Universal Alphanumeric Postal Code Proposed 595
Meshach writes "An article in the Globe and Mail is discussing a possible change to the way postal codes are assigned over the world. NAC Geographic Products will be using Microsoft's MapPoint to power their Mobile Location-Based Services Network, which could change all postal codes in the world to a simpler, more universal format."
M$ doing physical mail? WTF?! (Score:4, Funny)
It will now be possible to have your snail mail crash on you. Imagine opening up your mailbox and getting a BSOD. And naturally Microsoft will sell your snail address to the spammers, so you'll get about 50 junk mails per day. And a robotic Spam Assassin is a lot more expensive than its free software counterpart. Who thought this was a good idea anyway - Bill Gates, or maybe some of the other spammers?
Re:M$ doing physical mail? WTF?! (Score:5, Funny)
Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:5, Interesting)
If they really wanted to simplify postal coding/addressing they'd do something first about these damn addresses for people in South Korea, and a few other countries, which are like a whole paragraph long! Ever have to fill out those little customs forms? Yeah, you know how fun that can be.
Idealists are more trouble to logistics than would be required to just take them out back and drown them it a bucket of water.
"Hey, isn't that a quarter in that bucket?"
Besides, strong initial resistance to this plan, there's probably some disingenuous patent and royalty speculation riding on this.
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:2)
Japan's addresses are easy enough to write, but hard as hell to find if you don't know the area. It's annoying as all hell, but from a western mind just doesn't make much sense.
I would prefer an address that is lat/lon
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:4, Insightful)
-Graham
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real answer is that GPS wouldn't make any money for NAC Geographic Products, whereas this proprietary system would, through licensing to various governments around the world.
But, the fact of the matter is that the U.S. Postal Service likes its system just fine and will not change it to someone elses liking. Kinda like the metric system. Even if the new system is better. The same is true for the Royal Mail. We already saw how quick England was to jump on the EC bandwagon and adopt the Euro. Indeed far too many countries will be unwilling to change for this system to go global.
I'd have to sayto NAC Geographic Products; nice try but, no money for you.
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:5, Informative)
Metric is a bad analogy. The USPS has no reason to change to suit somebody else because they are the 500 lb. gorilla that literally moves half the world's letter mail. When you're that big, everybody else conforms to you.
(IIRC, the USPS is already starting to implement ZIP+4 codes for outbound international mail to speed up sorting in-country.)
"Even if the new system is better."
How exactly would it be better? And would it be better enough to overhaul all those OCR and barcode readers the USPS uses to sort the mail already? They already seem pretty efficient when it comes to drawing zone maps, what good could possibly come from changing their names?
So far, the only reason I see to sign on to this is the Ferret Effect. "It's new and shiney!"
"The same is true for the Royal Mail."
Aren't they out of business yet, what with their deregulation efforts?
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:3, Informative)
Firstly, it's not England's choice whether to adopt the Euro, it's Great Britain and Northern Ireland's choice. But hey.
Secondly, if the argument against adoption of the Euro was as simple as you make out then we'd have sorted it out on day one!
Apart from ignoring the fact that Sterling is steadily weakening against the Euro, you make the (very common) mistake of making a value judgement about "strong" currency being good for ecomomies and "weak" curre
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:4, Insightful)
My objection to this plan is why invent some new alphanumeric coding? Why not just use latitude and longitude?
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean like a phone number?
Complex Codes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Try remembering that one. I'm happy with five numbers. Atleast I can make some sort of memory device of that.
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:5, Funny)
download and install the western font from microsoft i suppose.
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:2)
Just so you know, even if they don't use the standard western alphabet (Let's actually call it "Latin" as that's what it is) they still have use of it. I've yet to see a computer that can't produce latin characters.
Not to sound cynical here, but are you an American hell-bent on being non-Americanized?
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:4, Funny)
Isn't that what unicode is for? And what could be more simple than remembering the bit-equivalent of unicode kanji?
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:2)
In my opinion, something like this is long overdue. It is a great complement to the OTHER obvious improvement to the mail system - which is to allow people to register codes for specific people, companies, and offices, so that even if the person moves the "address" remains the same. Simple, doesn't say where you live, and so forth. In an ideal world you could use it for phone and email too. Just link that code to the
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:4, Funny)
For example, NAC Geographic Products' address in Toronto would be 8CNB5 Q8Z4R.
Ecnbs Qesar?
