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Excessive Tech Packaging?
fraew wonders: "I just received a Microsoft Partner Program package in the usual MSDN sized box (34cm x 25cm x 11cm) that contained a single A5 piece of paper. Nothing more. Previously I've had RAM DIMMs and PCI cards double-boxed in boxes that approached the size of a computer case, so what is the worst example of excessive tech packaging you've received?"
This.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Paper is a friggin' waste to recycle. It's biodegradable for one. The tree's used to make it in the U.S. all come from tree farms. These trees are grown specifically for this purpose, so no one is running into virgin forests cutting down all the trees for paper. There does exist opposing research for both sides on the topic of set asides and the increased cost to consumers for packaging. I think the cost difference is negligible and definitely worth the process of forest conservation. On the topic of pollution, no one really talks about it. It's kinda like a dirty secret. To recycle paper you need to put it through basically the same process as making it - which is horrible for the environment. So, instead of making an inferior product that causes the same amount of environmental damage to produce and doesn't save the forests - I'd have to say no. Tree farms save the U.S. forests in conjunction with set asides.
Regardless of how few or many samples you request from Texas Instruments, they ship it out in something about the size of a shoebox. I've gotten single tiny surface mount chips sent that way.
How about the P-P-P-Powerbook?
signatures are for fools with hands
I don't know about the actual boxes, but we just got 3x software boxes (standard book sized), one each in a 1' cubed shipping box. This from one of the largest distributors in the country.
Talk about driving up the shipping price...
No, not laptop batteries; CMOS batteries. Standard CR2032 button cells. We had a batch of machines (SX270), a few of which shipped with CMOS batteries going bad, so we RMA'd for 5 new CMOS batteries. (as was policy at the time -- might as well get all of our warranty support that we can, and such.)
We received a box about 12 x 12 x 8 inches. This box contained 5 inner boxes, each about the size of a standard retail software box. Inside each box, the top and bottom were covered in eggcarton foam. In the center of each box was a single CMOS battery.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Yesterday we got what sounds like the exact same package. A big box containing nothing but a single slip of paper... why they couldn't stick it in an envelope (or even just an email) is beyond me. I can only assume Microsoft has paid FedEx some massive amount for a bulk lot of as many of those boxes as they feel like sending, because we always get the same sized box from MS, whether it's a dozen CDs plus technical documentation, or a just a single CD or piece of paper.
The other one I always wonder about is why Dell feels the need to seal every single component inside the box of a new PC in plastic, even if it's just a single sheet of paper...
a router, housed in a box 75cm x 50cm x 35cm
"so what is the worst example of excessive tech packaging you've received?""
The browser that slashdot came in.
Bought a tiny home firewall online. About 15cm x 10cm x 3cm (6in x 4in x 1in for the metrically impaired).
First the firewall was bubble wrapped. OK. Then the bubble wrap had a cardboard support. Fine. Then the OEM box box - this is where it starts to get crazy. That was easily 40cm x 20cm x 10cm. It was shrink wrapped, and then wrapped in another layour of bubble wrap by the reseller, and packed with scrunched up newspaper. It was then put in another box which must have been about 60cm x 40cm x 20cm. All of which was taped up and put inside a courier bag.
Now I'm not keen on damaged mail order goods, but that is just getting silly.
I recently purchased two StoreEdge units with about 12 TB of storage... each unit has two power supplies and hence requires two power cords. Each cord came packaged in its own box, the size of a thick laptop with the four boxes arriving inside another larger box. Each piece of software, of which they shipped two copies, was also shipped in some weird boxing while arriving inside the box the unit itself came in.
Totally fucking absurd. Why the hell do four powercables need to be shipped in four separate boxes? Why do CDs already in sleeves, need to be boxed twice before being put into yet another box?
Sorry for the rant. That experience really brought out the violently fanatic "environmentalist" in me. It reminded me of an endless matrioshka sans the artistic angle.
At least you got some kinda of protective packaging, over-the-top notwithstanding. I just had a user send in a laptop in a FedEx box... WITHOUT A LICK OF PADDING!!! I'm surprised the sucker turned on (or exploded, though the batter is not on recall). The top of the case was dinged all to hell because the spacer used just happened to be the users power supply. Yeah, some padding there... dumbass.
