Did you know?

[robinbloke]

As of January 1st 2005 a standard was set for numbering retail items. Any item sold anywhere for tracking around the world.
It's a fourteen digit standard, of which the industry uses 13 at already, with provision for another factor of ten more.

Fourteen digits.
Thats 100,000,000,000,000.
One hundred million million different products possibly available, of which we already use, produce and sell 10 million million distinct items.

Blimey.

Comments

[rirekon.livejournal.com]

That means there's another 90,000,000,000,000 different versions of Windows yet to be released :-/

[briggsy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but it's all those small dungeon shops selling "A Vial Of Blue Potion" and "An Orcish Battleaxe [+5,0]" that driving the higher digit count.

[dreamfracture.livejournal.com]

Some of those digits are probably the checksum, but it's still an awfully large number.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Aieeeeeeeee!

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

It's a gross simplification, yes; since retailers won't use their entire allocation for the section they have. Plus the check digit, aye.

It's still pantsloads.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm potions.

[briggsy.livejournal.com]

As a geeky aside:

The ITF-14/GTIN/EAN-14 number actually sets aside 12 digits for the manufacturer and product code (so not all digits will be used), 1 digit is used as a checksum, and the other is a packaging level thing.

So 1 trillion possible products at most, given an optimal assignment of company codes. However it is unlikely that many manufacturers will ever use more than a fraction of their possible product codes, although as time goes on they'll build up a history of old products with now useless codes.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I bet most of them are PINK. Bah.