Dodgeville

I picked up this shiny new hard drive (1 terabyte!)  yesterday and was a little perplexed to see Seagate’s new warranty terms on the static bag. It seems that if I remove the drive from the packaging to, you know, use it or something, I’ll void my warranty. Quite the conundrum.

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What kind of person do you suppose drives this car: gardener, l33t h4X0r, or Australian lothario? You be the judge.

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Shortly after I posted last month about wasteful packaging, we received another shipment of technology. Inside a single fairly large box were six smaller and very sturdy boxes. I could easily have stood on each one, much like I did with the power cord boxes from the previous shipment. Except these ones probably would have been strong enough to use as step stools in the kitchen. Inside each of these smaller boxes were two large, dense pieces of foam. Sandwiched between each pair of foam pieces was a single hard drive. Approximate ratio of the total volume of the hard drives compared to the total volume of the large box they were shipped in: 1:50. Approximate ratio of the weight of the product to the weight of the packaging: 1:5.

Can Sun really find no efficiencies here? The company claims that “packaging engineers determine how rugged each product is, and tailor the optimum amount of packaging for the product without compromising protection during tough simulated transit testing.” I think the packaging engineers are building in a bit too much of a huge margin of safety, especially considering that comparable equipment from other manufacturers is not packaged quite so heavily.

I had been planning to salvage the foam for other purposes, but the office cleaning crew beat me to it. At least I got to make a nice foam tower before it was carted away.

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One of the things I love about my day job is getting to play with a lot of technology. One of the things I dislike is that a lot of the technology is packaged very wastefully. The picture above provides a good illustration. Yesterday’s shipment included a very large box that opened to reveal the 10 boxes shown here.

Each of those boxes then opened to reveal a very loosely packed component: five power cords (three of them individually boxed!), a keyboard & mouse, two sticks of RAM, two small internal expansion cards, and three slimline DVD-ROM drives. Everything removed from these boxes is in the little pile on the left in the top picture.

Now I understand why you’d want to put delicate optical drives in a nice sturdy box with foam padding, and why a company with a lot of inventory would value having a few standard-sized boxes instead of a bunch of loose components. I also understand why a company selling servers would want to ship each server and non-standard component separately and have me assemble them.

But I’m at a loss to understand why each power cord required its own crush-proof box rated to hold 65 lb and with a burst strength of 200 PSI. When I repacked all this stuff after checking it against the packing slips, it all fit into just one of the pictured boxes with the exception of the keyboard. The rest of the boxes went straight out into the blue bin, having served basically no purpose but to consume space.

Why ship in ten sturdy boxes (plus yet another box to hold all of the boxes) when just two will do? Why does each individual power cord need to be shipped in a separate box that a fully-ballasted man can stand on without crushing it? I’m sure the answer is “efficiency,” but I’m not seeing it.

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My newest toy tool arrived last week, a tiny Fujitsu Lifebook U810 ultra-portable computer. This is a full-fledged PC running Windows XP (and Linux by next week) that weighs only 1.5 lb and fits into an oversized pocket. It’s pictured above with my formerly tiny, and now suddenly enormous, 12″ laptop and below flipped over into tablet mode on a standard 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper. Fujitsu is not calling this an Ultra-Mobile PC (probably because the term conjures some negative memories among mobility-loving geeks) but that’s effectively what it is.

Its real purpose is to replace my aging HP Jornada 720 as my go-everywhere computer. The J720 set a virtually unbeatable standard for portable computers seven years ago. With a touch-typeable keyboard, built-in modem, dual expansion slots, a powerful (for the time) processor and almost too much (for the time) memory in a pocketable, one pound package, the Jornada 700 series heralded a bright future for portable computing. I took the 720 as my only computer on both business and camping trips as recently as 2003, which is saying a lot for a geek whose livelihood depends on having access to a computer most of the time.

In fact, the Jornada 720 was so unbeatable that both Microsoft and HP abandoned the handheld computer market shortly after it was introduced, focusing instead on the flashier (but ultimately less practical) Pocket PC. The J720’s successor, the Jornada 728, was unsupported virtually from the moment it hit the shelves.

I’ve been hunting for a worthy J720 replacement for at least three years now. Enter the Fujitsu U810. I’ve been playing working with it for almost a week now and couldn’t be happier. It fixes most of the problems I eventually had with the Jornada—including a relatively dim screen, unsupported software, and incompatibility with modern devices and software—and even takes care of a few issues I have with my regular laptop. Best of all, it fits easily into my man-purse and doesn’t appreciably increase the load of technology that I already carry around every day.

It’ll never be a desktop replacement, but it’s one fabulous travelling computer. My favourite feature so far? That would be the control-alt-delete button.

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