Why don't we set the WayBack machine to 1971 and take a look at the computers you're asking this of? I've got a memory card from a 1970's era Unitote SLCC hanging on the wall in front of me. It has a whopping 16K of hand-wound magnetic cores, and is the size of a spiral-bound notebook. This card was from the controller for the whole store. The CPU consisted of several wire-wrapped circuit boards populated with discrete 74xx series chips. The power supply was bigger than my 17" monitor. The cash registers had 1K of RAM.
This was an era when the extra two digits representing the century would have meant two less columns on an 80 column punch card. That little insight saved them 3% of their total storage costs.
And now let's print those barcodes on our products. What, no laser printed master copies? I have to hire a separate company just to prepare the master films for my barcode.
I'm guessing that the UCC probably even considered that 12 digit UPCs would reach their end-of-life in 20 or 30 years. They also probably knew that by then we surely would have better equipment.
I'm amazed at the forethought and insight that went into designing a system that fit on the equipment of the day and withstood 31 years of use.
The 1960's era "bullseye" bar codes you're referring to were really still 1D bar codes, just swept in either an arc or a circle. It would have made simple line-scanners omnidirectional, but the codes were physically big and harder to produce (no digital printing in that day.)
The bullseye the original poster was referring to is the UPS-developed MaxiCode, which is a 2D symbology that can hold up to 93 characters of data.
They're not as short-sighted as you claim. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Most scanners out in the field today have the decoding logic built into them. Only the very oldest pencil-wand type scanners perform the barcode recognition step on the host computer. That means the scanners have programs running on microcontrollers. Many of the newer, more expensive scanners have their programs in FLASH, but most of the scanners in use are PROM-based, and are not field upgradable. That means that if a retailer has to accept a new 16- or 20-digit symbology, they have to spend $300+ per copy to buy new scanners. At a chain like Wal-Mart, that could easily be over $50,000,000.
Grocery store flatbed scanners approach $2000 each. Are you in a position to tell Mom (or Pop) over at Mom'n'Pop's grocery that they need to spend $20,000 just to scan Diet Caffeine-free Vanilla Cherry Clear Coke (with natural lemon flavor)?
I'm guessing that the UCC is going to recommend the manufacturers usurp some other existing barcode symbology (the poorly researched article kind of implies EAN), and hope that the majority of the retailers will be able to set their scanners to accept them.
The people at the UCC specifying these codes are NOT the scanner manufacturers. They develop spec and assign (sell) "manufacturer codes" (think IANA). And they've run out. They have no profit incentive to invent new technologies that would sell new scanners. They are constrained by the inability to upgrade most of the scanners out in the field today.
A few years ago Symbol Technologies introduced RSS, a 16-digit symbology with an optional 2D space, with the hopes that it would become the replacement for UPC. It garnered less excitement than a.NET demo at a Linux Users Group meeting.
Oh, and this is to Kate Murphy of the NYT: It's Uniform Code Council, not Universal Code Council.
The official symbology name for the zero-supressed (6-digit) UPC is UPC-E. UPC-E is "inflatable" and can be used to recreate the original UPC-A number.
The last digit of UPC-E is an indicator that tells how the manufacturer and product codes are truncated. There's a graduated mechanism that allows major manufacturers to use 1000 unique product codes with UPC-E (M&M/Mars, etc.) Their manufacturer codes are of the form ##000, ##100 and ##200. But even the lowliest five-digit manufacturer can encode up to five product codes (00005-00009) in UPC-E.
It's a very clever hack. But it's old, and scanners are now more ubiquitous, more aggressive and way cheaper than ever before. New symbologies, such as RSS can render some of these hacks obsolete. That is, if you can convince the major retailers to dump about $14,000,000 each to buy them...
I don't want to get off on a rant here, but this has been my mantra for about 10 years now. In Minnesota, government abuse of the RICO act somehow has been twisted to give the state's DNR permission to steal your boat if you catch 11 walleyes instead of 10. Yes, catching one too many stupid fish gives them legal permission to steal your tackle, rod, reel and boat. Doesn't matter if it's a $400 canoe or a $26,000 bass boat with a 150 HP motor.