AccountKiller
I once got a power cable air-freighted from Malaysia. Don't ask me what Dell thought they were doing! (It apparently was supposed to go with a server we'd ordered).
What's even funnier is that I didn't find out what was in the box until *after* I'd been notified that it had been delivered to a building across town, and that the courier company had to go and pick it up from there and deliver it to me at the proper location, for free courtesy of their screwup.
The Logitech V200 cordless mouse comes in plastic packaging that is so thick, I would say that a circular saw is the most appropriate tool for opening it. It's probably at least twice as thick as it needs to be. I think that the only explanation for that is to make you so thoroughly mangle the package that you would feel bad about returning it if you change your mind.
When I ordered a mini-DVI to DVI adapter from Apple (it fits in my hand... it's just two ends with a little 2" stretch of wire) it came in the box that looked like it could ship a couple large tech manuals. Why? I never understood.
disclaimer: not my picture - found it on 4chan /G (probably nsfw) a while ago and saved it because it was so damn funny. Anyway here it is - an SD card and it's packaging (from newegg if I remember correctly).
I recently got some telecom equipment (DS3 Mux, patch panels, etc.). It arrived in several medium to large sized boxes. I opened one. Under a large wad of paper padding was....one patch cable for the mux. No, not a big cable but a thin 18" cable. In another box was...the other patch cable. I kept opening similar boxes till there was a very small pile of equipment and a huge pile of boxes and paper in the middle of the room.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
If overkill on media counts, I once bought a copy of the original EGA version of Lemmings. It came on a 5 1/4" CD. The data itself was a total of 512K. The game would have fit on a double -density 5 1/4" floppy.
Now if we are talking about shipping packages, I receive 1 or 2 floppy disks per month via overnight FedEx from one of our data vendors. It comes in a padded FedEx envelope stuffed in a small FedEx shipping box. The real kicker: The files on the disk are e-mailed to us as well. We have never used the content from the actual disks. I just peel off the labels and add them to a stack at my desk.
A perfectly normal serial cable, 3 meters long. It was sent by Digital to use with a PDP-11 in the datacenter. The cable was wound a few times to about 60cm diameter and put in an antistatic bag. The bag was put in one of those white, silky paper-like protection bags, wrapped in bubble-wrap and placed in a flat cardboard box, about 70x70x10cm. That box had been placed in the center of a box around 100x100x60cm, surrounded by those plastic impact-resistant "beans".
No wonder that company went under.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
UPS delivered a large box to our work about 30"x20"x12".. nearly large enough for the tape library we ordered. Inside was some plastic balloon padding and another heavy-duty shipping box about the size of a briefcase. Inside that was a tiny box containing a plastic bag containing a stupid promotional pen... and the warranty paper for the Quantum tape library.
The pen is pinned to my cubicle wall. I think I referred to the warranty paper once.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
The amount of space in the boxes of the mobile phones I buy never ceases to amaze me. The box the phone itself comes in isn't that big usually, most of the space is taken up by the wall wart but other than that it seems fairly compact. However, then the network provider who sells me the phone usually takes it upon themselves to also package the phone's box in their own box so they don't have to send their employees running around getting me network documentation/new SIM cards which I normally throw out, they can just use the bolted-on space they've created to package everything in one go. If I'm lucky, separating all these parts from each other doesn't take very long, but I have had experiences where I couldn't get at the contents of the box without breaking the packaging first, and you can say goodbye to any returns policy the store might have if you do wreck it.
I also have several generations Logic Audio. The contents of each package are the installer CD(s) or floppy disks, the dongle and the instruction manual. The latter most you could easily mistake for a phone book if it was the same colour, but I digress. The size of the packaging is enourmous! I've been using the old boxes as bookends, as they're rather sturdy, but I do get disappointed that the coolest part of the package isn't even something physical, especially since they're so large.
I recently installed some software and as part of the process it phoned home with machine details and the serial number so it could generate a license key. A couple of days later a CD arrived. It had one text file, which was the license key, which was 8 digits.
The stupid Advanced iLo packs often come in a 12"x8"x8" box that contains a bunch of padding and a padded envelope that contains a cd case that has zero value, and the license number attached. They could just email me the license number or print it on a certificate with the server or something, but no I have to fill the dumpsters and landfills with this kind of crap.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Every box has 2 weights to it as far as the shippers are concerned: physical weight, and volumetric weight.
