HP Shatters Excessive Packaging World RecordComments:359
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jul 20, 2008 10:01 PM
from the please-say-this-isn't-true dept.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday July 20 2008, @10:56PM (#24269233)
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.
I am just glad HP does not sell Refrigerators or Couches!
One could just imagine that each would come from HP inside its own 40' shipping container filled with those "environmentally friendly" peanuts that turn into snot when they get wet... LOL
You can scatter those things outside; they're just starch. Something will eat them. Maybe birds? If I don't have too many to deal with I just flush them.
Don't do any of that if they're styrofoam. Those have to be thrown out or reused. Although if you have even a little acetone you can have fun with the styrofoam ones. They vanish right into it, way better than the starch ones do in water. One prank people used to pull in the labs where I went to college (I only heard about this) was to hand the new guy a styrofoam cup and tell him to go downstairs and get some acetone.
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.
Back in high school, we used to mix Styrofoam and gasoline. We'd hit the furniture store dumpster after closing on delivery-day and load the cars up with all the Styrofoam we could stuff in. Then go out to the desert, pour a couple of gallons of gas in a waste basket and start chucking in the Styrofoam. Pour our the resulting sludge and light. It burns hot and burns for a long time.
Very environmentally unfriendly and you're likely to inhale way too much vaporous gasoline, but good fun for juvenile fire-bugs.
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.
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.
Standard practice indeed. I went to a customer site once and was taken aback when I saw his cubicle filled with HP boxes. He had over 400 HP servers and he had the same couple of sheets of paper in a box for each server. I am not sure if it was more than 400 little boxes I remember about a dozen or so huge boxes containing little boxes each with a couple of sheets of paper.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday July 20 2008, @10:50PM (#24269177)
But... but... HP and Dell scored top marks from Greenpeace. Clearly the packaging was needed to protect the license papers which means you'd kill more tree for more paper if they are damaged.
[This also show that Greenpeace ranking is irrelevant]
While I'm not familiar with how Greenpeace came up with its ranking, I do know that the book "Paper or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World" by David Imhoff included an anecdote that HP reduced packaging and lowered supply-chain losses and costs all in one.
Instead of shipping printers (perhaps only a certain model or type) in individually-packaged boxes on skids, HP had a tray-like thing (like what you get at a fast food place for drinks) that held many printers. This was then wrapped with clear skid wrapping.
Because they weren't boxed individually, you could fit many more on each skid. Because the contents were visible from the outside, forklift operators were more careful and there was less damage in warehouses.
It is very likely that HP pre-packages its licenses in these boxes, and the economics of it probably works out that most of them are sent individually. It is thus simpler for them to send out many individually-packaged boxes to customers who purchase multiple licenses, than to have someone remove the papers from the boxes in the warehouse, find an appropriate envelope to put them in, and then do something with the box.
You, the customer, would no longer get the many boxes, but they would probably be used and discarded further up before they get to you, analogous to when recycling bins get emptied into the same dumpster as the trash.
- RG>
(the "idle" comment form is really weird in SeaMonkey)
And yet, with all that thought going into your post, you don't seem to address the "why the hell would you use a foam-lined cardboard box for two sheets of paper in the first place" question.
It is very likely that HP pre-packages its licenses in these boxes, and the economics of it probably works out that most of them are sent individually. It is thus simpler for them to send out many individually-packaged boxes to customers who purchase multiple licenses, than to have someone remove the papers from the boxes in the warehouse, find an appropriate envelope to put them in, and then do something with the box.
The question is thus why are HP "pre-packing" them in boxes, rather than envelopes, in the first place?
...or perhaps Greenpeace takes into account more than packaging? I mean really, you're declaring their whole environmental study invalid based on a few anecdotes about excessive use of cardboard?
[Disclaimer: In general, I don't trust Greenpeace numbers, but even then, the parent's argument is off.]
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.
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.
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.
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 [hp.com] 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."
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday July 20 2008, @10:20PM (#24268963)
(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.
People did this in the old days. I once paid for the ACC compiler as well (I guess that's the one), because GCC was "open source" which was utterly distrusted by everyone. How times have changed - now the place is full of Linux systems, the few remaining HPUX machines will be replaced as soon as is convenient, and Sun? The only one I've seen in the last five years is the one in the sky.
ACC, while a bit shaky in its implementation of the C++ standard, at least produced great error messages. Typically it did not just tell you what was wrong and where, but also what it thought you needed to change to fix it. And mostly it got it right too!
"In file xxx on line yy, function FooBarBaz is undefined. Maybe you meant to call function FooBarBoz?"
Really, all it was missing was an interactive mode where you could just tell it to change the source for you...
