed perspective than a bunch of know-it-all slashdotters.
It has already been mentioned by other posters, but let me say it once again: you can't print RFID.
I've been working on a B2B web solution designed for daily exchanges between automotive manufacturers and their smaller suppliers. Most of them have a very limited computer equipement. That makes sense in that their job is to produce pieces, not to process complex data flows. Most of the time, the guys barely have a PC with an Internet connection and an inkjet or laser printer.
When a supplier is doing a physical delivery, he will use the web solution to send an electronic message to the constructor *and* to download a PDF file with labels, which will be put on the different packages and palets. And guess what? These labels have bar codes. Some bar codes are just used to quickly identify the article references, and other ones are IDs which were sent through the electronic message in order to check integrity with the goods which were actually received. You may have, say, up to 70 or 80 labels per delivery, and one or two deliveries a day.
I can't see any easy way for them to put RFID instead of bar codes in the near future.
The problem with Slashdot memes is that YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
Can you fax an RFID? I didn't think so.
now it's the Frequency of the Beast?
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
- Filtering the massive amount of data that can be collected
- Gen 2 standards still not finalized
- Cost
- Can require a reconfiguration of business process to get full benefit
- Limited amount of information can be stored in a tag
Bar codes are cheap, easy to train users to read, and are often used for different purposes than RFID is envisioned. Currently, most RFID labels include one or more bar codes for backup reading and for storing additional information not contained on the RFID chip. I think RFID will make great strides and the technology will begin to be pushed down into smaller and smaller manufacturers/retailers but it's still many years off. Roy http://www.data-net.com/Author of Enyo: Up and Running from O'Reilly Media
I think you're right. People *WILL* read what is in someone else's home. AND as a response, people will buy the RFID's for really expensive articles they can't really afford (not the item, mind you, only the tag) to drive their neighbors wild.
In the book, there is a construction scene where the building materials are all tagged with RFID. Volunteers are wired with devices that tell them what part needs to go where next. A central processor keeps track of where the parts are, what needs to go next, and where it needs to go in relation to the other parts that have already been applied. I imagine it also told them how to connect it if they didn't know how. Such as, first take the mortar and the trowel and apply it this way before you get that brick and put it there. I'd guess you'd need some sort of HUD to make it efficient.
Maybe if every part had an RFID tag then we'd be able to make great steps forward in Open Hardware?
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
Who can buy your data? here in the UK we have some protection (Data Protection Act) but there's still lots of holes and most of the time if you sign up for anything (free gift offer, airmiles, etc) there's a tiny little box which says "tick here if you don't mind us sharing your data" (it used to be "tick here if you don't want us to share your data" but the law was changed). So if you've ever signed up for anything, chances are somebody has bought and sold your data. Credit reference agencies also buy and sell your data from the electoral register. Not sure who can buy access to your SSN in your country.
I recently priced out RFID vs. Barcode for a project. For now the prices per-unit RFID are way too high to justify on individual items unless you are as big a Walmart. Anything below the Fortune 100 and the costs/benefit tends toward barcode still.
In a stark contrast to the warehouse's conveyor belt speed of 600 feet per minute, the store checkout speed is 6 customers per hour.
Stale: "Five Fingered Discount"
New: "Foil Bag Discount"
"Provided by the management for your protection."
There can be some real bad abuses with this technology.
Unlike barcodes, RFID microchips could contain a unique number making it possible to tell the difference between two individual products. Like being able to trace an individual product back to a given store. Imagine if they added these to Coca~Cola Classic cans, and being able to read the RFID microchip and finding out which store it came from, because in addition to saying what the product is, it has a unique number.
This type of thing can really stop shoplifters, if the door doesn't open for products not scanned out, if you know what I mean.
To prevent abuse, it would be in the best interest of anyone pro-privacy to scan the number in for inventory, scan it out upon checkout, and delete the information afterwards regarding the unique number.
Mag tape is always cheaper than disk per byte, despite both dropping greatly in recent decades. I can see you barcoding extremely cheap items like a stick of gum or individual cigarettes, but not RFID'ing them.
that disappointingly lacks kind of innovation for which Google is known for. If only Google is a company (and innovative at that) it should have found the innovative way (like adsense) to get revenues out of non-lucrative market of IM but not at the sake of openess for which Jabber stands. At this point it looks like their IM service is pushed into the market in hurry to ride on the goodwill wave that they have created.
