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HP Shatters Excessive Packaging World Record
An anonymous reader writes "HP customers will be familiar with their bizarre packaging practices (5 pounds of packaging for 8 license keys!); lets just say this story is not an isolated incident ... " I've seen some excessive packaging, but perhaps nothing to top this.
I've seen something crazy, but not that crazy. That's just ... crazy.
That's what my family would have said.......I would too :)
And I thought the MSDN CDs ya get posted were bad.
They come in a box about the size of an Eee PC (but taller), and contain just a CD in a sleeve cover.
Nothing to see here...
Cost of shipping 150$?
But did the recipient even bother to recycle it?
We received a crate a while back from Agilent with a chassis and desk for an 8510 that had not been rack mounted as it was being re-tasked. The lower part of the crate had a fold out ramp that allowed the wheeled chassis to roll right down onto the floor of the lab. Pretty fancy for an empty rack. The tradition continues long after splitting away from the parent company.
bob@Osprey:~>
Sounds about typical for HP. Back many years ago when I was primarily an HP-UX SA, excessive packaging was the norm as well.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
Often times when you ask the shipping department to take care of a package containing hardware, let's say in a 12 x 12 x 4 cube, they are nice enough to protect by putting it in a box with extra padding. Sometimes, when you note it's out of IT and don't notice it's already reboxed, they'll do it again.
This is not that unusual. Clearly they ship out their licenses in a box. I'd just use an envelope like those free ones from the shipping companies. But why ask why, put it in a box. Got many boxes? Put the boxes in a box.
Why not be thoughtful and put 32 pages in one box? This presumes the shipping department knows what's in the box, and even they know, why would they want to deal with all these extra boxes when they can ship them off to the customer.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
My experience with HP have been increasingly disappointing. Recently I contemplated the purchase of an HP network printer / scanner. Most network printers with an integrated scanner implement the scanner as a host-based scanner over USB. The HP unit I found seemed to be the exception. Until I read the data sheet more closely. The network scanner degrades resolution to 200dpi. For full resolution scanning, dust off your host-based USB interface. What I found annoying about this is that the brochure blithely advertised "network scanning" as fully supported.
I have a colleague who swears by HP at the enterprise level, but at this point, I wouldn't buy a consumer level appliance unless I had first exhausted the alternatives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSkwayDpgyY
(Posting anonymously for obvious reasons)
When working for a spin-off of HP, we did a licence audit and decided we needed 500 or so C++ compiler licences for compliance. Order them. Expect a single A4 sheet back saying we're covered.
Instead, we get a pair of huge 2m x 2m x 2m boxes, on shipping palets, containing 500 smaller A4-sized cardboard boxes, each containing an A4 paper licence. This was soul-destroying fail of the highest level and led me down the path to BOFH-dom.
This excessive packaging of license keys goes back to the days of Digital Equipment Corp. It's not the "HP Way," but for some reason it persists.
This story was on the consumerist DAYS ago. Slashdot used to be the first place i'd see stories... must be a slow night
There Can Be Only One...
Remind me to never request a printed manual from HP. Every page would be in a different box.
Now that is _truly_ dirty paging. Yikes!
Ever tried ordering a 100-page printer manual from HP? I ran out of space in my lawn after the third trailer truck arrived...
Futurama Madhouse
Make me ceo for a day, every single person that was involved with shipping that would be fired immediately for stupidity. I would certainly start with the manager in charge of the group that printed and packed those.
Got Code?
If the hardware worked, the drivers were ridiculous.
I have been to error code hell. I have breathed the toner.
This company stole years off my life and I WANT THEM BACK!
.
I repeat: 1 roll of scotch tape in an huge box full of peanuts. Shipping was free.
P.S. I have have the receipt but not a picture of the box as it was in 2006.
I recently ordered a pair of servers from Sun. The power cords and the addon nic each came in seperate boxes in a 2'x2'x1' box for each server. At least the outer box wasn't filled with peanuts.
I feel like being forced to download HP's 600MB installer just to get one printer driver is the software equivalent of this packaging phenomenon.
HP : Hewlett Packard, Heaped Packaging, Heavy Paper, Hopeless Paperweight, Highly Priced...
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Tell them you already got your license entitlements via BitTorrent.
Game... blouses.
...wins the wasteful packaging contest IMHO. My Leopard CD and trackpad protecting sticker arrived in a box that was filled with brown paper and was large enough to fit two LCD monitors.
Several years earlier, I ordered a Firewire-to-USB connnector for my old iPod and it arrived in a box that was 5x bigger than the package AND was literally packed with nothing but air...in the form of plastic air-filled balloons.
I'm surprised they don't ship their MacBook Air in a depleted uranium case in order to maintain structural integrity.
Weird, I use email to ship keys. Its faster and *much* cheaper.
Happens with a lot of companies I have known. One company ordered around 40 new PCs' from IBM. The PC's arrived from IBM in a pair of 2m x 2m x 2m cube boxes on the inside of the container. The driver asked if our IT department happened to have a forklift truck available as it would save time unloading.
Well, we didn't, so we had to cut open the boxes and make a little door so we could get in - they had been filled to the brim with styrofoam peanuts and promptly flooded the back of the container before spilling onto the parking lot.