I had one almost as bad. About 1 year ago, I ordered a storage Fotochute for $99.99. I had a $20 off of $100 coupon and so I padded the bill with a roll of transparent tape at $0.98. Howwever, the Fotochute was permanently of out of stock so that only thing that was shipped was the roll of tape $0.98 - $0.19 discount = $0.79 with free shipping. That is understandable, but what wasn't was the fact that it came in a 1' x 1.5' x 2' box full of styrofoam peanuts.
.
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.
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.
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 [hp.com] in a whole new light.
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.
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 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.
There's actually a good reason behind why the power cord(s) is/are packaged separately, and hence in their own boxes - international differences in electrical sockets.
It would suck for inventory and man power if you constantly had to manage how many of each of your servers have continental europe, british, north american and so on power cords with them in the box.
From the strength of your opinions I'm guessing you've never seen a paper mill or know that making pulp from trees for use in cardboard creates sulfur dioxide.
'Here is a list of things recycled paper is environmentally better for than virgin paper: less bleaching, less energy, less pollutants, more benign pollutants, less impact on natural resources, less water, less waste to dispose of. The only waste product that is more of a problem with recycled paper is the sludge produced by removing ink and additives. However, this sludge is material that would otherwise be in landfills and it has repeatedly been proven to be non-toxic.'
- From The Society for Natural Resources Conservation, Cornell University
Yeah, I know you're going to come back at me with a quote from Rush Limbaugh or some advertisement you saw on tv... Or dismiss Cornell University as a hippy haven of intellectuals... Whatever.
Crazy (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen something crazy, but not that crazy. That's just ... crazy.
Re:Crazy (Score:5, Funny)
Could it have something to do with the wording of the "shrink wrap license"? Like "by opening this box you agree..."?
That would be really depressing.
More like "by entering"... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:More like "by entering"... (Score:5, Funny)
You enter the box. It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Re:More like "by entering"... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Crazy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Crazy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Crazy (Score:5, Funny)
One could just imagine that each would come from HP inside its own 40' shipping container filled with those "environmentally friendly" peanuts that turn into snot when they get wet... LOL
Re:Crazy (Score:5, Funny)
You can scatter those things outside; they're just starch. Something will eat them. Maybe birds? If I don't have too many to deal with I just flush them.
Don't do any of that if they're styrofoam. Those have to be thrown out or reused. Although if you have even a little acetone you can have fun with the styrofoam ones. They vanish right into it, way better than the starch ones do in water. One prank people used to pull in the labs where I went to college (I only heard about this) was to hand the new guy a styrofoam cup and tell him to go downstairs and get some acetone.
Re:Can also be done with Xylene! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Back in high school, we used to mix Styrofoam and gasoline. We'd hit the furniture store dumpster after closing on delivery-day and load the cars up with all the Styrofoam we could stuff in. Then go out to the desert, pour a couple of gallons of gas in a waste basket and start chucking in the Styrofoam. Pour our the resulting sludge and light. It burns hot and burns for a long time.
Very environmentally unfriendly and you're likely to inhale way too much vaporous gasoline, but good fun for juvenile fire-bugs.
I can top that (Score:5, Funny)
MSDN (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:MSDN (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:MSDN (Score:5, Funny)
I've had a box the same size for a charger adapter. Perhaps it is the only size of box they have?
No wonder HP is a mess. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cost of shipping 150$?
Entry in Roget's Thesaurus: (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing new here (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds about typical for HP. Back many years ago when I was primarily an HP-UX SA, excessive packaging was the norm as well.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Informative)
But... but... HP and Dell scored top marks from Greenpeace. Clearly the packaging was needed to protect the license papers which means you'd kill more tree for more paper if they are damaged.
[This also show that Greenpeace ranking is irrelevant]
Re:Nothing new here (Score:4, Interesting)
While I'm not familiar with how Greenpeace came up with its ranking, I do know that the book "Paper or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World" by David Imhoff included an anecdote that HP reduced packaging and lowered supply-chain losses and costs all in one.
Instead of shipping printers (perhaps only a certain model or type) in individually-packaged boxes on skids, HP had a tray-like thing (like what you get at a fast food place for drinks) that held many printers. This was then wrapped with clear skid wrapping.
Because they weren't boxed individually, you could fit many more on each skid. Because the contents were visible from the outside, forklift operators were more careful and there was less damage in warehouses.
It is very likely that HP pre-packages its licenses in these boxes, and the economics of it probably works out that most of them are sent individually. It is thus simpler for them to send out many individually-packaged boxes to customers who purchase multiple licenses, than to have someone remove the papers from the boxes in the warehouse, find an appropriate envelope to put them in, and then do something with the box.