Now consider what happens at the high speed checkout when one of the items registers as alcohol and the buyer is less than proper age. The line manager will be over helping at the cashierless line since the stupid system stops because the weight is not what it expected, and if you think Wal-mart is going to add another line manager just so you can get through faster...!
One solution could be: have a self-check where you place your cart in a "box" with a scale under it. If there's alcohol in the cart, the cart can't be removed until the age is verified. The same scale the verifies the weight of the items can also sound an alert if the cart is removed before it's allowed.
The problem would be with the fruits and vegetables. Those would still have to be handled separately.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
"The greatest benefit for the most people" should mean nothing to a for-profit company. This might be the mantra of a company in a Socialist society, but hopefully not in the U.S.
You know cashier error is played up by politicans and reporters grubbing for a story, but I am pretty good at tracking my purchases at the grocery store, I buy only one or two bags at a time, and I have a moderately photographic memory, and over the years the scanners have always, always been right, except for maybe one or two times when I have been buying large quantities of an item and one or two like items have been missed. Every once in a while I think there's been a mistake, but the scan is always 100% correct when I double-check.
So RFID will make it faster!!, cheaper!! But it's possible the errors might go *up* since there's no human involved in making sure the scans cover 100% of the items in the basket. And people will do their best to cheat; right now at the self-scan at Home Depot, there is an attendant keeping people homest. And the unions and politicians will try to block the new technlogy as best they can. I am sure those glitches will be worked out in time, but it will probably be a few more years before our glorious check-out less future arrives.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Barcodes work great on individual items. There's already loss prevention systems using some kind of RFID for tracking those really expensive/high profit margin retail items.
It's further up the supply chain when you've got a pallet with maybe 50 cases on it. Barcode doesn't work very well because:
1. You have to trust the person creating the pallet's barcode. There is no incentive for walmart to pay an employee more for that trust, so they want a computer instead.
2. The 50 case pallet needs RFID to accurately report what's on the pallet. If a case or two might "fall off" a barcoded pallet then the barcode is none the wiser. In theory RFID would report the entire contents of the pallet as it's passing through the door.
The problems:
A. Cost. Barcodes got RFID beat hands down.
B. Accuracy. An RFID chip can't communicate through many layers of cardboard/product/cardboard so a pallet with boxes on the inside bottom do not get reported. If you want to be a millionaire, patent an amplifier/antenna that can be sprayed onto a paper tube and dropped down the center of a pallet of goods to get those inside boxes to accurately report. Now, if you don't pay me for this great idea, I'll unleash my submarine patent on you.
In this application it's not so much what's on the retail floor they're so concerned about it's keeping accurate track of goods at a logistics/warehouse level.
I gotta stop ordering double-espresso.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
"Now, if they passed these benefits along to the public, either through paying their employees more or hiring more people, that would be a good thing."
What about charging less to their customers? That's what they do now.
Are you saying they should hire more employees and then give them meaningless, unproductive jobs. That's stupid. If you're saying they should expand their operations (like by offering a wider array of services) that would make sense, they're also doing that. How about if they pay their employees more per hour, but then work them for fewer hours?
"If they used it to eliminate workers and pay their shareholders and executives more, that would be a bad thing, since it benefits the fewest number of people."
That is not true, it depends how many shareholders and how many employees there are. I think I wal-mart's case, many of the employees are shareholders, but they also have a lot of shareholders who are not employees. By the way, executives are workers and their positions are made irrelevant and eliminated by technology just the same as any other employee.
Yours is a typical anti-industrialist argument. Change is bad because it eliminates work. But that assumes that people want to work in the first place. If people wanted to operate a check-out line, you wouldn't have to pay them to do it. So, no it's not bad to get rid of these kind of shitty, meaningless jobs that no one wants.
When we moved to Tulsa in 1982 the local Safeway had barcode scanners. I remember it extremely well - it was very state-of-the-art. Those cash registers even spoke the price of each item scanned. Obviously that feature was deemed too much of an annoyance. Imagine a dozen registers all scanning an item every couple seconds, and the register is calling out numbers via the typical male synthesizer of the day. It made quite a racket! Very few items did not have barcodes even at that point.
I worked at a grocery store in 1989 in the UPC department. Every item had a barcode then, and only small-time stores did not have barcode scanners at that point. So I think your statement about only being widely used in the last 10 years is off by at least a factor of 2.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
When computers can just recognize a can of soup by 'looking' at it, we won't need either.
Left or right?
