ACS Saves 42 Trees!
Students printing multiple, back-to-back jobs in ACS computer labs, will now only receive one cover page. This will save approximately 350,000 pieces of paper or 42 trees per year. This amounts to roughly 8% of our paper consumption saved, without any degradation in service. Hat tip to ACS’ Adam Tilghman for his coding wizardry and foresight!
If you have any ideas about how ACS can help with UCSD’s sustainability efforts, please leave us a comment.
April 13th, 2008 at 12:31 am
Students should have the option to whether they wish to print a cover page or not. A lot of times, especially in the 7 CSE labs, there are not many people printing, and a print job could be the only one coming from the printer. In these cases, the cover page serves nothing of good use and is only a waste of paper. Besides, the cover page reveals a student’s user name and is not very secure. All in all, students should be able to choose the printing of the cover page, even if only in certain labs and during down times such as 10 PM to 9 AM, in which cases students do not need the cover page to identify their print jobs.
April 13th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
What about popping up a window asking if a coversheet is necessary? I don’t need a coversheet at 3am, or if I’m the only one in the lab…
April 15th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Thanks for your feedback, Mengzi (M) & KB. Per the ACS Printing Guru (PG):
M & KB: Students should have the option to whether they wish to print a cover page or not.
PG: This would be an ideal solution, but the current operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc.) don’t provide a mechanism for us to ask the user any questions within the “Print” dialog.
M: A lot of times, especially in the 7 CSE labs, there are not many people printing, and a print job could be the only one coming from the printer. In these cases, the cover page serves nothing of good use and is only a waste of paper.
PG: We see about 5,000 such print jobs each month, and it would be nice to eliminate some or all of those cover pages. At present our print server can’t reliably determine if your lab is busy or relatively empty, but if circumstances change we’ll revisit the question of eliminating those cover sheets.
M: Besides, the cover page reveals a student’s user name and is not very secure.
PG: When multiple students print jobs on a printer, the cover sheets allow you to quickly locate your job without having to read other students’ potentially private or personal documents. At present this benefit outweighs the risk of showing a username.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
A cover sheet may do more than identify your job; in case of problems related to printer hardware, the cover sheet provides instructions for getting a refund, and helps us at the ACS Helpdesk identify the problem, the time it occurred, the number of pages charged and the account to receive the refund.
April 20th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Mengzi Zhang, your concern about identification is stupid. Your name is public information. Google yourself sometime. You are also probably listed on tritonlink with your full contact information.
“not very secure” - not very correct