What probably happens is:
Retail
the manufacturer finds the optimum box size to relay the information they want on the box, then adjust that for the box that some number of them fit into, finally making adjustments for pallet packing. This final packaged box weight may or may not fall under the physical weight of the item. The reseller then has to add to the packaging when they send it to the consumer.
OEM
The reseller gets a bunch of parts together in some sort of skid container which needs packaging to be put into a box. These resellers get discounts when they order larger quantities of the boxes, and they know that customers hate paying a ton for shipping a trivial sizes, so they get boxes that they know the volumetric weight of. 13x9x7 inches is the rough 'universal' size in the industry I'm in that you can ship UPS and it will be 1lb by volume. 13x13x9 is the 1 lb by volume for air shipments.
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
Maximum PC magazine received a few hard drives for review from a manufacturer they would not name, about a year about. What were they packaged in? Four CRATES, yes WOODEN CRATES, three of which were completely empty.
I blame geof's speakers.
Have you seen some of the plastic packages for SD cars and the like? Tiny like 1 inch SD card framed in piece of plastic over 12 inches long and almost as wide.
A $40 512MB SD Card from Tiger Direct in a shoebox. Really, an email to replace the catalog and a USPS stamped envelope would have increased their margins 10 fold.
Oz
I'd ordered several software licensees for a Unix C++ compiler. Eventually a large box showed up at my cube. It was a full size computer/monitor box. Probably about 3 foot by 3 foot by 4 foot. Inside that box was another slightly smaller box that had a shipping label that showed that it had been shipped to from another facility to the facility that had shipped the larger box. Inside this box was yet another shipping box also with a label, inside that was a large legal size manila envelope with a mailing label. Inside of that was a white envelope (no mailing label this time). And finally inside of that was a single 4" by 5" sheet of paper containing one of the software license. I found it amazing that that sheet of paper made traveled through so many shipping facilities, each time getting another layer of boxes before finally arriving.
The next license arrived similarly packed (only the large computer size box wasn't used for it.) My only guesses are either they wanted to impress upon us how valuable/expensive the license was, or that they had some sort of standardized shipping process that assumed everything was workstations.
I buy TurboTax every year to do my taxes. The box has only gotten slightly smaller (along with the typical PC game/software box) but the contents of it have shrunk: first a manual, then a quick start guide, then a single sheet, then a CD in a plastic tray, then just a CD. The outside of the box has all sorts of colorful fold-out panels to tell you all about the software, but there is literally just a CD, inside a paper sleeve, in the box.
Next year, I expect they'll start shipping boxes containing only a fortune-cookie-fortune-sized slip which contains a URL and password so you can download the software on-line.
For more information, click here.
I imagine most software, memory card, hardware, etc boxes that hold pocket-sized items are oversized not only to get manufacturer graphics on them, but also so they are that much more difficult to conceal and shoplift from a retail store. Just a sign of the times.
As an industry, the retail software publishers have just about the least-efficient packaging available:
Roughly 8"x10"x1" for just a CD and if you are lucky, a manual that would fit in a DVD case. If you are very lucky, you actually get a DVD case in the box.
Give me a box about the size of a DVD jewel case with the "cover art" printed as a multipage "outside-the-box-book" and I'll be much happier.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
12x12x8 inches is the size of a rather large bookbag. A CMOS battery is the size of a Pepsi bottle cap*. (Yeah, common knowledge among many Slashdotters I'm guessing. What can I say, I'm not a hardware guy so I Googled it: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=cmos%20bat tery&btnG=Google+Search&sa=N&tab=wi )
* Normally I'd use a coin denomination but I think Pepsi bottles are probably more circulated than any currency on earth.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
This is nothing.
I have you ALL beat.
I recently ordered Suse 10.1 and it arrived on DVD's...LOTS of them. They put a single bit on each DVD, in which was placed in a DVD box, which was wrapped in plastic, placed in a cardboard box, wrapped in bubble wrap, then placed into another box which was then labelled and shipped.
They're no fools. You ever need warranty service on your C++ compiler, you better have saved all those boxes.
...coming in a box measuring 80cm x 40cm x 40cm! And the box was filled with styrofoam packing peanuts. All that packaging for one A4 sized paper...