Sorry. I keep trying to decode that address code as 'leet speak. :)
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:3, Funny)
XXX-1337
It took a while since the situation had nothing to do with computers, but I finally realized that some part of my mind was trying to read it as "LEET".
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:2)
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is fine when you are printing the addresses from a database. That's great for businesses. But remembering addresses is going to be a real pain. Worse still, it divorces the postal address from the real world components that you use to physically find the place. Oh, and most of the addresses I use on a regular basis are clustered. So only a few of the digits will vary. So I will be trying to remember a new piece of information about each of my friends. And it will be non-mnemonic and easily interchangable with the addresses of each of several other friends. No thanks.
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:2)
your logic is a bit off.
these 10 digits represent your physical address in relation to the world. no need for the street name, city or anything else.
(unless ofcourse, you live in an apartment, where you would probably put 8r4e3 u2i5k - apartment 10)
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:5, Insightful)
My city name is not conceptually grasped as seven characters; it is a single mimetic construct. Humans have a much easier time identifying with the name of a place than they do with a random string of letters and numbers. "Phoenix, Arizona" means something more than a physical location in space. It's a community. It's the warmth of the sun at my back. It's the image of Scottsdale, panning wide with dust-tan gravel and bounding jackrabbits. It's the two jutting masses of high-rises on either side of the I-10. It's six dozen hole-in-a-wall dance clubs. It's open skies, painfully blue and clear at six in the morning; it's raging thunderstorms on an August afternoon, with whole pepper trees sailing down the road at 50 miles an hour. My mind recalls all these things, and each of them reinforces the neural pathway that says "Phoenix". What do your ten letters and numbers mean, sir? What memories do they offer? What emotions do they evoke?
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahh, 8CNB5 Q8Z4R, I remember it well. The cool crisp air, the smell of fresh pine. And then there was 8TP9W Q3HF0, which had a pretty long winter this year.
Ok, don't get me wrong, some sort of inter
Excellent Point (Score:3, Informative)
32^7=3.4e10, aka 34 billion codes. And there are already 6 billion PEOPLE on the globe, and growing. Never mind locations. It just won't cut it.
10^10= 1e10, aka 10 billion, aka phone w/area code. Also won't cut it.
32^10=1.1e15. Plenty.
The trick is that the digits at the front will be easy to remember because they are more likely to be be repeated am
I can see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm, as a person living in Finland, if that implies Microsoft wouldn't find their way to Finland any longer, it actually sounds like an excellent idea...
GPS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:GPS (Score:5, Informative)
Good idea. My GPS receiver has a display mode called MGRS (Military Grid Reference System) [ucsb.edu], which maps (with some calculation) to latitude and longitude.
Example MGRS coordinates:
16 T CP 12345 67890
where:
- 16 = a 6-degree slice of longitude
- T = a 8-degree slice of latitude
- CP = letters indicating a 100 km x 100 km square inside the slices listed above
- 12345 = "easting" in meters from the west edge of the square
- 67890 = "northing" in meters from the south edge of the square
Actually kind of nice -- the military uses maps with the squares and easting/northing values pre-printed. Also really nice for quick rough calculations of distance and bearing. If someone wants to use an alphanumeric code representing geographic location, might as well use one that's (1) already standardized and (2) usable by a human.Re:GPS (Score:5, Insightful)
It gets better!
Let's say that you wanted to narrow things down to approximately 1-mile. 1-mile is approx 1 minute (1/60 of one degree) of longitude.
360 degrees * 60 minutes = 21600 different minutes on the face of the earth.
26 letters plus 10 numbers = 36! Subtract "confusables" (I, O, S, Z) -- 32 possible characters! 32^3 = 32768! The number of character combinations is greater than the number of minutes in one direction. It is a simple math exercise to create a base-32 numbering system and to enumerate all possible minute/second combinations.
Therefore, three characters can represent your latitude to the nearest mile (give or take), and another three characters for your longitude! A new universal six-digit zip code!
And all of this in 5 minutes with a simple calculator! What is the big deal? Devising a system such as this is trivial. Getting people to use it is the hard part.
Maybe just a rumour (Score:5, Funny)
Which means that as a New Jersey resident, my postal code would be:
5h1+h0l3
Re:INFORMATIVE?!?! Come on people. (Score:5, Funny)
Well.. (Score:2)
Considering the problems they've had with IPv4 and the space, I hope they go right to Postal v6 for assigning their codes.
Nice thought (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice thought... but its like the metric system. Who will want to change what they have known for many a lifetime.