( It's also the only reason I like our buffoonish governor: as a third-party governor, he bickers with the republican senate and democratic house and all together, they can't agree on which bad and stupid laws to pass. So, they end up passing none. )
Nothing frightens me more than a single party in control, even if it's the party with whom I agree for the moment.
It's been proposed before, and I'll propose it again: we need a three-strikes law for congressmen. If they vote for three laws that have any piece subsequently deemed unconstitutional, they lose their seat, get impeached, go to jail, whatever. Hopefully, they'll be too frightened to pass any of these crappy UCITA / PATRIOT / CALEA types of citizen abuse. And Senator Hollings (D, Disney Corp.) can spend the rest of his Big Brotherish life in fscking jail.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
(But, we do actually have a business need for the page to appear exactly as defined in the spec. It consists of a series of images down the right hand side that have to line up with a set of hardware keys that are present next to some of the screens.)
Because you aren't running a closed-shop company developing web pages for internal use only. And you haven't arbitrarily had "compatibility" declared to mean "appears exactly identical to how it looks on this page of spec." Not "close" but "exact".
If you were running a shop that was supposed to run IE only, then you could tell your developers "Write your web pages to work on IE 4.0. Don't worry about other browsers. If the testers using IE like them, they're golden."
Do you have any idea how much more time it would take to test every web page written with every successful browser out there? I'll give you a big clue: multiply your testing staff by four. Just for our team that would be 40 testers instead of ten. Then, go to your director and tell her that you need 4 times the payroll budget for testing because you have two users running Mozilla and one guy running Opera somewhere in the north campus building, and three guys with AOL somewhere out in California. Oh, and you'll need cube space and computers for each of the new testers.
I don't care if YOU know how to develop web pages properly so they appear identical on all platforms. That's a skill I can't afford to teach every developer I hire. If I can hire IE-only web monkeys to crank out IE-only pages, and get away with one fourth the testing budget, I can tell you your web-page purity and HTML/JavaScript/Perl knowledge won't mean sh!t in this real corporate world of budgets and deadlines.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's late and you're wrong.
Well, you got me there. I own a ReplayTV. And I have had it for several years now.
I find that I can't tolerate watching commercial-sponsored TV live anymore. The fact that the advertisers and stations try to consume 15 minutes of my life in exchange for 45 minutes of entertainment is so aggravating that I have to pick up a book and force myself to read until I've built up a commercial-free buffer.
The on-screen program listings are nice, time-shifting is great and all that, but the commercial-skipping aspect has become even more important to me as I've grown accustomed to it.
So far in all these replies, the only examples anyone has posted of watching commercials is this:
The Super Bowl,
Jennifer Aniston selling anything,
and Natalie Portman selling Hot Grits. (OK, I made that one up.)
So I'm not buying people sidestepping my original argument of "what value to the Nielson Ratings purchasers are the opinions of TiVo viewers?" They're not watching the commercials except for four hours on a cold Sunday in January. If I were buying the Nielson service, perhaps knowing what shows the commercial-skippers are watching is just a good reason to not advertise on them.
But what value is this, really? Think about it. TiVo viewers (along with ReplayTV viewers) DON'T WATCH COMMERCIALS. Why else would you own one of these machines?
So, what possible use could the Nielsons have for this data, since it's precisely the demographic that ignores advertisers?
It can still get caught the same way. Our network monitors are watching for port scanners on the inside as well as the outside, and it wouldn't take them long to notice it.
Of course, physically FINDING it once they've learned of its existence might be a bit trickier. But I assume the second step they'd take would be to shut down the port on the nearest switch. (The first step, of course, would be the location of a suitable scapegoat. Nobody does anything around here without some kind of CYA plan.)
Ahh, but all other things are NOT equal. If you're looking at a $20 toaster, that moves it up into the $25 range. These are typically very price-sensitive items, especially when you're talking about the lower-end, high-volume ones. And that's only if it's made by a big manufacturer with an existing distribution chain who already sells to the discount retailers.
Smaller manufacturers have a harder road to hoe just to get in the door, and woe be unto you should you happen to sign a contract with WalMart. That little smiley-face on the commercials is simply your assurance that some sales rep got his nuts squeezed in a vise until he lowered his price.