Sad to break this to you, but most species of hemp contain at most traces of THC. And after the early 1900's strains of hemp have been selected which score even lower.
To give you some numbers, the legal upper limit for THC content industrial hemp in Europe is 0.3% and most strains contain actually safely less than that. By comparison, the drug varieties contain 20% to 30% THC. So think literally having to smoke 100 times (or more) as much to get the same high. You'd have to literally smoke several pounds of industrial hemp to get the same high as from a join of the drug varieties. At which point, you'd either asphixiate from the smoke, or (more likely) it would take so long as to not get a high at all. The organism would get rid of it faster than you can get it into your system.
It's a plant that's been cultivated since the stone age for its fibres. (Which contain even less THC, btw.) It's been one of humanity's main sources of material for clothes, ropes, sacks, etc, for literally tens of thousands of years. Even paper. The USA Declaration Of Independence was drafted on hemp paper, btw. Even nowadays it's cultivated in the whole world except the USA... even though it's legal to _import_ industrial hemp in the USA. How's that for a stupid hypocrisy?
At any rate, there are plenty of plantations all around the world. Not only in Europe and Asia, but even right next to you in Canada. We already know how much it yields per acre, and how much is stolen by stoners. Hint: none at all is stolen by stoners, because it's freaking useless to them.
In the USA the ban has more to do with (A) the cotton lobby, and (B) with a good dose of government hypocrisy and putting up a jolly good "war on drugs" show. You _can_ make sure which varieties people grow, and every country except the USA does that. You just require a license for growing it, and then you go and check what those people grow. It's that simple.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think we all know that excessively large cardboard boxes are the root of all human happiness. Why do you thin the homeless live in them?
Now, if I just knew what to do with those Apple stickers they keep including...
Received a box about the size of three stacked PC case PSUs. On opening it we initially though it was empty, but when we read the manifest, sure enough there was a two inch sticker in there which according to the instructions (!) was to be stuck onto a Dell cabinet that had been delivered the week before.
1gb USB Memory stick. Physical size 2"x1/2". Box size 2'x1'x1/2". Seemed a bit excessive for something that now lives on my car keys.
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
We actually had a chip shipped to us as it was a preproduction mobo (early LGA board IIRC).
The box was about 2 feet by 2 feet and about 10 inches deep. Inside that was shaped polystyrene. Inside that were poly peanuts, inside _THAT_ was a small black plastic box (abnout 2 inches square), inside that was some more antistat foam inside which was a miniscule BIOS flash chip (about 2 cm square and 3 mill deep).
BLIMEY!
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Reading a few of these, they can be excused away at least somewhat: They're for one-off items, that perhaps the company just put into one of the boxes they had on hand.
The ones that bug the hell out of me are the big companies that ship stuff completely overpackaged *routinely* for completely standard items.
Example 1: Dell Latitude notebooks. They come in a 2'x2'x2' box. Inside this are a few smaller boxes, suspended in the middle with some foam standoffs. Open those up, and there's more foam surrounding the notebook. Open another one, bigger than the entire notebook, with cardboard standoffs holding the battery. Open another one that has documentation and CDs, each wrapped in plastic. I'd estimate that 80% of the packaging is air space. Of the 20% non-air, 50% is foam. By comparison, Macbooks come very nicely packed. We can fit 10 macbooks in their packaging inside one Dell notebook box, with plenty of rattling around room to spare. This is particularly annoying, because it takes up HUGE amounts of storage space for us. We have to at least shed the outer box to compress things down before they go in the store room.
Example 2: Ordering keyboards from HP. Just a keyboard. Basic model. They take the keyboard and put it in plastic. Then they put that into a box (#1).
If you order a keyboard a la carte, they have another box, #2, custom made just the right size to fit Box #1, so they can ship it to you. This seems to be done for the purpose of having a different ordering number for the unit. IE, the part code for a PC means you get a box with a PC, a manual, and a Box #1. The part code for a keyboard means a box with a Box #1.
If you order 10 keyboards, they put 10 Box #2s into an aggregator box, Box #3.
Then they put Box #3 into a shipping box, Box #4, which gets the shipping label.
Thus, boxes:
#1: Protect the keyboard
#2: Add a part code
#3: Bundle 10 keyboards together
#4: Place to put the shipping label
It's almost like the joke recursive gift box I saw a friend get for their birthday one year.