I know my 60 year old dad who does carpentry will never learn the metric system, even though it would be easier, why would he, or the millions like him want to learn a new addressing scheme?
Re:Nice thought (Score:5, Insightful)
The point here is this would provide a fix to the issue of standardized postal codes in the long term. Just because it's not status-quo doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
Re:Nice thought (Score:2)
I'd much rather be using the metric system - I hate having to do all the conversions with a pencil and paper instead of just moving a decimal point.
I'm just saying there will be a lot of people who raise a fuss over it. We had a hard enough time when our county changed from the rural route system to actually having road names. That was over 5 years ago, and many people still will not use the new addresses, causing more work for the post office.
Re:Nice thought (Score:3, Insightful)
Your statement is quite ironic, seeing as how the carpentry that you mentioned is one of the very, very few areas where fractional measurement DOES have some strong merits over metric. : )
steve
Re:Nice thought (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nice thought (Score:3, Funny)
Is it just me, or does that look like part of a Microsoft product key?
Sure, using GPS for location is nicer, but this provides a much more compressed form of basically the same data. Just think, now you can be stranded on a deserted island in the middle of the south Pacific and still get your mail.
Zip codes introduced in 1963 (Score:3, Informative)
Not to nitpick, but how could someone know something for "many a lifetime"? It's a cool idea, and I'd love to be able to implement it!
Sigh... in other news... (Score:2)
Microsoft announces that there are now 4.5 billion MSN PassPort accounts, making it the worlds chosen identity provider!
...In the war of the l33t (Score:2, Funny)
It's the war of the l33t-5cript kidd13s, and I fear they may be winning.
The only complaints I've seen about alphanumeric codes have been about the difficulty remembering them: I can't say they're much worse than US zip codes.
Simple? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the poster:
From the article:
Um, is that encrypted? Simpler than what? An IPv6 address?
Oh, simpler for everyone except us those who aren't in the postal and geographic industries.
Santa's Address (Score:5, Funny)
H0H 0H0
And thats too bad
Re:Santa's Address (Score:3, Funny)
what wrong with the original? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what wrong with the original? (Score:3, Insightful)
-B
scan me! (Score:2)
Mike
I like this idea, but we all know... (Score:2)
If they didn't have their wonky 5 OR 9 digit Zip code system and joined the rest of the Commonwealth, and who knows what other countries then we would have a nice system.
Too complicated for 99% of mail (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, this is only one more digit than a "zip+4" here in the USA, but mixing letters in there is going to be a disaster for the postal service. Their OCR has a hard enough time with decoding zip codes. Now they have to figure out the difference between a Q and a zero. I hope this system is smart enough NOT to implement "O," "S," and "Z" as letters.
Besides, most mail is local. It's like dialing the country code and area code just to order a pizza.
Re:Too complicated for 99% of mail (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in eastern Massachusetts we have to dial the area code just to order a pizza.
Re:Too complicated for 99% of mail (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, to be fair, Canadian Postal codes don't use several letters, including IJO & Q.
Yeah, that'll work (Score:5, Insightful)
Precision: Swap two digits and your letter to Grandma ends up Beyond Rangoon.
Availability: MS owns the postal system. Can't wait to see the EULA ("By licking this stamp...").
Re:Yeah, that'll work (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a serious problem, since as the article mentioned, they want to use these codes to replace addresses, instead of adding them on.
ZIP codes in the US aid sorting (because they are based on carrier routes instead of simple geographic area) and provide redundancy in the address, so if you mess up something in the address or zip code, there's enough info for a human to correct it. If people switched to using only the new code, that redundancy goes away.
thank god! (Score:2, Interesting)
Universal Coding? (Score:5, Funny)
With 1.8e4806 possible locations, it will be worth everyone memorizing a simple 2Meg file.
Change is bad (for software) (Score:5, Insightful)
Somebody will have to convert all these fields to normal strings...
(though I do hope whatever system is chosen won't make use of both "0" and "O", or both "1" and "l" - let's 1earn something from 0ur mistakes).
Re:Change is bad (for software) (Score:2)
military-grade postal codes (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't even like people knowing what side of a street I'm on from my current postal code.
mappoint.com (Score:3, Interesting)
I just tried it with my address and got this:
- Maps & Directions
You have reached a page that is experiencing problems or a location where a page does not exist.
Try again later or visit our home page at maps.msn.com or maps.msn.co.uk
Great choice in location service providers.