If you just decided to start up Cheeko's Toasters, Inc., you probably wouldn't make a profit selling them at $50 a pop. Trying to compete with $20 toasters will end up with you getting burned.
Siemens has had an IP-enabled refrigerator demo for many years.
Granted, it's mostly just a fancy barcode scanner that's supposed to keep track of your inventory and add milk to your grocery list if you take it out and don't put it back. I believe it also incorporates a temperature sensor to send some kind of alert when the temperatures inside the compartments go out of range.
I think those are perfectly reasonable uses of the technology. If my freezer is heading for the tropics, I want to know as soon as possible so I can bring home some dry ice and save many $$$ worth of frozen food.
So, I ran CAT-5 to my kitchen for the day when it'll happen...
Umm, that was the whole entire point of the discussion following the passage of 2002MN, which was detected only three days after it missed the earth by 120,000 km. (See the Slashdot discussion here.)
So, the answer to your question today is 'No, we wouldn't see it coming.' And that would make it harder to claim or disclaim an asteroid strike instead of a nuclear attack, especially to the aforementioned Persian Gulf dwellers.
Listen to yourself: You seem to think a LAWYER would not pursue legal action because they were EMBARRASED by the action? Personally, I'm amazed that Hilary Rosen can get up in the morning and breathe the same oxygen as humans.
At least you weren't so redundant as to disclaim yourself with IANAL. That much is obvious.
You're missing a basic but important point in manufacturing arrays of electronic components: Size Matters.
Given that manufacturing is never 100% perfect, that means some (hopefully small) percentage of pixels will be defective. When you're talking about a 2.5" camcorder display with 240 x 180 pixels, if.0001% of pixels are faulty, that means one out of every 23 screens will have a bad pixel. If you then translate that into a 17" computer monitor with 1600 x 1200 pixels, then every monitor will have two bad pixels, on average. And if you translate that to a 48" screen with 4600 x 3400 pixels, each screen will have 16 bad pixels.
Let's avoid debate over the question of whether or not Joe Sixpack has "faith" in "Science"; I simply think no-one will have "faith" in an organization involved in a coverup. Announcing the error is all that can be done.
Covering it up is how crap like Enron and Worldcom happen in the first place.
I just said let's not waste money hunting for "tiny" asteroids. (This one was "tiny" on the scale of "minute=pretty sky show; tiny=local damage; large=regional damage; big=global environmental ramifications; huge=planet-killer".)
This asteroid might have made a splash big enough to flood one city, or to knock down a big chunk of one, but that's still nowhere near a 1.8% chance. An off-the-cuff guess would place densely populated areas of the U.S. at 5% of our land mass. Let's double that to cover the coastal area as you suggest (as the coastal areas are among the most heavily populated places). That's 10%, for a total of 0.18% chance of a tiny asteroid causing significant damage to the US. If a tiny asteroid hits the earth in my lifetime.
(I suppose if you wanted to argue that the U.S. would end up picking up the tab for damage caused to a third-world country by an asteroid, we could extend that probability as arbitrarily high as you'd like.)
Keep in mind that astronomers and comet-hunters are already regularly spotting asteroids of the "big" and up sizes, and they do it for free; for the simple glory of naming these chunks of rock. Do we really have to spend part of our finite tax dollars on the very small probability that a tiny asteroid will hit? I see enough funding cuts in other science projects already -- another beggar at the door will just take from them. Because you KNOW they won't cancel the Crusader to fund something like this from the defense budget.
I'm just choosing my priorities statistically. "Bang for the buck" would not be inappropriate.
(re: my sig -- I'm making an excuse for my sister.)
The Tunguska impact was nowhere near the size of Siberia. At the site in Tunguska, a few square miles of trees were knocked down, probably less total area than that devastated by forest fires this month.
Since the chance of evacuating the impact area would have depended on earlier detection:-), let's just estimate the "impact" of the impact statistically.
Let's hypothetically say that it was really big, and would have destroyed 500km^2 (it wasn't that big and wouldn't destroy that much.) Since the surface of the earth is about 500,000,000 km^2, the chances of it whacking something I care about would be 1:1,000,000, which still isn't enough for me to pump another tax dollar into a search for tiny asteroids. Not that it is or isn't cool science, but really, this is a lot of hype over nothing.