Then, one by one we got the monitors and main units out - all two hundred of them. By the time we were finished, there were enough styrofoam peanuts on the ground to visualize the airflow around the building. They would form streamlines and vortices all around the parking lot. It was our job to chase after every single one for recycling.
Now, mail-order companies seem to enjoy putting the smallest items in the largest boxes. Once ordered some new memory cards and hard disk drives. Each order arrived in a large desktop PC sized box filled with large plastic air-bubbles (empty sealed plastic bags filled with nothing but air), styrofoam peanuts or foam padding. In each case, the padding took up about 20 times as much space as the original item.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
At first I thought this was just a prank pulled by someone who didn't like HP, but after reading the comments I seem to have to believe it's true. It makes you see this in a whole new light.
-- Cheers!
I had to order a oil dip stick for a HMMWV from AM General /Hummer.
Around 3$ with free ground shipping.
It showed up a in a huge 1' by 1' by 3' box for a dinky little item inside. They could have used a package tube, but I'm guessing they have a big bulk contract with UPS. I order many parts from them and they're over packed all the time. I guess it's better to waste money that way then risk a part arriving broken or damaged.
The shipping department at HP probably get monitored on how many cubic ft of parcels they handle, with a bonus for the supervisors if they ship more than 300cuft of parcels per day.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"News for nerds, stuff that matters"
One out of two ain't bad?
My...that's a big package.
By venturing more than 3 feet into the depths of this 'box' you agree that any encounters that may result between the entrant and any:
I - trolls
II - goblins or
III - beings of origins
a - Extraterrestrial
b - Indeterminate
c - Unknown
are the sole responsibility of the recipient.
Furthermore, you agree that any objects discovered therein, including but not limited to:
I - treasure,
II - artifact,
III - relics of historical significance, or
IV - the shipped product
are to remain the property of HP, inc. in perpetuity and are to be returned with 28 calendar days, with attachment of a check for the full value of any life insurance policies, savings, properties or outstanding paychecks of any of the intended package recipients who may have perished within.
Look at the packaging for a few screws!
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
When I worked for the digital/Compaq/Hp company - I canvassed them to move to more eco-friendly packaging (like recycled boxes as filler instead of styrofoam) sadly, it seems, they just started to use more boxes.
Kind of crazy, especially when you consider what recycling cardboard does to the environment. We usually turn it into solar cookers for our friends, but then, we're way more nerdy than most people about the environment. This from a traditionally environmentally friendly HP, (or at least that's what they're going for now...) A little surprising to see. ANyone have any good suggestions for what we should do when companies overpack to this extreme? Jonathan http://www.greenjoyment.com/
Its not hard to understand this insane packaging especially in IT. The original article about 32 sheets of paper in 17 boxes is just the shipping process being designed for 1 licence that they are kind enough to to fold or roll.
A licence is two sheets of paper boxes to keep them safe. You order 16 licences, u get 16 boxes. The shipping guy sees there all going to the same place so puts them in a bigger box. The system makes sense for 1, but the man time required to realised the problem and solve it would cost HP more than the packaging materials.
With IT equipment its roughly the same argument. With so many options available, each option is boxed separately and shipped separately, saving on man time. The shipping guy takes the item off the shelf, labels it and sends it out. The excessive packing just serves to protect the item from notoriously rough handling. If you get the item and its been damaged in shipping, you return it often at the cost to the company
who must then pay someone to find the problem, where it happened, fix it/replace it and ship it again. The cost of this is massive so they just pad the item ridiculously ensuring it safety even with the worst treatment.
I don't condone what these companies do, its an environmental disaster, but it does save cost.
And anyway, it lead to some good laughs. I bought a rack mount last year as a flat pack, supposedly to save shipping. 3 glass sides, 1 top, 1 bottom, 4 rails for the uprights and a glass door. Each one came separately wrapper in its own box, delivered by 3 different couriers.... made me cry it was so funny.
Someone named John Robson commented on the story linked by the Slashdot story. He said, "HP should be penalised for that."
No need to worry, John. HP is in a Slashdot story. There will be very capable people, I think, who say to themselves, "Maybe I should apply for a job at HP. Nah, maybe not."
The parent comment says, "My experience[s] with HP have been increasingly disappointing. Recently..."
That's been our experience, too. HP seems to be getting a little better, however, now that Carly Fiorina has left. Before, it was REALLY ugly.
How does excessive packaging happen? It happens because people become so unhappy working for a company that they slip into becoming robotic drones. Nothing matters. They just try to get through each day. Illogical packaging is only one of the many, many illogical things that happen every day. Those people never go to hell, because if they arrive there, Satan says, "You've suffered enough. You don't belong here."
Can HP possibly be fined for this? They should be, IMO.
This is just nuts. 17 boxes to protect 32 pages.... for crying out loud, even if you want to argue that they needed cardboard to prevent any folding or bending, the desired goal could have been accomplished with just two sheets of cardboard... one in front and one in back, and the pages and protective cardboard put safely into a bubble-wrap mailing envelope. Not only would that be much more eco-friendly, but it would also cost a heck of a lot less for postage.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is the craziest I've ever seen personally.
A box arrived in the mail. It was maybe 10 x 6 x 4 or so. Inside that was a manila envelope. Inside that was a small box, slightly larger than a jewlers ring box. Inside that was a clear plastic pill bottle. Inside that was a small ziploc baggie.