I heard about this while talking with a guy who deals with warehousing systems for a local supermarket chain.
It is a misconception that this is for use within the retail stores. In reality this is for use within the warehouses that supply the retail stores. I blame the reporter for making the assumption, and to a lesser extent the summary for running with the bait.
RFID is still too expensive to be placed within each individual package of Ramen noodles. It won't replace bar codes on the packages bought by consumers, but it is already replacing bar codes within the distribution centers.
In other words, each crate of Doritos will have an RFID chip that identifies the product. This is useful within the warehouse, as the warehouse deals with crates of product, not with individual packages of Charmin. You'll still see bar codes on products you buy.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
New from Lipton.
The day I come across an RFID tag on the tin foil at my store is the day I stop shopping there.
If your tinfoil hat isn't defeating all of their evil RFID scanners, you simply need a bigger hat, perhaps with thicker tinfoil. You're not using aluminum foil are you?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/seminar/archives.php
Search the page for a talk by "Vivek Subramanian" (sic) entitled "Electronics Everywhere: Organic Circuits On Plastic, Paper And Even Cloth!"
More on the hardcore low-level end of things where he talks about the transistor-level construction, current limitations and ways to get the costs down to fractions of a cent per unit.
Entire cart checkouts, you say? In reality, the checkout monkey will have to dig through all your crap to verify that the RFID worked, and half of the items won't be tagged right, or have failed RFIDs, or be blocked by your big can o' coffee. Then you get to wait until the manager shows up to approve the variance, and then the computer, scanner, or any other component fails (as it must), and soon the checkout line lies fallow along with the "self checkout" lines which I seldom see operating nowadays.
Technology is not your friend, people. Luckily, the impending economic collapse of the US a la Argentina in any given decade will spell the end of this silliness. We'll all be sewing clothes for the Chinese and too busy/poor to actually purchase anything.
Now busting up campus parties will be as easy as scanning apartments with the high-gain police RFID reader. Greater than a "reasonable quantity" of alcohol sounds like probable cause to me!
does it still track product once it hits the landfill ? Or were they depending on customers to remove these non-biodegradable 'tags' before they throw them way ? or were they even thinking that far ahead ? Could someone also explain why the DoD is in on this ?
~darkness_falls
I feel sorry for all the people w/ barcode tattoos.. now they'll have to go get rfid tattoos.
I'm glad someone mentioned that! Doesn't matter that they have 30+ checkouts, they only run 5 or 6 it seems
Other items I wouldn't be so sure of - anything small that can be easily carried out that has a larger margin is a target for these.
For an example, take Barnes and Noble. They have a theft prevention system (sometimes it is even turned on!) for their books and other items. I think the system uses the standard detection thingie (which the disable by swiping the item over a magnetic thingie), but there are other things...
Something I have found inside books there (they don't actually stick them on) are stickers with a barcode (but not the item's barcode - the barcode is not a real barcode but looks like a "test" code) on one side, and on the other side a spiral antennna (looks like an etched PCB pattern) with a darker "square" chip-like "blob" in the middle to which the "antenna-line" is attached to. This is clearly an RFID tag with a printed (test) UPC barcode.
These RFID stickers are "blown" into random books and other things in the store. They are difficult to find because not every book has them, and not every book of the same book which has one has them. It seems to be a test strategy of some sort, since the number on the UPC is not the number of the ISBN of the book (looks something similar to "6-46464 46464-6")...
I would expect Wally World and others to use this for similar higher margin items like DVDs, CDs, books, games, toys, etc...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Two things - first, a recent expert analysis revealed that Walmart could save up to 8.5 billion dollars every year by using RFID throughout its supply chain. Here's the kicker - approximately 80% of those savings would be realized by FIRING people who check items out, work in the warehouses, etc.
The second thing - jeez, Slashdot is getting as bad as the New York times. This story was news years ago. Everybody knows that RFID will replace bar codes - and why. Come on, guys.
A good friend of mine was an EE for a company that did packaging machines for Ramen Noodles.
;-)
He said that when someone hit the emergency stop button or when the system detected a jam, the computer then gave the motors on that part of the assembly/package machine 220V in the opposite direction of what they were moving. He said that brought things to a stop real quick!