Of course, that's pretty much the charter of Slashdot, now, isn't it?
Did anyone find the Dilbert series to be funny AT ALL?
Nobody I know...
Remember, the only reason Dilbert is funny is because we all get to see our pathetic, cubic lives reflected in his mirror. And when we see fun-house images of ourselves, we laugh. Scott Adams has a gift for bending the mirrors just the right way.
But when he "tries" to be original, he kind of falls flat IMHO. Sure he sells books & stuff, but I think it's only on the Dilbert name.
Of course, he brings money home by the truckload and I don't, so what the hell do I know?
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we set the WayBack machine to 1971 and take a look at the computers you're asking this of? I've got a memory card from a 1970's era Unitote SLCC hanging on the wall in front of me. It has a whopping 16K of hand-wound magnetic cores, and is the size of a spiral-bound notebook. This card was from the controller for the whole store. The CPU consisted of several wire-wrapped circuit boards populated with discrete 74xx series chips. The power supply was bigger than my 17" monitor. The cash registers had 1K of RAM.
This was an era when the extra two digits representing the century would have meant two less columns on an 80 column punch card. That little insight saved them 3% of their total storage costs.
And now let's print those barcodes on our products. What, no laser printed master copies? I have to hire a separate company just to prepare the master films for my barcode.
I'm guessing that the UCC probably even considered that 12 digit UPCs would reach their end-of-life in 20 or 30 years. They also probably knew that by then we surely would have better equipment.
I'm amazed at the forethought and insight that went into designing a system that fit on the equipment of the day and withstood 31 years of use.
The bullseye the original poster was referring to is the UPS-developed MaxiCode, which is a 2D symbology that can hold up to 93 characters of data.
Most scanners out in the field today have the decoding logic built into them. Only the very oldest pencil-wand type scanners perform the barcode recognition step on the host computer. That means the scanners have programs running on microcontrollers. Many of the newer, more expensive scanners have their programs in FLASH, but most of the scanners in use are PROM-based, and are not field upgradable. That means that if a retailer has to accept a new 16- or 20-digit symbology, they have to spend $300+ per copy to buy new scanners. At a chain like Wal-Mart, that could easily be over $50,000,000.
Grocery store flatbed scanners approach $2000 each. Are you in a position to tell Mom (or Pop) over at Mom'n'Pop's grocery that they need to spend $20,000 just to scan Diet Caffeine-free Vanilla Cherry Clear Coke (with natural lemon flavor)?
I'm guessing that the UCC is going to recommend the manufacturers usurp some other existing barcode symbology (the poorly researched article kind of implies EAN), and hope that the majority of the retailers will be able to set their scanners to accept them.
The people at the UCC specifying these codes are NOT the scanner manufacturers. They develop spec and assign (sell) "manufacturer codes" (think IANA). And they've run out. They have no profit incentive to invent new technologies that would sell new scanners. They are constrained by the inability to upgrade most of the scanners out in the field today.
A few years ago Symbol Technologies introduced RSS, a 16-digit symbology with an optional 2D space, with the hopes that it would become the replacement for UPC. It garnered less excitement than a .NET demo at a Linux Users Group meeting.
Oh, and this is to Kate Murphy of the NYT: It's Uniform Code Council, not Universal Code Council.
The official symbology name for the zero-supressed (6-digit) UPC is UPC-E. UPC-E is "inflatable" and can be used to recreate the original UPC-A number.
The last digit of UPC-E is an indicator that tells how the manufacturer and product codes are truncated. There's a graduated mechanism that allows major manufacturers to use 1000 unique product codes with UPC-E (M&M/Mars, etc.) Their manufacturer codes are of the form ##000, ##100 and ##200. But even the lowliest five-digit manufacturer can encode up to five product codes (00005-00009) in UPC-E.
It's a very clever hack. But it's old, and scanners are now more ubiquitous, more aggressive and way cheaper than ever before. New symbologies, such as RSS can render some of these hacks obsolete. That is, if you can convince the major retailers to dump about $14,000,000 each to buy them...