Inside that was ONE styrafoam bead, like from a beanbag chair. it was the replacement foam bead for an anemometer.
At least those can be opened with a box cutter/stanley knife where other clear armor plastic encasings can cause self-injury and anger tantrums/building damage.
Why is there so much padding for such a small package?
There may be a reason behind the practice of shipping single sheets of paper individually boxed. It makes them look important. This policy may have been established following an important customer accidentally tossing licenses or keys out while unpacking s/w manuals and media.
Have gnu, will travel.
If it turned out to have actually contained HP hardware, it would have been a much bigger waste of packaging.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
When you die, you go to a structure, with enough of room for you--minus all your garbage. Thanks a lot for needlessly screwing up the planet for every one else, you selfish bastards!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
We need to start doing this.
We need to recycle this crap.
We need people to push gov to make energy plants that can burn this crap.
And despite the inexcusably top-heavy driver installs that come with their printers (or did last I had one with Windows)....
And despite their inexcusable spying on employees and journalists...
I still give HP mad props for their efforts at e-waste recycling. They put together that thing a couple years ago where you could drop off just about anything electronic at Office Despot, and damn if I didn't fill half a container with museum qualified crap going back to 10MB MFM drives. (I'm keeping my 8" floppies and my S100 bus CP/M boat anchor, those you'll have to pry from my cold dead hands. But anything PCjr or later you can take, and you did, HP, didn't you.)
And for that, I will continue to give HP some slack, and I still go a bit out of my way to hit OD for supplies. (But HP: please fix the ridiculous over-packaging problem, and please try not to spy on reporters.)
I recently had to order 5 power cables from a Cisco reseller and 3 days later they showed up in HUGE box that was some 10 times the volume size of the cables and jam packed with packing material and paper as if power cables could break if the box was dropped.
What a waste!
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
It's like finding 'hypocrisy' in the dictionary: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/index.html
Wow! Looks like HP has gotten more efficient in their shipping.
About ten years ago I get back from lunch to find a huge box at my desk. Typical workstation plus monitor size box from HP with a shipping label was like 4ft+ cube. Was not exactly sure what it was so got to openning it. Inside that box was another slightly smaller box also with a shipping label listing one HP address to another HP address. This went on for quite a while til I got to a small box with padding. (If I recall the stuff have been shipped a total of 5 times adding several boxes each time) Inside that box was a large manila envelope. Inside manila envelope was a white envelope (or might have been the other way around) it has been a while. Inside that was a single 5" by 6" sheet of paper with a single license for the HP-UX 9 C++ compiler.
I had order 5 licenses... the next day another of the licenses came, though at least the outer box was not quite as large. I often wondered if it was either that there shipping system was set up for just sending license keys or if they really wanted to make sure that piece of paper didn't get lost in the mail.
The other odd thing was the licenses didn't include any serial numbers or what not, just the B code number for the software and a statement about it being 1 license.
I worked for HP for several years, so this is personal experience.
For a High Tech company, they are still extremely retarded in the way they handle things.
Here are some examples:
Leave application forms. Go to a website, fill in a form and then print it and fax it to your manager. There is no way to "submit" the form to a database which then emails the manager. I was probably one of the first people to print-to-pdf and email it instead.
Procurement: Once when I moved roles within HP, I needed to order a laptop. So I ordered a laptop, docking station, and carry case. These were standard laptops. The order processing centre was located in Singapore or Malaysia, and so the laptop, the docking station and the carry case were air freighted to me from Singapore even though my office was about 5 Kms from their Warehouse in Sydney.
HP actually once sent me what looked like an empty box, about 14"x10"x8". It contained one small piece of felt. (used to blot excess ink inside a cheap inkjet printer). I bought the part for $0.24 with free shipping.
Here's where it got more weird. I ordered 4 rubber feet on the same invoice. 3 arrived in one large box the next day, the 4th arrived inside an enveolope inside another box the day after (it was out of stock so it had been shipped from another warehouse in Virginia to the one the invoice was processed at to be boxed up and sent out). The postage on the envelope was about $2 to ship the one foot from A to B. The feet cost $0.98, with free shipping or course.
I had 2 identical shipments from Cisco last year that were shipped on the same day from Singapore. All the boxes contained were license agreements, about 5-6 pages in total. Apparently it was cheaper to print the material in Singapore. I seriously doubt that the shipping and handling costs were cheaper going that route though.
I just got hired by HP and I am awaiting for my contract to arrive in the mail. Its taking awhile so I hope its because it will be coming in a huge box like this.
Where I work we buy a lot of HP desktops, only problem is that mice are not included in the box and they ship the mice separately, in separate boxes with a single mouse in each, also in plastic packaging, on a crate with hundreds of others. It freaks people out when you can lift a very large crate of unopened boxes. It really does drive us nuts though. Smarten up HP.
HP: Hewlett Packard and Harry Potter. Both spell the end of trees.
