College To Save Money By Switching Email Font 306
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has come up with an unusual way of saving money: changing their email font. The school expects to use 30% less ink by switching from Arial to Century Gothic. From the article: "Diane Blohowiak is the school's director of computing. She says the new font uses about 30 percent less ink than the previous one. That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon. Blohowiak says the decision is part of the school's five-year plan to go green. She tells Wisconsin Public Radio it's great that a change that's eco-friendly also saves money."
Re:from a professor (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:disclaimer: in the industry (Score:2, Interesting)
It's on topic, so I'll continue for a bit.
There are two ways to remanufacture the average laser.
1. The cheapest way: Drill and Fill. A company takes an empty laser cartridge and either splits it in half with a saw or drills a hole in it. They pour in toner, seal up the hole, and sell the cartridge. This produces a low cost, crappy cartridge. These will fail mid-stream, produce crap output, and possibly will leak.
2. The proper way: Disassemble, clean, re manufacture, reassemble, test. Most cartridges can be taken apart. Once apart, a tech can clean the entire cartridge. They can get rid of any old toner which is in the empty shell. Gears can be cleaned. Electrical connections can be primed with conductive material. Rollers can be replaced. Blades can be serviced. Chips can be replaced. The tech can reassemble the cartridge and test it. One can make a cartridge which performs just like an original. Parts are rated based on a certain amount of pages. When the proper parts are replaced, the cartridge will last as long as it is supposed to.
Don't get me wrong. It's manufacturing. It's hard. Just like with any manufacturing, there is a failure rate. But, trust me, with the majority of lasers and inks, one can produce an after market product which matches the OEM.
But in the same regard, someone can do a shit job on a cart and ruin your printer.
Make sure that if you go local, that they have some form of guarantee, and will go out of their way to fix your machine if something goes wrong (cleaning, replacing, etc). Most respectable remaners will do so.
Re:email? (Score:3, Interesting)
...of course that wouldn't work given that smaller fonts would mean fewer dark foreground pixels and more bright background pixels. Switching from white backgrounds to gray backgrounds would be more likely to have any impact (assuming that modern monitors use more electricity when displaying bright images).
What no one seems to have brought up is that while Century Gothic uses less ink than Arial, it also takes up more space (unless the size is reduced). Try it out with some Lorem ipsum [lipsum.com] text. I found that five paragraphs Arial 12-pt with 1.25" margins on letter paper takes up about 11" vertically. Those same five paragraphs in Century Gothic 12-pt take up 12.75" vertically. That 15% increase in space could easily lead to savings in ink being offset by additional paper waste.
Re:from a professor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not laser print? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is probably very close to the truth. The people in question are probably professors, and the way internal politics works in most Universities (I have worked for 3) the professors have most of the power. Since they all want a personal printer, they all get one, but they are the ones in charge of the budget and there is no way they are going to buy a laser printer when they could buy a cheaper inkjet (since "it is almost free"). Since the ink often comes out of a budget that is not theirs (at least not directly), they don't care about on-going costs (nor were they really going to think about them in the first place).
And the professors in question are often older (this affects both eyesight, and comfort with technology), and they are often getting email that needs to be marked up (notes on scientific papers, reviews of their post-doc's work, etc...), and you find that they get in the habit of printing out everything. There are some who are moving to a mostly-digital workflow, but the tools for this are still specialized or not well known in the community (they are just learning about how to use editing notes in Word).
In most Universities the local IT has no power to change any of these, and has to walk a lot of very fine lines politically (while being underpaid for even the normal job). Central IT often can put out edicts, since people there have the ear of the dean, but localized IT has both the responsibility to enforce these edicts, and none of the power to do so.
Re:.sig files... (Score:2, Interesting)
Another approach would be to ban .sig files, complete with
ridiculous gigantic
name, email address, snail-mail, address,
three phone numbers, URL, twitter link,
facebook link, linkedin link, blog link,
some kind of logo and a giant block of text
mandated by legal. Oh yeah, and coded in
HTML so it matches corporate colours. Ugh.
Sometimes I get emails where the sig is longer than the body of the freakin' email.
Yes. ;-)
You're right.
It's also annoying when people quote without trimming.
- c64_love
Fred Haddad - via ...!eds1!devon
.. . __ /// NOW PLAYING: /// CD quality music
.\X/ "Only Amiga makes it possible!"
FidoNet node 1:270/411
UUCP:
!rhutch!Fred.Haddad
Fred.Haddad
@rhutch.FIDONET.ORG
. .
__
\\/// Over 1 million colors
(Yes these are my actual sigs from the 1980s, when I was young and stupid and made them ridiculously long.)
Re:Why not laser print? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not laser print? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's where you talk to the corporate health and wellness people. Remind them of the recommendations that everyone get up and walk around periodically during the day, and the omnipresence of personal inkjets means people aren't walking.
Suddenly, all those printers will get yanked by the health fascists. Use evil for good. ;)
Re:Why not laser print? (Score:2, Interesting)
Until they hit the $30 mark (or less), it won't matter to these people.
Like I said -- they only see the up-front cost. Trying to make them see that such a printer will cost them *far* more in the long run is like trying to convince Glenn Beck that he's wrong -- about *anything*.
Re:Ah (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to accept digital copies. I stopped, for a lot of reasons: unverifiable "I sent it, really, my email must not be working" excuses, file format incompatibilities, people emailing papers during the class sessions that they skipped so that they could finish them, etc.
The physical paper affords a lot of interactions as well - it's easy to gesture over a region of writing, circle it quickly, etc. Most digital versions of those gestures don't work (I could imagine - maybe - some of them working on a pad or tablet, but that's a stretch.) HCI research, trying to identify why an automation effort failed, observed the importance of physical writing in the care of hospital patients noted how much information was stored in the materials. Nurses could identify authors immediately from handwriting; density of writing often cued the dynamics of care; annotations connected writing to clarify the treatment plan, etc.
The biggest reason, however, is that I don't want to have to sit in an office to read and grade dozens of papers. I want to be able to do it on a plane, a train, a bus, on the beach, etc.
Re:email? (Score:4, Interesting)