I don't want to get off on a rant here, but this has been my mantra for about 10 years now. In Minnesota, government abuse of the RICO act somehow has been twisted to give the state's DNR permission to steal your boat if you catch 11 walleyes instead of 10. Yes, catching one too many stupid fish gives them legal permission to steal your tackle, rod, reel and boat. Doesn't matter if it's a $400 canoe or a $26,000 bass boat with a 150 HP motor.
( It's also the only reason I like our buffoonish governor: as a third-party governor, he bickers with the republican senate and democratic house and all together, they can't agree on which bad and stupid laws to pass. So, they end up passing none. )
Nothing frightens me more than a single party in control, even if it's the party with whom I agree for the moment.
It's been proposed before, and I'll propose it again: we need a three-strikes law for congressmen. If they vote for three laws that have any piece subsequently deemed unconstitutional, they lose their seat, get impeached, go to jail, whatever. Hopefully, they'll be too frightened to pass any of these crappy UCITA / PATRIOT / CALEA types of citizen abuse. And Senator Hollings (D, Disney Corp.) can spend the rest of his Big Brotherish life in fscking jail.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
(But, we do actually have a business need for the page to appear exactly as defined in the spec. It consists of a series of images down the right hand side that have to line up with a set of hardware keys that are present next to some of the screens.)
Because you aren't running a closed-shop company developing web pages for internal use only. And you haven't arbitrarily had "compatibility" declared to mean "appears exactly identical to how it looks on this page of spec." Not "close" but "exact".
If you were running a shop that was supposed to run IE only, then you could tell your developers "Write your web pages to work on IE 4.0. Don't worry about other browsers. If the testers using IE like them, they're golden."
Do you have any idea how much more time it would take to test every web page written with every successful browser out there? I'll give you a big clue: multiply your testing staff by four. Just for our team that would be 40 testers instead of ten. Then, go to your director and tell her that you need 4 times the payroll budget for testing because you have two users running Mozilla and one guy running Opera somewhere in the north campus building, and three guys with AOL somewhere out in California. Oh, and you'll need cube space and computers for each of the new testers.
I don't care if YOU know how to develop web pages properly so they appear identical on all platforms. That's a skill I can't afford to teach every developer I hire. If I can hire IE-only web monkeys to crank out IE-only pages, and get away with one fourth the testing budget, I can tell you your web-page purity and HTML/JavaScript/Perl knowledge won't mean sh!t in this real corporate world of budgets and deadlines.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's late and you're wrong.
Well, you got me there. I own a ReplayTV. And I have had it for several years now.
I find that I can't tolerate watching commercial-sponsored TV live anymore. The fact that the advertisers and stations try to consume 15 minutes of my life in exchange for 45 minutes of entertainment is so aggravating that I have to pick up a book and force myself to read until I've built up a commercial-free buffer.
The on-screen program listings are nice, time-shifting is great and all that, but the commercial-skipping aspect has become even more important to me as I've grown accustomed to it.
So far in all these replies, the only examples anyone has posted of watching commercials is this:
- The Super Bowl,
- Jennifer Aniston selling anything,
- and Natalie Portman selling Hot Grits. (OK, I made that one up.)
So I'm not buying people sidestepping my original argument of "what value to the Nielson Ratings purchasers are the opinions of TiVo viewers?" They're not watching the commercials except for four hours on a cold Sunday in January. If I were buying the Nielson service, perhaps knowing what shows the commercial-skippers are watching is just a good reason to not advertise on them.So, what possible use could the Nielsons have for this data, since it's precisely the demographic that ignores advertisers?
Of course, physically FINDING it once they've learned of its existence might be a bit trickier. But I assume the second step they'd take would be to shut down the port on the nearest switch. (The first step, of course, would be the location of a suitable scapegoat. Nobody does anything around here without some kind of CYA plan.)
Smaller manufacturers have a harder road to hoe just to get in the door, and woe be unto you should you happen to sign a contract with WalMart. That little smiley-face on the commercials is simply your assurance that some sales rep got his nuts squeezed in a vise until he lowered his price.
If you just decided to start up Cheeko's Toasters, Inc., you probably wouldn't make a profit selling them at $50 a pop. Trying to compete with $20 toasters will end up with you getting burned.
Granted, it's mostly just a fancy barcode scanner that's supposed to keep track of your inventory and add milk to your grocery list if you take it out and don't put it back. I believe it also incorporates a temperature sensor to send some kind of alert when the temperatures inside the compartments go out of range.