Here's a picture of the box a mousepad I bought recently came in. The mousepad is about 25x20x1cm, the box 70x50x20cm (conversion to inches is left as an excercise to the reader). But what made me really laugh is the fact that they apparently couldn't fit in the other item of the order, a Logitech V270. So they sent it in a second box. No wonder they charge $10 for shipping...
I've gotten some teflon mouse stickers (that could have been sent in a small envelope, really) in a 1ft x 3in x 3in Fedex box, packaged with styrofoam and bubble wrap. This was from newegg, sadly.
I recently took 2 car-loads of workstations, servers, printers & accessories over to a client.
:D
I returned with 1 car-load of packaging.
While installing the kit, I managed to build a floor-to-ceiling fort in their reception area
Predictive text is shiv!
Mandriva CD into DVD drive, Linux on hard disk, never used MS-Windows or its CD since.
Waste of time OEM installing Win or packaging up the CD for it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...can you see what it did to my typing?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Two meters of this came in a tube that was 1.5 meters long.
On receipt I wound it round my fist and shoved it into a small bag.
I also love the way some tools and bike parts are packaged. I one bought an avid disk brake rotor and mech. They could have delivered the the parts by firing them out of a cannon and they would still work. But no, they packaged it in a plastic tray , in a box, inside bubble wrap, inside another box, inside a waterproof bag.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Because the plastic tube they were in was so long (i ordered 20) it arrived in a box that was 12"x12"x48".
I once had to buy 16 memory chips for some upgrades at work. I got it in 4 large boxes roughly 1 ft x 1 ft x 8 inches. (Mind you these are just memory chips.)
The funny part is that after opening it up I found I had 3 boxes full of stuffing with two memory chips each and the 4th box had 12 memory chips in it....All the boxes were the same size. What the heck?
a 0.3 titanium pencil ... it came in a box the size of a VCR!
God is real unless declared as int
You know the kind I am talking about - it would be fine if you could just pull it apart, but it is "welded" together. So you pull out a heavy duty utility knife 'cause not even a pocket knife will do it. Then you have to figure out where to pull your cut through this incredibly tough plastic - better hope you don't go through the manual cause it is hard to RTFM when it has been shredded. I can't tell you how many times I have come close to my nifty new mp3 player (or whatever) with the knife. After you have made one cut through this stuff, you try to pull it apart - it still won't budge, but you manage to slice your finger open on the now sharp plastic. With the blood dripping on your new toy, you make that second cut and squeeze it out and as you hold the bittersweet prize for your efforts you raise your blooded hands to the sky and scream "WHY THE FUCK DO THEY USE THIS SHIT???" Lucky for "them," the shiny new toy inside comforts your rage that might have made you litigious or postal and soon you are back on Amazon ordering some new toy oblious to the fack that it too will come packaged in that crap.
Has anyone made a hate website about this packaging?
I'm astonished at the horrible packaging compact fluorescent light bulbs (you know, the ones you can replace the older incandescent ones with) come in. HEAVY duty plastic, very difficult to slice open...I'm always worried that I'm going to break a bulb or two. Why can't they come in a simple cardboard container like older-style lightbulbs?
Ferretman
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
You could have just gone to http://gcc.gnu.org
I was ordering 16 3' Ethernet patch cords. They were ALMOST shipped to me in 16 separate boxes. I only caught it when I noticed the SHIPPING was $140. For about $12 worth of patch cords. I called them to complain and they made it sound like it was somehow my fault. Fortunately it was fixed in time.
an adapter for connecting 2.5" laptop harddrives to standard ATA flat cables. It was a two inch long snip of flat cable with connectors on the ends. Packaged in a carton a cubic foot big and stuffed with curlies. I got more like that from that particular on-line-shop, but this was by far the worst example.
I recently ordered an optical USB mouse.
After opening the box it was shipped in, I discovered an inner package sealed with a sticker that reads as follows:
Attention DO NOT Break Seal Prior to Usage
I shudder to imagine what would happen if this were in the hands of Dilbert's PHB.
I once receive 5 double boxed packages where the inner box could hold a laptop, the out box could hold a small desktop, and the contents were 1 sheet of paper each where I had ordered 5 software licenses. The could have atleast packed the 5 sheets of paper in one over sized over packaged box.
