HP Shatters Excessive Packaging World Record 359
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.
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.
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.
This dates back to DEC (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Sun can be just as bad (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Just like their apps (Score:2, Informative)
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:Just like their apps (Score:3, Informative)
the 20mb one you have to search for, the easily found one is the one with all the crap that's over 200MB.
Re:It's not the heat, it's the stupidity. (Score:3, Informative)
Penn & Teller: Bullshit
Nice source. A second rate Vegas act featuring a fat loudmouth and a mute. And of course they have no political agenda [theadvocates.org]. Guys like this are the reason mainstream voters are frightened of Ron Paul.
Re:It's not the heat, it's the stupidity. (Score:4, Informative)
... What many people fail to realise is that linen which is still a prized fabric is actually made from hemp and linen can last quite a long time...
I don't think so. Linen is made from Flax fibres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linen [wikipedia.org] as a simple wiki reference can confirm. My grandparents grew up in an area where flax was grown for linen production.
People still do this too (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Crazy (Score:3, Informative)
It was at that point I thought a change in career would be a lucrative decision. I figured if I could be the corrugated supplier for HP, I'd be all set.
Can also be done with Xylene! (Score:3, 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.
what Greenpeace takes into account (Score:3, Informative)
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 [futurepundit.com] 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 [grist.org] 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 [greenpeace.org]. 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 [sciencedaily.com])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 [wikipedia.org]. Instead, they are squandering the opportunity for a few headlines and links to their web site.
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.
Re:People still do this too (Score:3, Informative)
I have yet to see a benchmark (on Intel hardware of course) where the ICC is beaten. GCC 4 is much faster than GCC 3 at just about everything (there's a couple odd tests where it's not, or at least the version they were testing wasn't) but it doesn't compare to the ICC.
Not really a surprise. GCC is a very general compiler targeting lots of architectures, whereas the ICC is just for one. Also the people writing ICC have access to the people that designed the chip.
Re:Can also be done with Xylene! (Score:2, Informative)
Back in high school, we used to mix Styrofoam and gasoline. 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.
That is essentially homemade Napalm...