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Google Green - The Story of Send
- AndreasFrom 14y agoMy first thought was green washing, but I do not know enough about Google to judge. Are they really this environmentally aware?
- cgs1019 14y agoYes, relentlessly so.
- ScotterC 14y agoAs mentioned, they are relentlessly green because they're in a wonderful situation where it saves them a lot of money. The green washing aspects would be carbon offsets and such because those are still up for debate as to whether they really have any positive net effect. Edit: Got a downvote so I thought I'd clarify. Carbon offsets are the act of paying for carbon neutrality. No matter how efficient or environmentally friendly Google is, they can't possibly be carbon neutral with all their energy use unless they use primarily nuclear power with some hydro, solar and wind built in. Therefore they buy carbon offsets, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset, which allow them to advertise that they're carbon neutral. The controversy over them stems from the fact that they're very similar to indulgences from the catholic church in the time of Martin Luther; paying for greenness isn't actually being green.
- jrockway 14y agoGoogle picks offsetting projects that are more valuable than average; details are here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/green/pdfs/google-carbon-offsets.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... I saw a talk recently about how much solar and wind power Google buys, and it's not at all cost effective. Google does it because they think it's cool, not because it saves them money. (But, the rate of return on the investment into wind infrastructure tends to be pretty good; wind power can be sold at a higher price than regular power.) As an example, look at the Googleplex in Maps some time; all the parking spaces are covered with solar cells to charge the specially-converted fleet of plug-in-hybrids available for employees to borrow during the day. Building solar cells and custom-modding cars to give to employees for free is not exactly "saving them a lot of money". But it sure is cool.
- ScotterC 14y agoIt's definitely cool and if it makes employees happy then it's definitely worth the investment. I have a personal bias to get over which is that I only believe in investing in energy solutions that can solve large percentages of the energy gap for everyone and not just the ones able to spend the money or work the incentives system.
- Drbble 14y agoGoogle is one of the top few investors in solar/wind power generation projects in the US, not just buying watts, and it is for profit/savings, not a donation.
- jrockway 14y agoCould you explain your calculations on that? How is building new infrastructure with brand new technology cheaper than plugging into the existing infrastructure?
- dude_abides 14y agoAfter watching this video, can anyone still justify the existence of Adobe Flash in this world?
- dugmartin 14y agoYes - this demo pegged my 4 core cpu on Chrome/Windows 64.
- magicalist 14y agoThat seems unlikely. For an accelerated tab you'll have the Tab process, the GPU process, and the Browser process. Even if you pegged all three (which is extremely unlikely considering the content), you'd still have a core to spare. There's a point in there about the relative maturity of graphics code, but let's keep things honest (also, I think the Mac/Windows divide on Flash would be lessened if everyone had to use Flash on the other platform for a while. Imagine your CPU doing that on virtually every page that decides to embed a Flash ad and you'll get some idea of what it's like on a Mac).
- icebraining 14y agoYet it ran fine on my single core two year old netbook on Firefox/Linux, while Flash rarely does. Of course, Flash on Linux is even worse than on Windows.
- eevilspock 14y agoMust be a Windows or Chrome problem. On my dual core 3-year-old Mac, Safari stayed between 20 and 30%.
- masklinn 14y agoSounds like what Flash does on linux or OSX, 1:1 perfect replacement!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Gring 14y ago
- vnorby 14y agoPush your back and forward buttons on your browser in the middle of one of the animations. That is seriously cool.
- dm8 14y agoInsanely cool! Any resident Googlers out here: Who works on such projects? Is it a 20% project? Or there is some dedicated team to do stuff like this? Edit: Downvotes? Really?
- mattupstate 14y agoIt was done in part by an agency called B-Reel. They do quite a bit of work with Google. http://www.b-reel.com/ http://www.b-reel.com/
- mrtron 14y agoHow was this made? The browser scrollbar is even perfectly useable.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- evincarofautumn 14y agoVery well, that’s how. A quick look reveals that each scene is a section, the assets are linked with data attributes, and the rest is fancy combinations of TweenJS and Three.js animations, coordinated by /assets/js/main.min.js (which also handles the invisible history).
- thisisblurry 14y agoIt also appears that Swiffy, the SWF-to-HTML converter (http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/ http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/) was used for helping to generate some of those animations.
- kodablah 14y agoAlthough they don't appear to use it, there is a project out there which does pathing like this: http://joelb.me/scrollpath/ http://joelb.me/scrollpath/
- KeithMajhor 14y agoIt's plain HTML5. That scrolling behavior isn't a freebie. The scroll bar you see is actually for an empty div. There's an attached scroll event handler that they're likely using to run the animation.
- famousactress 14y agoI can't decide whether this is in explanation or apology for the fact that gmail is crazy slow.
- VikingCoder 14y agoMy GMail is consistently faster than my corporate Outlook, on the LAN, in a company with ~200 employees. This has been true of every company I've worked at.
- famousactress 14y agoI don't currently have Outlook/Exchange. I suppose if I did it's possible that gmail would seem much nicer to me than it currently does.