Libertas in infinitum
http://www.microsoft.com/industry/Retail/RFIDmyths 1.mspx
excerpt:
Reality Check: Debunking the 10 Biggest Myths of RFID
Updated: October 28, 2004
By Greg Gilbert, Director of RFID Solutions and Strategy, Manhattan Associates
This article was previously published in Retailspeak Magazine
With mass speculation and widespread news surrounding the evolution of radio frequency identification (RFID) standards, its little wonder that the topic has received a sensationalistic spin akin to Y2K. Frenzied companies, eager to adopt or comply, are scrambling for answers. Instead, they find themselves confused amid fast-breaking updates about electronic product code (EPC) standards and various companies latest compliance requirements.
Its time to set the record straight and offer executives some truths about the reality of RFID. Debunking the myths, misconceptions and mysteries surrounding RFID will help put it in proper perspective and save wasted hours and euros searching for misguided answers.-
Myth 1: There Are no Set Standards for RFID Today
Truth: GTAG? ISO 18006.A? ISO 18006.B? Gen 2 EPC? The acronym soup has thickened into a murky layer of complexity, further complicated by some vendors claims of owning the standards. The fact is that there are several RFID standards today.
The major reason that the prior standards were never adopted on a broad scale was that the technology companies were the main drivers of these standards. They had a solution and were seeking a problem to address. EPC standards, however, were developed by end user companies to ensure that the technology developed addressed a specific business need.
Recent rumors regarding the Global Proposal verses the Freedom Proposal within the EPC community, along with company lawsuits, have added to the uncertainty. EPCglobal is helping to define the standards for next-generation technology, but the big playersWal-Mart, Metro, the U.S. department of Defense, and select Fortune 500 companiesare aggressively moving forward on the RFID adoption curve, and many have already implemented current-generation EPC technology.
Smaller businesses will likely take their cue from the industry leaders as RFID standards continue to evolve, emerge and ultimately become more entrenched.
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Myth 2: Replacing Bar Code-Based Processes with RFID Processes Will Achieve ROI
Truth: Feeling the pressure to incorporate RFID into their manufacturing and logistics operations, some companies will tend to implement technology for technologys sake. Buyer beware: Implementing RFID does not instantly guarantee a fast path to return on investment (ROI). To impact the bottom line, the decision to implement RFID must be linked to a definitive business goal.
For most companies, it is cost-prohibitive to convert to RFID on a broad scale. And, in some cases, it doesnt make sense. For example, if your warehouse is reliably scanning bar-coded cartons on a conveyor as they are loaded onto a truck, switching this process to RFID doesnt really buy you anything. Why? Because the labor savings resulting from replacing an automated bar code scan with RFID simply dont amount to much.
However, if every carton is currently scanned manually, changing the process to automate the data capture could reduce labor requirements and increase facility throughput. In addition, if there are areas in which data is lacking, adding RFID can increase visibility and accuracy.
The reality: RFID technology isnt new. It has been around for the past decade, whereas bar code technology has surpassed three decades. The promise of achieving greater ROI with RFID is not time-sensitive as many may believe; it is application-dependent.
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Myth 3: RFID Benefits Only Retailers, Not Suppliers
Truth: While the RFID spotlight has clearly illuminated major retailers (Wal-Mart, Tesco, Metro, Target and Albertsons), several major Fortune 500 suppliers includ
10 foot/second = 10.9728 kilometer/hour
When will the rest of the world catch up.
The problem is not going to go away.
How about all new
I can walk 11 miles in one day, you insensitive clod!
600 ft/min is not the correct unit to use here. Foot is a measurement of length, not of volume, so it has zero meaning here. It's not telling you how big the volume is being moved out the door every minute, folks.
When you see something bogus like this, it is a very good sign that the "news" item is hot air.
gone with the advent of computers and plastic. Oh, wait.
:D)
Please, can we stop hyping the great new waste of technology as the dawn of an imaginary era? We don't have flying cars, either, despite the predictions of idiots. (I just love imagining traffic jams and collisions at altitude
In Thailand, where I am, RFID tags cost about 75 cents each, whereas Barcode labels have zero unit cost. We stuck to barcodes because of the price.
So... they don't have any retail stores or restaurants as customers? A few years ago, I was the morning manager at a small restaurant. My last duty pretty much every morning was to bring the credit card receipts to the safety box at the local Wachovia, and get enough cash for change for the next day. When I went in there at about 1100 every day, I'd see the same four or five other people, all doing pretty much the same thing. (The watch store down the street, the two drug stores, and the coffee shop in the same plaza as ours). And I was pretty much under the impression, from talking with our accountant & owner, that commercial accounts made a lot more money for the amount of work.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?