Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/is-the-era-of-the-barcode-over-not-yet.html
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I’m all for replacing it, if the replacement actually works. Working in a bookstore receiving our new stock, I sometimes came across barcodes that were designed with extreme incompetence or malice. Pale red bar codes the same color as the laser trying to scan them, black barcodes on a dark navy blue background, barcodes on super shiny material that refuses to scan, even fuzzy, flocked barcodes. Apparently barcodes are already entirely optional, because all of these barcodes were purely ornamental and the only useful part was the actual ISBN, which had to be typed in manually.
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Can’t quite tell… this is about replacing lower density optical codes with higher density codes (with better error correction), like qrcodes…?
Here’s a nerdly oddity, which i believe remains true, if a qrcode is produced circular, or anything beyond the three alignment squares, they’re for ‘artistic purposes’ only. For example, there’s no (standard?) information in the approximate magenta ellipse area:
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Older conspiracists are going to miss them terribly. They’ll find other “marks of the beast” to worry about, of course, but they won’t have the same visual impact as an IBM barcode stamped on a forehead or the back of one’s neck.
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We’ve all got the Gates tracking chip now, right?
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Or worse, the ISBN was right next to the barcode without enough guard space to keep the reader from picking the appropriate one. :: grumps ::
There actually is a standard for putting UPC barcodes down, but my cursory search didn’t reveal anything about colors, only placement, quiet zone, and other things.
(flocked, fuzzy barcodes? That’s an odd one…)
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Right. 5G nanochips injected with the so-called “COVID vaccine”. So much more efficient for the NWO council of reptilian elders than barcodes. Muah-ha-ha!
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I’d be curious whether people playing fast and loose with the tolerances is some sort of product category thing(I assume that publishers suspect readers of judging books by their covers; and ultimately care more about sales than about your convenience); or whether it’s related to changes in the prevailing barcode reader harware.
I’ve only dealt with it somewhat peripherally(the barcode readers that are used for internal inventory tracking in our ERP system are…fretful…about things like network connectivity and playing nice with the ghastly middleware; so they become IT’s problem; by my impression has been that, while the absolute best, grab-a-barcode-off-a-box-at-20-meters-on-the-top-shelf, ones remain fairly classical looking red laser designs(probably diode rather than helium-neon; if only for battery life reasons); there are a lot more now that look an awful lot like they’ve got a full camera inside and are just machine-vision-ing barcodes out of a relatively conventional webcam’s view of the world(usually still some small lasers for operator aim; but those no longer only read after sweeping a laser back and forth across the stripe pattern).
The more camera-style ones seem to have inferior performance against ‘good’ barcodes under demanding conditions(long distances, low light, etc.); but seem to be pretty good at pulling anything that looks vaguely like a barcode out of the corner of its metaphorical eye.
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Yeah, I have six of them now. Detectors go up in flames when I walk by!
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This one trick will fool 5G Scanners! Bill Gates hates it!
Actually taking in as many different trackers as possible, the RF interfere and cancels it all out!
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We have to scan patient and medicine bar codes at the hospital, in order to chart medicine administration. Many of the IV bags have 4 barcodes, and you have to get the right one (which is not always in the same place), and they are often in white ink on a clear bag, which means you sometimes have to hold one hand behind the IV bag, or remove it from the iv pole and hold it against the wall while you scan… then return to the computer to see if it worked, then return to the IV bag if it did not…
For some machines you have to scan the QR code on the patient bracelet, for others the bar code on the patient bracelet.
How many years have we had bar codes and this stuff still isn’t streamlined?
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Oh, yeah. I’m being tracked by Gates, right now!
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There’s also long-term inventory control barcodes that fade over time. We’re converting our library materials over to RFID (cue conspiracy theorist screams) and probably 1 in 10 barcodes can’t be scanned for the transition due to degradation, or the reader not being able to scan it (we have a horrible mashup of at least 6 different types of scanners.)
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Wot! No mention of Kartrak? (The barcodes that they used to put on railroad cars.
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I don’t sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed - so I don’t have a product code. But I created my own barcode system for all data files with a custom ttl encoding of what stimulus produced the data. Does that count?
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No, it does not count. Only kickboxing counts.
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Mandatory barcodes on everything was always trivially creepy. Covers of magazines ruined by them for decades!
MAD Magazine has neither forgiven nor forgotten.
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