These boxes were delivered over 2 days by FedEx. Wish I still had the pictures I took of the boxes and their contents.
Do I win?
Think Deeply.
There's been plenty of naming and shaming in this story so far. How about mentioning a few outfits that aren't wasteful? I'd like to direct some positive attention towards companies that pack appropriately.
As an example, I recently ordered some laptop RAM from OemPCWorld.com. I didn't have good specs on what modules would work, so I ordered 3, planning to return 2. According to their return policy, this is cool.
What arrived in the mail was a letter-size FedEx cardboard envelope. Inside that was my receipt and a half-size USPS cardboard return envelope, post-paid, which I'd added to my order to facilitate the return. Inside that were three tiny antistatic mylar bags, each with an SODIMM in it.
Absolutely perfect. I couldn't have packed it better if I'd tried; there was no wasted space, the 2 layers of cardboard provided more than enough protection against flex, and the whole thing weighed just a few ounces.
Another company that does things right: BG Micro. Recently ordered about $30 worth of stuff from them, some small tools, a few components, nothing huge. They wedged it all into the standard textbook-sized USPS box. The fragile bits were protected in individual boxes within, but most of the durable stuff just got a turn of bubble wrap, if that. It was sensible, and everything was in perfect shape when it arrived.
Another: Minimus. Does it bother you that the average first-aid kit contains about a 3:1 ratio of bandages to antiseptic wipes? Shouldn't it be the other way around? I wanted to properly equip my kit, but Ididn't want to buy a box of 1,000 alcohol or iodine wipes. Thanks to Minimus, I didn't have to. They carry everything from ketchup and mustard packets, to single-use bug repellent towelettes, all sorts of medical supplies, laundry soap, hand sanitizer, even coffee and tea. I can't say enough good things about this company. I stocked up the entire family's first-aid kits, equipped my travel bag with some laptop screen wipes, and tried a new brand of toothpaste. The whole mess came in a 5x5x4-inch box, and that still left about half the box as air space. Single-use products are the epitome of excessive packaging, but I ordered for convenience. Besides, Burn-Jel isn't something I need a gallon of.
I'm not affiliated in any way with any of the above companies, just a satisfied customer. How about your experiences?
Your supposed to play pass-the-parcel with it. Then, whoever gets the license, is allowed to use the compiler. You are obviously a newbie.
Consumer Reports has a section at the back of the magazine called "Selling It", where they show huge mistakes in advertising. Horrible spelling errors, logical WTFs, and just plain BAD ideas like EneMan -- the enema superhero -- that somehow made it to market, actually onto shelves. They also had a Golden Cocoon award for overpackaging, which popped up every now and then in Selling It.
Unfortunately, I can't find any examples online, but I'm sure at least some of you know what I mean.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
We (Rio) once had three CF-sized 1in hard drives turn up on a pallet. Yeah, as in forklift. Admittedly they were pre-production samples direct from the manufacturer's labs, but even that's not really an excuse for a 3ft*3ft*2ft box.
Peter
Buy.com used to operate in the UK, and I placed an order for a bunch of stuff from them years ago. It appeared that buy.com only ever had 1 size of packing box which they used for everything, about 2' x 1.5' x1', which then had a plastic sheet inside to hold down the goods in the box. My order was a few boxes, but one had only 1 DDS tape in the bottom, with the rest of the box being fresh air!
(I know what /. is getting like, so here's what a DDS tape looks like: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thum b/1/1d/DSS1_Tape_wScale.JPG/800px-DSS1_Tape_wScale .JPG)
Car analogies break down.
A single 1.8" hard disk - admittedly, a rare engineering sample at the time, for the development of the Rio Karma - arrived in a wood-bottomed box 3 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet, complete with rope handles and one of those fork-lift compatible pallet-style bases. All the way from Japan to the UK.
For a 1.8" hard disk. Mmmm.
Last Christmas, I bought my wife an iPod Nano. As a joke, I wrapped the Nano and put it in a slightly larger box which I wrapped as well. I went a little nuts with the box-in-a-box and soon had seven layers of boxes and wrapping surronding the Nano. I added a final eighth layer when my next door neighbor bought a new refridgerator.