You should have seen what my USB drive from newegg came in. It was enough packing peanuts to feed a packing elephant for days! Anyway, if you think someone at HP thought "hey, let's send licenses out like that!" it's probably more like they put all licenses in those boxes to go with packages and failed to consider that someone might order them seperately and it would have taken a lot of labor to unbox them all and put them in envelopes instead.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Large warehouse management systems usually have a "footprint code" (or some other similar term) for all the items in the system that they ship. If someone is lazy and doesn't put one in (or uses some default setting) then the system picks the wrong size box to ship the product. The crew working shipping can't change it so they just ship it and tell the monkeys in charge they've got a bad footprint. *Hopefully* someone cares enough to actually change it to the right code. I've seen 100 CD's go out in 100 separate boxes for this reason.
I remember getting a set of VMS manuals from Digital. It was a very large box, very heavy (a set of VMS manuals weighed over a hundred pounds.) The books didn't fix the box exactly, and in the box was another box, empty, labeled "Empty Filler Box".
-- Of course I'm paranoid. I'm a sysadmin.
It's like using a Perl hash table containing integers encoded as strings, when all you really wanted was "int x[10];"
if they could get the width to be fluid that would be nice... or maybe just a wee bit wider... please
------ no thanks... I've quit
I am a Oracle Magazine subscriber (free magazine, totally useless but great when I need quality paper for packaging). Once they sent a "special edition" magazine with a promotional CD included; it was sent in a standard A4 envelope. Well, the Oracle guys decided it was a really important CD and sent me another copy, just to make sure. It was in a paper CD envelope, like Ubuntu's free CDs, but the paper was much thinner. The paper envelope was put in bubble wrap, and the bubble wrap was put in a cardboard box the size of a 500-page A4 paper pack. The cardboard box was sent as a DHL package, the delivery was priced something like $20-$30 (paid by Oracle). And the best part? The DHL-shipped version arrived a month later than the copy I received with the magazine (and probably was free for Oracle to ship since they already paid for shipping the magazine).
I used to work in the fulfilment arm of HP's major competitor. We had a situation where an enterprise license COA sticker worth $50k was shipped in a jiffy bag. Package was so small it got lost,Customer refused to acknowledge receipt, mother of all witch hunts afterwards. At least not much chance of this package going adrift. Also their fulfilment system would probably have these licenses as line items in the order, so they have to be individually boxed/labelled/scanned anyway, so I would think it was a good idea to use a bigger carton plus overpack to minimise the chance of the package going astray.
Balance the cost of saving the planet against the reaming you would get if it got lost.
I know what I would do.
I work in a decent sized HP IT shop and this happens to us all the time as well. On many occasions we have ordered RAM for servers and find that a single stick of RAM is double boxed in boxes the size of boxes that dell uses to ship entire computers. On top of that if we order multiple sticks of ram, they all end up in separate boxes, no combined shipping. I'm surprised nobody is looking into this because it could be a HUGE cost savings for a company like HP to do shipping more efficiently.
Back in 1996 I was doing HP-UX system administration, and we ordered a (small, maybe 10) number of software licenses for a pair of servers and they were packaged exactly like this. One license key on a piece of paper in each box, packed in a larger box.
This is because HP is a hardware company, not a software company. A software company ships bits, a software company ships boxes... Simple as that. "We just got an order for 16 of part number XYZZY, pull them from the shelves, box 'em up and ship 'em out". Shipping a license key is done exactly the same way as shipping a server or a multimeter, or a signal generator...
Plus, on the receiving end it is something that even knuckle-draggers in receiving can understand. "We ordered 16 part number XYZZY, here I have 16 boxes saying XYZZY on it. order received".
So, it's totally stupid in some ways, but I can see why they do it.
Sean
I wonder if HP is a green company? Or maybe they are working on saving electrons by not using email...
A while ago, our company ordered an upgraded protocol license for some Intel telecommunications gear.
A few days later, a big box shows up -- I think a 2 x 2 x 2 foot cube. In that box was a wad of packing peanuts, as well as a padded envelope...
When we opened the envelope, we expected to find a license button, which would be physically installed in our equipment. There would be no reason to ship that in a large box, but at least a license button would have been some tangible product that justified shipping.
Alas, the envelope contained no license button after all. Instead, it contained a single sheet of paper complete with instructions on how to access a web site, and a validation code to use. That validation code would then give us an actual license key, which we could then enter into our equipment to unlock the extra protocol features (that were already built in to the equipment).
I can't quite put my finger on it, but something seems a little wasteful here... I'm *sure* if somebody thought hard about this, they could probably find a way to do the whole thing electronically...
Jokes and HP mocks aside, there is another dark side to all this extra packaging story.
Shipping and packaging is considered to be a barometer of the US economy by most Wall Street financial analysts and government statisticians.
Needless to say, most of them need to paint a rosy picture of the economy when the time comes for luring more suckers into the Wall St. money machine and to fatten their bonuses. So how can they "work with the respective industries" to boost the shipping numbers? You got it: Bigger packaging!
Without these large shipments that mostly contain nothing but foam and bubblewraps, most of the indicators like CPI, GDP or industrial output would look much worse than what it is now. And a true picture of such an economy would cause head-rolls in both corporate high-ranks and in the government circles.
So don't expect HP / Dell or any of these companies to change their behavior just because some slashdotters got a chance to poke fun at their packaging system. The whole economy and political stability is at stake here!
wait a second. not a single person sees that first picture which smacks of two boxes taped together and thinks to call "bullshit"?
I'm not defending stupid packing process, but really? Really?
Alternatively I expect someone totally bored and with a sense of humour at work.
