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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?"
How about the P-P-P-Powerbook?
signatures are for fools with hands
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)
"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.
"7) Hemp produces more pulp per acre than timber on a sustainable basis, and can be used for every quality of paper. Hemp paper manufacturing can reduce wastewater contamination. Hemp's low lignin content reduces the need for acids used in pulping, and its creamy color lends itself to environmentally-friendly bleaching instead of harsh chlorine compounds. Less bleaching results in less dioxin and fewer chemical by-products."
Keep in mind that this yield is per harvest - and hemp harvests occur much more frequently than tree harvests. After all, hemp is a weed, and grows very fast.
http://www.thehia.org/facts.html
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.
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).
Being that I am currently writing a book on the topic, I feel qualified to say this 1 acre of hemp will produce up to 3 times as much paper pulp as 1 acre of timber On top of that you get up to 4 yields a year when it is 7 years for 1 yield of timber..So lets do the math Lets say 1 acre produces 100 sheets of paper for timber, over 7 years that is 14.2 sheets of paper per acre per year on timber 1 acre of hemp will produce 300 sheets of paper, 4 times a year which is 1200 sheets of peper per acre per year timber=14.2 hemp=1200 which one would you decide to grow?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
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
HP and Insight paired up to give us a good one. We ordered from Insight the "Advanced Pack" for HPs integrated Lights Out (iLO) feature on a Proliant server. This was several years ago when they had just started including the "basic" iLO for free on all their servers.
We recieved from Insight a box about 3/4 the size of a standard tower computer box. We opened it up to find a box the size you'd expect to find a full-sized array controller card in, plus a few large shipping air-bladders.
We opened up the array-controller sized box to find foam egg crate packaging securing what looked like a cd sleeve.
We opened up the CD sleeve to find inside the front cover, a number. We then used that number to "unlock" the "advanced features" that had really been there all the time.
The thing that I think makes this packaging especially over the top is that the number could have just as easily been put in a plain text email. "Shipping" and "packaging" were not even necessary to get this into our hands. We would have gotten it faster, cheaper and it would have cost them less to do it.
After all that, I'm afraid to say it actually got a little worse. The truth is, we didn't really order just one of them; we ordered three. All came packaged exactly the same way. Insight didn't make any effort to consolidate the smaller boxes into just one of the larger ones.
TW
Water?
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They're no fools. You ever need warranty service on your C++ compiler, you better have saved all those boxes.
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 actually think this would work better, no?
My father, a medical statistician, was one of the authors of a book on skeletal maturity http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0702025119/ref=sr _11_1/002-0416510-2702407?ie=UTF8. I was asked to provide a program to accompany the book so that paedeatricians wouldn't need to do the complex maths that goes from measuring x-rays to assessing growth. This was a simple VC++ routine which came to less than 200Kb. The publishers insisted that it should be on a CD, not a floppy, because
- They were geared up to use CDs
- The end users couldn't be guaranteed to have a floppy drive available
So, in packaging terms the space wastage was enormous, but in marketing terms it was the sensible decision.init 11 - for when you need that edge.
1200 sheets of peper per acre per year timber=14.2 hemp=1200 which one would you decide to grow?
Grammar of this sentence suggests too much hemp.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"