She forgave me when she got to the Nano.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
"The worst example of excessive tech packaging I've received": for me this would be a giant IBM mainframe computer that came through the door in 1979 with absolutely no protective 'packaging,' but with 6 IBM techno-droids trailing along behind it.
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
LOGISTICS ie it was easier (and I guess cheaper) to have fewer box sizes.
and
COST - less "wastage" of space used to store different sizes/unused packaging/cost to post (by weight).
BTW the example I think was AMAZON.
Actually, in the UK they have just started to charge by weight and size of the parcel, so this may force businesses to reconsider.
...but a plant with 20-30% THC is pretty unheard of - even the best strains contain generally 7-9% THC, rarely as much as 11%, without counting using a sulphuric acid bath to convert CBDs and CBNs into Delta-11 THC (Not Delta-9 THC which is found naturally inside the plant.) I used to grow this shit, and I could easily tell you that a 20-30% THC content in a plant would make any pharmaceutical company manufacturing Marinol very unhappy, very quickly.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I don't have to tell you how many times I have cut myself open on such packaging. What I have found works best for most packages like this is a set of heavy-duty kitchen shears. Pick up some made out of steel if you can find them (they won't be cheap new, so you may want to look through an antique or junk store's kitchenware selection), but the cheapo dollar-store plastic (with metal blades) seem to work OK too for most tasks. These things look like heavy duty scissors with serrated blades. They are mainly meant to allow you to cut through chicken carcasses (rib cage) and crab/lobster shells (to remove the meat), as well a variety of other kitchen tasks. I bought a pair and stuck 'em in my shop for this very reason (as well as cutting cardboard and the occasional piece of wire - though I have wire dikes for that).
An alternative measure is a pair of medium-sized straight-angle sheetmetal shears (they also make left and right hand curved shears, so be aware of that if you cut a lot of round things), but since they are meant for sheetmetal, they sometimes don't work as well. Plus, they tend to be much more expensive than kitchen shears...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
A quick trip to Wikipedia says:
"British production is mostly used as bedding for horses; other uses are under development. The largest outlet for German fibre is composite automotive panels. Companies in Canada, UK, USA and Germany among many others are processing hemp seed into a growing range of food products and cosmetics; many traditional growing countries still continue with textile grade fibre production."
So while, no, you can't get all the proteins you need from any single plant source (hence you can't really live for long only on hemp and water), your friends are partially right that it is indeed a food source too.
It also indeed _is_ used as part of composite materials, and hemp-based plastics are starting being produced too. So there too your friends are technically right, although it's really a simplified view. You can make composite materials with any kind of fibre, including glass, carbon, or thread, or whatever. They're indeed stronger than wood or, in some cases, even than steel, but that doesn't come from the hemp as such. Hemp can be a cheap source of strong fibres there, but that's just about all there is to it. It's not like it can't be done with other things just as well. Still, there is something to be said about doing it cheaper.
Motor oil, again, is technically true, but again it's not something unique to hemp. Hemp would just be one relatively cheap source of biomass to use there, but technically you could use almost anything else instead, if you have to. Turkey guts, dead cats, whatever.
Let me explain a bit more. See, contrary to the "auugh, we're all dead when Middle East oil runs out" doom-and-gloom propaganda bullshit, people have been making synthetic fuel since before WW2. Most of Germany's tank warfare happened on fuel synthetised from coal for example. It wasn't cheap at all, but it kept the panzers rolling. That knowledge wasn't lost, and in fact today we're better than ever at turning anything organic or even just carbon-based into fuel. What remains though is the price. That's really the only reason everyone prefers importing oil from the Middle East instead. At any rate, we can convert coal or almost any kind of biomass into oil. The input material counts mostly for price too. Stuff that's rich in fat, for example, needs less effort to convert into something you can put into a gas tank. Stuff that's cheap to mass produce has its advantages too.
Personally I wouldn't hold that much hope for _hemp_ as the oil source of the future, though, for the simple reason that it's not _that_ rich in fat. Genetically engineered algae for example currently are at the point of being 50% fat, and hemp (as in the whole plant) doesn't come close to that. _If_ someone figures out how to mass-produce those algae, they'd make a far better and cheaper source of oil.
Still, technically speaking your friends _are_ right. It is possible to make synthetic oil out of hemp.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
6 very small rj45-db25 adapters from Lantronix (about 1.5"x1.5"x.5" each) in a box that was roughly 3'x2'x2'.