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/contactemail.html I asked them what they were going to do about this. If they get enough complaints, maybe they'd just do something about it. Of course you can also choose to spend the next two minutes writing a smart comment instead of trying to do something about it. If you do what you did, you get what you got.
A couple years ago....
After one single doorbell ding followed by the usual screech of rubber and roar of diesel exhaust, I open my door to discover that UPS has left the following:
AN ENTIRE SHRINKWRAPPED PALLET containing 22 identical smaller boxes.... which in turn, each contained ONE (1) HP hard-drive.
Which is fine... except I only ordered TWO (2) hard-drives. Somebody in HP's order fulfillment has a bit of a stutter in their keyboard's "2" key it seems and "2" became "22". 8-P
I bet that dang UPS man *KNEW* that delivery was an HP screwup...which is probably why he beat feet as fast as he did. 8-P
For example:
playingcatchup
therestoftheinternetalreadysawthis
ondigg2daysago
There is already a running joke on digg about how everything shows up there a day or two after reddit..
since this is technology news, and your grandparents are always the last to hear about the latest and greatest technology, and it first was seen at reddit and then digg and now here, does this mean we're our own grandparents?
We once gave bed sheets as a wedding present, but tied them to a torus knot using chicken wire, covered with cellophane and braid.
In that particular wedding the maid of honor slightly opened the packaged presents so that everyone would see what the happy couple were getting as a present... however, she wouldn't dare to touch the torus knot.
--
I believe the notion of shipping licenses in boxes started at Digital Equipment Corporation. The idea was that by shipping it in a box, it was less likely to be thrown away (as "worthless paperwork") before reaching the technical person who would understand its value. That idea seems to have survived two changes of corporate ownership, so maybe it's correct.
This doesn't even come CLOSE to electronic component samples.
I ordered a sample of a surface mount inductor once from Pulse. They sent me precisely one inductor (about 1/2" square and 1/4" thick) in a plastic box, wrapped in 1" bubble wrap, inside a 6" cube box, which was then surrounded in 10" of foam on each side, styrofoam spacers, all inside a 12" cube box, which was then peanutted and placed in a 16" cube box.
All of that for an inductor. This is common practice in the electronics industry.
Back when HP was Compaq I once received a shipment from them consisting of one 60cm x 100cm x 100cm box completely filled with loose styrofoam packing chips. At the very bottom of the box, where none of the packing material would do it any good at all, was a plastic envelope containing a handful of license keys.
At least the guys who shipped this package made sure that their paperwork was protected from damage. It seems they're learning.
About 20 years ago I was working for a company that used Xerox Star workstations. These had an optical mouse that needed a special pad with a pattern that the mouse could track. These pads were thin card and they would wear out after a while. We ordered some more and sure enough, they arrived individually wrapped in cardboard boxes about an inch thick with the whole lot in an outer cardboard box.
We went through all the same comments that are being posted here about inefficiency, why can't they put then all in one box, or just an envelope.
You may think that at least in that case there was a physical thing we needed rather than just the information on the paper but the Xerox laser printer we had attached to the network was perfectly capable of printing sheets of paper with the necessary pattern
Being older and wiser than I was then I now understand that it can be more expensive in resources as well as money to set up different processes for doing different things rather than having one process that does many things, albeit somewhat wastefully in some cases. If you must have a packing and shipping system for cardboard boxes and you also sometimes need to ship sheets of paper you either use the box shipping system with the apparent waste seen here or you set up a separate system to handle paper with its own environmental cost,
Dell are buggers for this, its more like theyre trying to restrain the monitors rather than package them. Just in case they escape in transit.
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
It's called the ICC, Intel C Compiler. The reason people pay for it is because it is the fastest damn compiler out there. Every time I see compiler tests done there is always some back and forth, some are faster at one thing, some at others. Newer ones are generally faster than old ones... Then, at the top of the pack, is ICC. It produces the fastest code in EVERY test.
Now if this were Intel marketing material, ok, but this is every test of the compilers I've ever seen done by third parties. Intel's compiler just knows how to produce extremely optimised code for their processors.
As such, it is no surprise that people buy it.
Pass the parcel. Ever.
"Three eyes are better than one" -- Lieutenant Columbo
We put small things in large boxes where I work because small boxes have a tendency to get lost in the warehouse.
Anyone that deals with HP has known about this kind of thing for years. God love anyone that resells their servers.
Principled Tech did a comparison test between HP/Dell/IBM blade servers. No points for guessing who's servers took longest to unpack: http://www.principledtechnologies.com/Clients/Reports/Dell/DellHPIBMbladeserverOOB1207.pdf
You said,
"Apart from this, numerous HP employees have been discussing this subject within HP. People like myself and other individuals from the Software branch have pointed out this is a wasteful approach. And judging by the brand spanking new e-delivery option and certain other efforts within HP, I see that this is actually worked on for SoftWare."
And:
"Probably the costs that are associated with a radical change of this system are quite high, because it's likely that many changes need to be made in databases, order systems, processes and procedures."
And:
"As said, I have seen indications this is being worked on, but one has to remember we are a company the size of a small country, and that makes it a little more difficult to maneuver than a one man company."
Wow! Isn't there some mid-level manager at HP who is willing to say, "Stop sending single pieces of paper in boxes! Never do that again." ???