You, the customer, would no longer get the many boxes, but they would probably be used and discarded further up before they get to you, analogous to when recycling bins get emptied into the same dumpster as the trash.
- RG>
(the "idle" comment form is really weird in SeaMonkey)
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, with all that thought going into your post, you don't seem to address the "why the hell would you use a foam-lined cardboard box for two sheets of paper in the first place" question.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Funny)
His point is like a package from HP... Lot's of useless packaging but somewhere in there lies a small kernel of relevance.
Your task is to unpack and find it.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as you landfill the boxes aka sequester the carbon, you are removing CO2.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:4, Interesting)
The question is thus why are HP "pre-packing" them in boxes, rather than envelopes, in the first place?
Re:Nothing new here (Score:4, Insightful)
...or perhaps Greenpeace takes into account more than packaging? I mean really, you're declaring their whole environmental study invalid based on a few anecdotes about excessive use of cardboard?
[Disclaimer: In general, I don't trust Greenpeace numbers, but even then, the parent's argument is off.]
Shipping department (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You get what you measure (Score:5, Insightful)
HP network printer / scanner (Score:4, Informative)
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.
How does excessive packaging happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [hp.com] 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."
Re:How does excessive packaging happen? (Score:4, Insightful)
It appears that Carly is now one of McCain's campaign advisers. May she do as well with McCain's campaign as she did at HP.
Personally experienced _much_ worse (Score:5, Interesting)
(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.
Re:Personally experienced _much_ worse (Score:4, Funny)
lol... paying for a C++ compiler. You're funny, I like you.
Re:Personally experienced _much_ worse (Score:5, Interesting)
lol... paying for a C++ compiler.
You're funny, I like you.
People did this in the old days. I once paid for the ACC compiler as well (I guess that's the one), because GCC was "open source" which was utterly distrusted by everyone. How times have changed - now the place is full of Linux systems, the few remaining HPUX machines will be replaced as soon as is convenient, and Sun? The only one I've seen in the last five years is the one in the sky.
ACC, while a bit shaky in its implementation of the C++ standard, at least produced great error messages. Typically it did not just tell you what was wrong and where, but also what it thought you needed to change to fix it. And mostly it got it right too!
"In file xxx on line yy, function FooBarBaz is undefined. Maybe you meant to call function FooBarBoz?"
Really, all it was missing was an interactive mode where you could just tell it to change the source for you...
Good god (Score:4, Funny)
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!
That's nothing... (Score:5, Funny)
Office Depot is pretty close (Score:5, Interesting)
.
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.
Just like their apps (Score:5, Insightful)
email? (Score:4, Funny)
Weird, I use email to ship keys. Its faster and *much* cheaper.
PC's from IBM (Score:4, Informative)
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.
No prank (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [hp.com] in a whole new light.
That's What She Said (Score:5, Funny)
My...that's a big package.
Dell isn't much better, though (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the packaging for a few screws [thedailywtf.com]!
Non Geek Packaging Record (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Not to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
Had a similar experience with them. (Score:4, Interesting)
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 hope I get the same thing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sun can be just as bad (Score:5, Insightful)
There's actually a good reason behind why the power cord(s) is/are packaged separately, and hence in their own boxes - international differences in electrical sockets.
It would suck for inventory and man power if you constantly had to manage how many of each of your servers have continental europe, british, north american and so on power cords with them in the box.
Re:It's not the heat, it's the stupidity. (Score:5, Insightful)
'Here is a list of things recycled paper is environmentally better for than virgin paper: less bleaching, less energy, less pollutants, more benign pollutants, less impact on natural resources, less water, less waste to dispose of. The only waste product that is more of a problem with recycled paper is the sludge produced by removing ink and additives. However, this sludge is material that would otherwise be in landfills and it has repeatedly been proven to be non-toxic.'
- From The Society for Natural Resources Conservation, Cornell University
Yeah, I know you're going to come back at me with a quote from Rush Limbaugh or some advertisement you saw on tv... Or dismiss Cornell University as a hippy haven of intellectuals... Whatever.
Re:It's not the heat, it's the stupidity. (Score:5, Insightful)
Paper recycling is pointless. It biodegrades...
Theoretically. Practically, no, not once it goes into a landfill. That's why you can still find readable newspapers from half a century ago.
As a rule [bpiworld.org], stuff doesn't really biodegrade [about.com] once it goes to the dump. [science.org.au]
Re:It's not the heat, it's the stupidity. (Score:4, Insightful)
No its the fact that Ron Paul is a nutbar is the reason that people don't like Ron Paul.