It actually makes some sense. Every item has a shock limit, measured in Gs. Sensitive avionics can be down in the 15-20G (multiples of gravity) range. CRT monitors are somewhere around 75G on average. Typical fine dinnerware goes about 100-125G.
Here's the key - take the box drop height and divide it by the distance from the nearest point of your item to the nearest point on the outer box. That is the minimum G force your item will receive if you have the perfect packaging material for that exact drop. You can only do worse, and the real figure is often 2-5 times that number. Soft foams, eggcrate, cutouts, and collapsable cardboard are all ways to try an linearize that shock response to minimize damage.
Given that a box in shipping can easily be dropped 4-5 feet from a truck tot he ground, or off a loading dock, and add a couple of feet for the masculine "throw" by the operator, and you can easily get 6 feet. In a 2' square box, with a 12" wide laptop, there's only 6" of space from edge to outside if it's perfectly centered. 72/6=12Gs. Now, that's for the perfect system; theirs is probably at 25-33% efficiency, which is pretty good, so now we're in the 36-48G range. And for a piece of electronic equipment costing $1000-3000, that's probably about right.
Oh, and just to let you know, a box full of packing peanuts probably has a 10% efficiency, with light resilient foam coming in around 15%. It's really _really_ hard to get above 50%.
(Yes, I've actually done a bit of packaging engineering to make sure some sensitive gear could withstant MIL-810 shipping requirements)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It comes in its own package, which was inside a box, which was then inside another box with padding around it, which was already kind of weird. Then when you actually get to openeing the thing, it's damn near impossible. My cool new toy, sitting there, all ready for some good robot times and I can't get him out of the damn box. It's like he's in a tiny plastic prison. Every time I think I've got a part free there's a new strap holding him in. And they're devious too...they hide the strap and then tape them down between two layers of cardboard so you have to cut and rip and pull just to get to the strap before you can even think of cutting it off. It was crazy. I have no idea how they even get some of those ties on there.
...no two people are not on fire.
Anytime you buy something from a retail store like a mouse that is in that annoying hard plastic container that takes a blowtorch to open. Of course, you pull out the scissors and end up cutting through the warranty card or manual or just try to muscle it open and get a gash on your hand from the sharp edges. I hate those things.
Reenge!
those chinese workers are getting us for being capitalist pigs!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
ponies come with an incredibly thuick plastic 'bubble' several twist ties, and tapes hair.
ahhhhg, the pain.
It's for my daughter, you twit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
because if hemp was better, they could scrap cotton and go with hemp.
It's about the bottom line, and getting more material on the same acreage means more money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"In the USA the ban has more to do with (A) the cotton lobby,"
why wouldn't they just grow hemp instead of cotton?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Everytine you do that, the gift must get four times better.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
One of our customers decided that they wanted to import in a relatively large database. (basically an address book with around a million records) They decided that FTP'ing the file would take too long, so they decided to FedEx a tape instead. Problem is, it had to go through several steps to go from original file, to tape, and back again.
They'd cut an EBCDIC 36 track tape. That tape would be shipped to an outside vendor to be converted to standard Unix tar format on DLT media. That DLT tape would be then shipped to us. I'd have to read that tape using a Sun workstation that was solely dedicated to this process. Once the file was on the local filesystem, I'd back it up using our tape silo onto LTO media. Then I'd run a restore of the file to a Windows server that the customer owned. From there they'd import the file into a SQL database.
So basically... Midrange->36track tape->convert EBCDIC to ASCII->DLT tape->Unix workstation->LTO tape->Windows server.
The process took around 30 days to complete from export on the midrange to import on the Windows server. Last I heard they decided to just FTP the file, which takes about 8 hours for the entire process.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
We started getting these boxes last spring, and they show no signs of letting up. We still haven't determined (because the company that shall not be named is in such disarray that we can't find anyone who knows what the hell's going on) whether we're getting the upgrade of approximately 1,500 licenses we ordered, or a refresh of all 12,000 licenses that we own. Either way, it's a fucking lot of boxes, or a motherfucking lot of boxes. Our Administrative Assistants love it when a pallet of these things show up. They open all that packaging up and stuff the paper inside a single box.
All of this data, of course, could have been printed on a single piece of paper.
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