I think those are perfectly reasonable uses of the technology. If my freezer is heading for the tropics, I want to know as soon as possible so I can bring home some dry ice and save many $$$ worth of frozen food.
So, I ran CAT-5 to my kitchen for the day when it'll happen...
So, the answer to your question today is 'No, we wouldn't see it coming.' And that would make it harder to claim or disclaim an asteroid strike instead of a nuclear attack, especially to the aforementioned Persian Gulf dwellers.
At least you weren't so redundant as to disclaim yourself with IANAL. That much is obvious.
That means you'll either lose your virginity or be trampled by a water buffalo by then.
And you really should see Brittani, Candi, Cindi (and all those other girls who end their names in "i".) I invited them over tonight.
Given that manufacturing is never 100% perfect, that means some (hopefully small) percentage of pixels will be defective. When you're talking about a 2.5" camcorder display with 240 x 180 pixels, if .0001% of pixels are faulty, that means one out of every 23 screens will have a bad pixel. If you then translate that into a 17" computer monitor with 1600 x 1200 pixels, then every monitor will have two bad pixels, on average. And if you translate that to a 48" screen with 4600 x 3400 pixels, each screen will have 16 bad pixels.
Don't you mean " Stock in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory decayed rapidly..."
Let's avoid debate over the question of whether or not Joe Sixpack has "faith" in "Science"; I simply think no-one will have "faith" in an organization involved in a coverup. Announcing the error is all that can be done.
Covering it up is how crap like Enron and Worldcom happen in the first place.
"nat5an's struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Bill Gates."
This asteroid might have made a splash big enough to flood one city, or to knock down a big chunk of one, but that's still nowhere near a 1.8% chance. An off-the-cuff guess would place densely populated areas of the U.S. at 5% of our land mass. Let's double that to cover the coastal area as you suggest (as the coastal areas are among the most heavily populated places). That's 10%, for a total of 0.18% chance of a tiny asteroid causing significant damage to the US. If a tiny asteroid hits the earth in my lifetime.
(I suppose if you wanted to argue that the U.S. would end up picking up the tab for damage caused to a third-world country by an asteroid, we could extend that probability as arbitrarily high as you'd like.)
Keep in mind that astronomers and comet-hunters are already regularly spotting asteroids of the "big" and up sizes, and they do it for free; for the simple glory of naming these chunks of rock. Do we really have to spend part of our finite tax dollars on the very small probability that a tiny asteroid will hit? I see enough funding cuts in other science projects already -- another beggar at the door will just take from them. Because you KNOW they won't cancel the Crusader to fund something like this from the defense budget.
I'm just choosing my priorities statistically. "Bang for the buck" would not be inappropriate.
(re: my sig -- I'm making an excuse for my sister.)
Since the chance of evacuating the impact area would have depended on earlier detection :-), let's just estimate the "impact" of the impact statistically.
Let's hypothetically say that it was really big, and would have destroyed 500km^2 (it wasn't that big and wouldn't destroy that much.) Since the surface of the earth is about 500,000,000 km^2, the chances of it whacking something I care about would be 1:1,000,000, which still isn't enough for me to pump another tax dollar into a search for tiny asteroids. Not that it is or isn't cool science, but really, this is a lot of hype over nothing.
Of course, that's pretty much the charter of Slashdot, now, isn't it?
Perhaps I should have phrased it: I wonder for how long they'll continue to sell VCRs?
Anyway, since VHS is still the primary *recording* medium of the consumer, I wonder if they'll continue to sell VCRs?
I just mentally picture Circuit City as being more "in the pocket" of Sony et al, especially when it comes to playing with the anti-copying lobbyists.
Nobody I know...
Remember, the only reason Dilbert is funny is because we all get to see our pathetic, cubic lives reflected in his mirror. And when we see fun-house images of ourselves, we laugh. Scott Adams has a gift for bending the mirrors just the right way.
But when he "tries" to be original, he kind of falls flat IMHO. Sure he sells books & stuff, but I think it's only on the Dilbert name.
Of course, he brings money home by the truckload and I don't, so what the hell do I know?