Microsoft rules.
Directions to my address (Score:3, Funny)
E Prefix (Score:5, Funny)
Chalk one up (Score:2)
Good thing... (Score:2)
Beverly Hills 8BHB5 D8Z4R (90210) doesn't have the same ring to it.
Hmm, maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, they want to reinvent latitude/longitude (sp?).
I have an idea, lets make this round thing and poke another round hole in the center. Then take this stick and put it through the hole. We'll call it a wheel.
Anyone with a globe can understand lat/long, why not fly with that if you think country codes and addresses don't work well enough. No sense in reinventing the wheel here.
Somehow... (Score:3, Insightful)
Can you imagine the chip that has a GPS receiver and that can translate into this adressing system?
CHIP: "Dear BSA - Computer Serial Number 123456789 has the following software
"Dear Ms. Rosen - Computer Serial Number 123456789 has the following MP3s
Etc.
John
it would be funny... (Score:2)
They've had this in the military for ages.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They've had this in the military for ages.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:They've had this in the military for ages.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Rubbish. (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose is not to locate point X on a sphere, we already have a perfectly adequate global coordinate system for that.
greeat (Score:2)
Microsoft running this ? (Score:5, Funny)
2 - How much dya bet you'd have to use those longish cryptic zipcodes as registration keys in future Microsoft products ?
Check Bit (Score:4, Interesting)
It'd be quite easy for me to accidentally get an invalid character in there, and without a quick way to verify the authenticity of the string, it's likely there will be a lot of misrouted shipments.
And removing any letters that have similar sounds to other letters would be a good idea. And o, so it's not confused with 0.
Wasteful? (Score:2)
What with something like 70% of the surface of the planet being covered with water, won't this make for a lot of wasted address space?.
And how many packages will end up being delivered to watery oblivion because someone missed 1 character in a 10 character universal address code?
And what happens when the USPS, UPS, and FedEx all BSOD?
Stupid Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It's unworkable, because, in the case of U.S. Zip Codes, the current codes are tied to post offices and carrier routes, which don't necessarily subdivide neatly into equally-sized geographic areas. Tying postal codes to arbitrary geographic regions would be a step backwards.
But it's also unnecessary. Why force each postal system to adopt a uniform coding scheme? Why not let them keep their coding schemes and append a country code to the front.
This works for phone numbers: Each national phone system need not have the same number of digits in their phone numbers. They simply need a unique country code.
Universal . . . ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft + Postal Service = .... (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh-oh (Score:5, Funny)
What's that sound?
It's the sound of millions of database application programmers screaming in agony.
The Normalization Monkey says, "Who's laughing now! Bwahahaha!"
Just wait 'till you get the notice (Score:3, Funny)
Address mapping (Score:4, Funny)
That's a bummer for gypsies. Maybe there should be a service equivalent to dyndns for them, so they can upgrade their own postcodes themselves on the move ?
We need a meta-standard (Score:5, Funny)
Ocean delivery (Score:5, Funny)
Useful for the postal office, not for people (Score:3, Insightful)
The postal office on the other hand, would probably go for this as it would reduce the time and cost to handle a letter or a package. Even if it is by a second/letter, it will make a big difference. However, unless they seriously reduce the postage, I'm never gona spend time looking up weird codes, they'll have to do that themselves.
Now, all this is very interesting, but personally, I do hope that snailmail will go away and be (for most things) replaced by electronic mail, which is faster, cheaper, healthier for the environment and, used correctly, more secure too.
Full address? (Score:3, Insightful)
Otherwise, sounds like a clever idea that I'm pretty sure will never take off, for reasons of varying 'legitimacy' (perhaps too hard to remember/resistance to change/the mark of the beast crowd).
about damn time! (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone else like the idea of permanent (more or less) phone numbers that follow you no matter where you live? Some talk of doing that in the US to cut down on the quantity of phone numbers that are kept out of rotation everytime somebody moves and gets a replacement phone number.
A very sad news... (Score:3, Funny)
How would you feel becoming obsolete?
My dream (Unique Post Codes) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My dream (Unique Post Codes) (Score:3, Insightful)
I work as a package sorter for UPS, and much of our sorting is broken down by zip code (although some is done by state or country). We sort by geographic areas, so that we can put the packages on a truck heading to that particular area. Zip codes are loosely based on geography and are therefore very useful for sorting.
