Bar Coding The World Away 470
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."
Get me a rewrite... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's good news for the geeks... more work for us to do.
Re:More digits... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:How long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not be smarter? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
When a domain runs out of numbers... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Woah... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why not be smarter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fellows' Law: All fixed-length fields are too short.
Re:Inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Metric? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ;)
Re:Woah... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh the irony (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why... (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
Re:Woah... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's about time (Score:3, Insightful)
>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.
Re:Woah... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:When a domain runs out of numbers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I agree essentially with what you say, I think far too many people don't realize that "good enough" will be at the cost of future economic and internet growth. There are many potentially very profitable communications, collaborative and gaming applications that are currently being restrained by IP address scarcity.
Globally addressable numeric addresses enable end to end communication. What we lose when using NAT is simplicity. Simplicity is what would enable more communications applications to become practicle. As it is now, when using NAT, either the application software or user needs to do extra work either setting up a static route or discovering a route through a NAT. It should be clear that this unnecessary complexity imposed by the artificial scarcity of IP addresses limits the broader practicality of direct (most efficient) end-to-end video, voice and data communications over IP.
Sure, there are some companies that profit from the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, but this is akin to the rise in gas prices, which raises oil company profits, but at the expense of a far greater number of people and companies that would have otherwise benefited from the increase of commerce that results when energy and transportation costs go down.
Comunication cost and ease of communication are fundamental economic drivers. When communication is easier and cheaper, the economy as a whole will be better. Replacing IPv4 with IPv6 means communication would be both easier and cheaper(as long as the rollout costs don't get out of hand).
Re:Get me a rewrite... (Score:3, Insightful)
In case you didn't notice, all Florida recounts done after the election pointed to Bush as the winner.
cue cat (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Woah... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Woah... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 :-)
Re:Gov't anti-metric (Score:3, Insightful)