You made me realize the weakness of my grandparent comment. I thought I was giving an accurate picture of the misery inside HP. But I forgot to mention the most scary part of being a corporate drone: The drones don't realize they are drones. Woooo-oooo-ooo.
The situation is even worse than that! (Similar to the late-night Infomercials: But wait!! There's more!) At least, when it is only excess packaging, it is possible to just put the cardboard in the recycle bin. The real misery happens when drones become involved with technical details. I remember a conversation with an HP representative about a model of HP laser printer that costs about $1000. He told me, if I remember correctly, that it was entirely reasonable that if that model printer needed routine maintenance, the work could not be done locally, in our big city.
Nothing about this should give the impression that I think corporate drones are a particularly bad problem at HP. I have had worse experiences with Microsoft and Intel representatives.
(But wait!! There's more!) It's even scarier when entire departments become drones. I was on an Intel marketing email list. I got many emails suggesting that I would be motivated to buy Intel processors by the fact that Intel would give me a free bunny suit doll.
Hah! Are there people who don't believe that Intel was using dolls to sell processors? Believe! It's not my photo; I just found it with a Google search. I would never jump through the hoops necessary to get an Intel Bunny Suit Doll.
How did the department at Intel scarily called "Marketing" first arrive at the idea that making customers jump through hoops is doing something good for the company?
Then, later, the entire idea that "Intel Marketing" should do something good for Intel was completely abandoned. That happened years ago, so long ago that no one who is there now can remember when Intel Marketing was good for the company, or even cared about being good for the company.
Want a recent example? The new Intel 45 nanometer processors, which are an extremely impressive engineering achievement, I think, are called Centrino 2. Before they were "Core 2 Duo". Believe! (More Infomercial talk: That's not 1! Not 2!! But 3 uses of the concept two!!! The second person in the infomercial says, "John, that's Amazing!!!!")
You think that monster attacking Sigourney Weaver in the movie Alien was scary? "Intel Marketing" is even scarier than that. At least Sigourney Weaver realized she was being attacked by a monster. The really scary thing is when someone has become the monster, and doesn't realize it.
Maybe Intel top management thinks that Intel Marketing is like prostate cancer. Sometimes, if a tumor isn't growing, it is considered better to let it stay in the body.
Those license keys need the heavy packaging. I hear they crack easily.
And/or they force the people who work for them to become robotic drones.
A normal, thinking person would say: "hmmm, I need to ship 20 of these things, I will open 19 of the boxes and put all the licences in the one remaining box, and return the other 19 to the department that packs them" or "hey, I should report this waste of money and recommend that licences be printed just-in-time and use shared packaging" and in either case expect to be rewarded by management.
But a robotic drone says: "beep, beep, beep, must make quota, must not make waves, management punishes initiative, beep, beep, beep". Only by totally disassociating all independent volition during working hours can the worker remain sane in a broken corporate culture.
It can also be done more cheaply with Xylene (paint thinner). I just love to see huge chunks of styrofoam melt into a goo! :D Plus if you're really out for a good time, the resulting goo should still be flammable...obviously there are safety and environmental issues there though.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
While I'd agree that the "tape barely holding the box together" method of shipping isn't the greatest, it should be noted that often the most efficient packaging is not the CHEAPEST packaging to ship.
Surely enough people around here have gotten multiple shipments from amazon to note that other than actual physical minimums the size of the box you receive your shipment in (and the number of boxes it comes in) has absolutely no relation to the size of the item shipped.
Often there is a contract with a shipper that says "if I ship X number or Y pounds of product, I'll get a price break of Z%." Amazon (and presumably other companies) will ship items in odd configurations to maintain this discount. Amazon does it so well (and needs it for the bottom line so much) that they have an entire department dedicated to the development and maintenance of the program that decides packaging and shipping.
the fact that you don't let being wrong about basic facts get in the way of your marijuana advocacy, i.e. what linen is and what the Constitution is written on (parchment).
I'm in favor of relaxing the War on Some Drugs, but your ignorance isn't doing yourself any favors.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
A couple years back I ordered six 18" long clamps from amazon. Each weighs about 2 lbs. UPS delivered six mangled 12x12x18 boxes, each containing one clamp and about 50 ft of those air pocket things.
Sarcasm is dead. There is no possible way that Chrisje was serious. Any rational person with even a limited exposure to computers and a vague understanding of software would realize that there is no excuse for this type of wasteful packaging behavior from a technology company in this day and age. That comment is ROFLMAO comical. This is *Slashdot*. Have none of you mods ever been around *software*? All this talk of part numbers and order handling and logistics for a tiny bit of *data on paper*? You realize, don't you, that HP could modify the program that generates the data on paper to group, print, and ship rationally? You realize that other companies long, long ago solved this problem, using software? Obviously somebody at some point in their process knew this stuff was all going to the same location at the same time. That's a great place to start looking for how to prevent this particular criminal packaging stupidity. Solving this problem isn't even hard. It just takes the realization that it is a problem, and it can be solved. Chrisje undoubtedly realizes this, and produced a masterful bit of sarcasm, which went right over your heads.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I once received a large box from HP containing several smaller boxes of stuff. The final one was one of those 9x12x3 boxes other people have mentioned. Inside it was a single sheet of paper that read, in its entirety: This box intentionally empty.