Unique/portable postal codes would have no basis
Not too effective in dense cities (Score:3, Informative)
in the world's densest cities [demographia.com]. 30,000 - 80,000 people/km^2 is quite common - New york's lower east side had 170k/km^2 in 1905; Cairo peak at 109k/km^2, and Hong Kong had almost 2 million people per square kilometer*!!
Hopefully, the system will be divisional based on local population density -- like zip codes are now . But if it is, then it will be neither simple (no GPS/zip translation), or it will be of variable length, and/or it will change over time as areas get denser and need redivision (like phone area codes)
* ok, that was a special case of 50k people living in a 0.03km^2 walled city.
United States? Never... (Score:3, Funny)
That dreaded 2. ?????? seems to be missing again (Score:3, Insightful)
What they have completely forgotten is that the current ZIP code system does not represent the actual lattitude/logitude position of the city or town, but instead the main routing office that the letter needs to get to, and then the sub-office it should be routed to from there to reach the route that this letter needs to be on. The +4 extention tells in which route it needs to be placed, and where the postman encounters the address within that route... Any relationship between ZIP Codes and GPS coordinates are purely coinsidental, and the numbers might seem completely random to an outsider, but it makes perfect since to the people who run the postal system. They've got no reason to break their already set up system to go to this... the ZIP code is more useful to them.
Come on... all NAC has really invented here is a base-36 expression of the same latitude and longitude numbers that we've been measuring in degrees, hours, minutes, and seconds, and they've come to the stunning conclusion that their system specifies the same location in fewer characters... duh. No stunning breakthrough here, just marketing hype.
1. Propose new addressing scheme.
2. ??????
3. Profit!
Q: Efficiency of Lat/Long? (Score:3, Insightful)
Like the other posters, I'm thinking, why use some proprietary system instead of universally-recognized latitude and longitude coordinates (with maybe an elevation, too)?
But I'm thinking that latitude and longitude might not be the most efficient way to tesselate the surface of a sphere. Think of all the useless precision you'll waste near the poles where nobody lives - the lattitude coordinates kept to within one second of arc or better will, near the poles, come down to microns of accuracy just to compensate for the need for azimuthal location precision of a meter or so near the Earth's equator.
Isn't there some way to divide the surface up like the patches on a football/soccerball/volleyball that would enable less waste of precision?
[Think of descending a graph where the assumed root node is the whole earth's surface and the major patches might be the pentagonal regions that form a dodecahedron, the next node some way of subdividing each pentagon further, etc.]
just pick a standard address format (Score:5, Interesting)
That way, each country can keep whatever codes they are using and that work for their local setup, but postal sorting equipment can be standardized.
GPS-based ZIP-codes, on the other hand, seem pretty pointless. If you really want to get a ZIP code from a location, a web site can translate GPS addresses into zip codes if you like.
This system is badly designed. (Score:3, Interesting)
a) It would avoid OCR errors and verbal transcription errors by not using any two alphanums that look or sound alike. So yes, B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V all mean the same thing (sound-alike), as do 0 and O, 1 and L, 5 and S and so on. Yes, that makes the strings a lot longer
b) Instead of trying to code GPS into this space, sell aliases. Let me pick any alias that maps to my address, and have companies escrow the mapping from them to GPS or street address. My address should be "Brad's House Here" or something like that.
c) When doing the above, each name must have characters added to it which perform an ECC function, so you can detect and correct any transposition or character totally wrong. For some that will mean they pick a nice string and add something random to it. Clever people will find words that meet the ECC test.
d) This way, if I move, my postal address stays the same. And I can register for a global do not mail list.
Bah. That's not universal. (Score:3, Funny)
John Doe
15 Schlotzky Blvd
Mudville, AZ 12345
USA
Earth, Sol, Milky Way
Now THIS is universal. :) This shoud work for a while, until we have to start specifying which of the universes we really mean. Then, I guess, we'd have to add another line:
The-One-With-The-Evil-Spock
Poor kids... (Score:3, Insightful)
"LINUX SUCKS" -- Small plot of land in western Oklahoma purchased by an unknown company in Redmond.
"LINUX RULEZ" -- Nearby plot of land purchased by a short guy in a tuxedo.
In the UK... (Score:3, Insightful)
By doing it this way it becomes possible to sort mail efficiently for delivery using just the postcode.
Ignoring for the moment that UK GIS systems also use other references (UPRN, TOID, PAF ref, grid ref) it would seem that retooling for this new system is all cost and no benefit - except to the company selling that data.