My post was sarcastic and comical. This point will be lost on many, and my karma will suffer a dent. Fortunately I've got loads to spare. Sadly, Chrisje appears to have been serious.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
..one of the pages got torn in transit.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, but that's what management is for. It's not just there to cash in the big bonuses and invent pseudo-jargon babble for the next meeting.
If the shipping department doesn't know what they're shipping, then make sure they know it. If corporate regulations are 50 years too old and have no provisions for shipping individual pages, and disgruntled people slip into drone mode and apply the dumb rules verbatim, then update those rules. That's what management is supposed to do: manage the whole damned thing.
I mean, this kind of thing just reminds me of Scott Adams's assertion that capitalism is harnessing the power of human stupidity, and that at any given time 80% of society's resources are pushed off a cliff by idiots. And in this case, also considering the extra truck space for the boxes (hence, you're also hauling more tons of truck per page sent, and paying the gasoline for it) and all, it comes out to orders of mangnitude more waste than actual product.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Packages like these mean more space used and more trips->pollution if they're delivered through long distances, the product will cost more and more just because of this nonsense, and the customer will have to pay for it.
I recognise they're high theft items but they're starting to get a little excessive.
Bought a plastic car that was in a thick cardboard box and sellotaped shut. Once that was removed there was another box inside made of molded plastic. Scissors time. Inside that is yet another piece of cardbord and the car is SCREWED DOWN to it. Screwdriver time - and the screws are about 2" long. Finally, I have 4 large ties to remove to free the stupid thing. Took me about 20 minutes to get the thing out (with an excited 5-year old waiting for his new toy and getting very impatient!!).
It cost $5 at Wal-Mart!
In terms of dumb shipments from technology companies, I ordered a small antenna from radio shack once (about 5" long) and it came in a huge box completely filled with the popcorn styrofoam. The antenna was in a small ziplock bag in one corner.
It must be some sort of new sport amongst packaging people.
A variable for "marketing splash made by issuing bad marks to a given brand" appears to be given about equal weight to "legitimately wasteful or unnecessarily toxic practices", by Greenpeace. They get far more publicity for issuing a ticket to Apple for using 3 wire-inches of the wrong type of plastic in an iPod model than they would ever get for ticketing HP's stupid behemoth wasteful packaging, which has been seen by every corporate customer of HP. (I've seen strikingly similar examples of insanely wasteful packaging from both IBM and Dell, as well as HP).
Please note that I think Greenpeace is doing the world a service by calling attention to those 3 wire-inches of environmentally unsound plastic, but they need to get a little smarter about who, why and how they critique and praise. They are not doing a very good job of translating the attention that they get from issuing a ticket to Apple, into attention on the issue of the toxic compounds in question. There are zillions of tons of this stuff used in all manner of products and manufacturing processes. These compounds get into the water that we drink and the food we eat, and there is mounting evidence that some of them cause cancer and other serious health problems. Mercury and lead are no longer even controversial, decades of research confirms that even low level exposure to lead can cause serious problems, and probably knocked a bunch of IQ points off generations of exposed people. If, say, 1/4 to 1/2 of our population were 5 or 10 IQ points smarter, how much better off would the world be today? Yet we continue to allow tons of mercury to go up the stacks of coal fired power plants, and smaller amounts to be dumped in lakes and rivers as a result of manufacturing processes. Lead paint shows up on imported children's toys because the west has been willing to circumvent its own environmental policies by exporting the manufacturing to developing nations with un-enforced or non-existent environmental safeguards.
How does this Greenpeace video and press release help educate people and motivate people about these issues? Missed call: the iPhone's hazardous chemicals. Well, it really doesn't. It just gets a bunch of headlines to the effect of "Greenpeace iPhone Smackdown". Greenpeace has figured out that they can get a lot of attention by poking at Apple now and then, but they haven't figured out how to turn that to advantage. They mention a few chemicals here, including phthalates, but they don't mention that these compounds are used in FOOD Containers, which is a much more likely source of exposure to the compound (most people do not eat their iPhones) and that it has been linked to obesity and diabetes ( Obesity In Men Linked To Common Chemical Found In Plastic And Soap )and might be a serious contributor to a global health crisis. Greenpeace could be turning these waves of press attention into a serious national discussion of phthalates, additional research on the topic, and removal of these compounds from food containers, which would be a rational application of the precautionary principle. Instead, they are squandering the opportunity for a few headlines and links to their web site.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Reminds me of that old Phil Hartman Sketch where there is an anal retentive carpenter and he even individually packages each item of garbage in it's own quadruple stapled double layered paper bag.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
This is not enough packaging. They should have shipped a truckload of sixteen wooden crates, built with inch-thick plywood, each crate containing a large wooden box built with thick finished mahogany with golden hinges and latch, each such box containing within it a large cardboard box buried in packing peanuts, each cardboard box containing a smaller one packed in foam, each smaller one containing an envelope, which contains the sheet of paper.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
email
Maybe they can change their slogan to:
HP: RE-Invent
or
HP: PREVENT
??
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I used to work at a facility that built and shipped out equipment for HP as well as a couple of other major computer firms, and HP had the most ridiculous requirements from start to finish for their products. The packaging was perhaps the most absurd. I can confirm what everyone else has said, that this is standard operating procedure for HP. An HP representative once explained to me that they did this because "presentation is very important to our customers." I couldn't imagine that the customers would care if their package arrived with tape that was an inch lower on one side than on the other, but those were the sorts of things we'd get dinged on if a box were shipped out like that. I mean... crooked tape on a cardboard box, and someone would be out there yelling at the poor shipping guys.
And yes, we shipped out pieces of paper in cardboard boxes packed in cardboard boxes too. Yes, the shipping department knew what was in them... sometimes they were the ones putting the paper in the box to start with. We all thought it was ridiculously stupid, but the last thing anybody wanted was an HP representative out there, angry and questioning the wisdom of their contract with our company to handle their stuff for them. So we shipped the stuff out like that.
Oh, and the other two companies we were contracted out to? They pretty much were happy as long as the right stuff got to the right place on time and undamaged. Beyond that they more or less left it up to us to handle shipping procedures.
I couldn't read the image well enough. I'd like to know what the license was for that was so important that a single sheet of A4 paper needed to be packed in a foam-lined box.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yeah I work for a computer lab that orders about 200 computers annually. This year HP had to send us our DVI (3 foot DVI cables, just to set that straight) cables seperately due to a lack of stock in the warehouse or whatever. Anyway, they sent us our 214 DVI cables, 10 to a box (box's dimensions 24x24x30), each cable in an 8x10 padded manila envelope. Wow!
Yep. 22 big boxes, 215 envelopes, and the cables...
They pull shit like this, yet when I order a laptop, instead of an OS disk or restore media I get a piece of paper with a picture of a CD on it telling me to burn my own.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Costs about $10. The customer gets it promptly, they're happy. You get a signature of the recipient, so your ass is covered.
I got a regular sized legal envelope that contained a letter telling me that, "I might be a winner of a contest held by a local radio station."
It didn't come from the station but some business in another state. My wife figured it was junk and wanted to toss it.
I figured it wouldn't hurt to fill it out, since I did enter a contest with that station.
After mailing back the form, I got an envelope by way of UPS with a small 4x6 card that said to take this to the local Circut City to claim your prize. A 51" DLP HDTV.
No fan fare, and no contact at all from the radio station. Fast forward two years. A Weber Grill shows up on my doorstep by way of Fed Ex. No shipping information, no info on who sent it. After a week of research, it turns out that I again won a contest from the same radio station.
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Recently I received a large box about 2ft by 2ft containing a smaller box which contained a smaller box which contained a letter wrapped in bubble wrap.
The letter said they would be shipping me some boxes to pack my returning item in.
During the time Carly Fiorina was CEO of HP, we learned through painful experience not to try to buy products from HP.
I remember seeing this sort of thing from HP back in the mid 90s. I've gotten similar boxes like this in the past, big boxes enclosing small boxes enclosing sheets of paper. Some of them, if I recall correctly, weren't even anything "useful" like license keys, but legal boilerplate type stuff.
"Looks like HP should invent itself some envelopes."
But the printer can't handle them!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
We ordered a large batch of equipment from Sun (same number of Sun Rays & LCD monitors). The Sun monitors come packaged with monitor, 1 power cord, 1 DVI cable, 1 VGA cable, 2 DVI-to-VGA adapters. The Sun Ray (2FS, which has 2 DVI ports) comes packaged with 1 power cord and 2 DVI-to-VGA adapters. In addition, we are separately shipped the same number of 2x2x2 boxes containing nothing but a power cord. And for these intentionally lightweight, low power devices, these are THICK heavy-duty power cords. Heavy, so that must have increased the cost of shipping.
All of the above comes with various manuals in 17 languages, as well. Not to mention each manual and CD (a CD for the monitor, which contains THE MANUAL on PDF) are individually plastic bagged, styrofoam, and boxes within boxes...
We end up having to dispose of 100's of extra video cables, power cables, and DVI-to-VGA adapters. (Costs to us: Staff time, proper disposal fees, cost to the environment, etc)
Part of the reason we go with Sun Rays is to be environmentally friendly. I would say that we lose the environmental edge by all the packaging, but for the fact that nearly all computer vendors have the same excessive packaging.
This is going to remain a problem as long as the cost of packaging labor & shipping is cheaper than management's time to review packaging/shipping procedures. Which it is, for now.
I once received a box of a pair Shure e2C headphones packed in a 14x 6 x14 box. This was to accommodate the 12x12x4 Plastic blister pack. The 12x12x4 blister pack contained another smaller 6x8 blister pack which contained the headphones which fit into a case that is the about 2.5 inches in diameter by half an inch thick. I boxed up all the packaging & sent it back with a note requesting a refund for my $12 in shipping charges since the entire item could have fit into a letter 4x6 padded envelope.
When filling a box with padding to protect a small item like a sheet of paper, you might be able to reduce the shipping cost if the padding material is lighter-than-air. Instead of using foam peanuts or plastic bags full of air, use plastic bags full of something like helium. The resulting package might weigh less than the empty box.
That's common. I just got a monster package (with lots of peanuts and reusable air packs) containing 4 boxes with 1 paper license in each box. This was for Brocade fiber licenses. It's truly nuts. A FedEx envelope would have been just as secure, cheaper and far more efficient.