- adamt 14y agoMy experiences with gmail are very positive. I have about about 10GB of mail across 4 gmail/apps accounts with about 100k messages, and the performance is almost always instant (search, send, read, file). Furthermore if I travel to the other side of the world (which I do 3-4 times a year) then it continues to offer a quality level of service. I've never seen any in-house system get close to what I get from gmail.
- famousactress 14y agoYou and @VikingCoder make similar points. I suppose it's possible that I suffer slower gmail than you guys (I am mostly using a company 'apps' account, maybe that matters). It's also possible that you find gmail awesome because you're comparing it to an in-house system. I'm not. I'm comparing it to Asana, Quora, StackOverflow, or even other some GOOG products. In my world Gmail lines up with JIRA more often than with the tools whose performance consistently delight me.
- icebraining 14y agoI use Google Apps at work too and it's as fast as my regular Gmail account was. Maybe it's the JS? Gmail is very code heavy and my laptop sometimes can't keep up.
- AVTizzle 14y agoThis is absolutely delightful. Interacting with this graphic practically tickled.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nkurz 14y agoBeautiful animation, which almost perfectly reflects Google's transformation from a engineering-driven tech company with a flair for beautiful solutions to a advertising-driven "ideas" company with a penchant for meaningless marketspeak. Wow, their servers are 93% efficient! I was sort of hoping it would be an explanation of why they thought it was a good idea to have the Send button in one spot for new messages and in another when you reply. Double tricky bonus points for putting the Spam button in the same place as the send button when it moves!
- ubercore 14y agoIt's not at all marketspeak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_supply_unit_(computer)#Efficiency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_supply_unit_(computer)#Ef...
- nkurz 14y agoUpvoted because I appreciate pedantic responses, but I'm familiar with PSU efficiency standards. I still feel confident saying it is nonsense to say that "We also custom-build all of our servers so they are 93% efficient" and would bet that this was written by a non-technical marketing person. My overclocked I7 downstairs is also using a power supply that claims to be 90%+ efficient, and blows out enough hot air to warm the room. But this is from the processor, not the PSU. It would not make any sense to say that the entire computer is 90% efficient unless we were rating it as a space heater, in which case I'd feel safe claiming 99%+. I don't even know what it would mean to say that a given server is X% efficient. A percentage of what?
- entropy_ 14y agoActually, I think this is a case of an engineer saying something that is later taken out of context and used by a marketing person. One of the videos has a person explaining about optimizing power distribution in data centers and she specifically mentions using AC/DC converters of 90%+ efficiency.
- nkurz 14y agoBeautiful animation, which almost perfectly reflects Google's transformation from a engineering-driven tech company with a flair for beautiful solutions to a advertising-driven "ideas" company with a penchant for meaningless marketspeak. Wow, their servers are 93% efficient! I was sort of hoping it would be an explanation of why they thought it was a good idea to have the Send button in one spot for new messages and in another when you reply. Double tricky bonus points for putting the Spam button in the same place as the send button when it moves!
- nollidge 14y agoLooks totally messed up in Safari for Windows. I just started using it, is that typical of WinSafari with newfangled HTML5 type stuff?
- _delirium 14y agoNot too detailed, but a nice overview that I think succeeds in having some information while being engaging. The only thing that particularly confused me was this line: > We also custom-build all of our servers so they are 93% efficient. How do you measure overall efficiency of a server as a percentage, rather than some kind of compute-per-watt metric? I assume it's not 93% of the theoretically optimal electron->computron conversion factor. ;-) The only thing I can guess is that it's the average efficiency of the power supplies?
- SEMW 14y ago> The only thing I can guess is that it's the average efficiency of the power supplies? Googling suggests the most efficient server power power supplies available do indeed have average efficiencies of around 93% (e.g. http://goo.gl/R1HqV http://goo.gl/R1HqV ), so yup, that seems likely.
- riffraff 14y ago> the temperature on our server floors at a warm 80 degrees and after ten seconds of open mouthed astonishment, my metric brain realizes they are probably talking about Fahrenheit
- furyg3 14y agoAlso: > That means we don’t need as much energy-intensive air-conditioning, and our employees get to wear shorts to work. As someone who is in warm datacenters often, "get to" is a bit of a positive spin on it...
- karpathy 14y agoI first figured out something was fishy when they mentioned that it allows their employees to come to work in shorts.
- bawllz 14y agoDidn't you know they cook chicago-style steaks on their floor? its one of the perks of working at google! Not to mention the steaks are 100% organic and their automatic troughs operate at 93% efficiency.
- GreenNight 14y agoAnd it's already corrected in there: >One way we save energy is by keeping the temperature on our server floors at a warm 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Either that or I'm seeing a different one.
- Eduard 14y agoOn the way to the last information spot, your Google Mail goes through an undisclosed rack. This rack symbolizes the new NSA data spy center in Utah.
- pirateking 14y agoThat quick stop caught my attention too. I'm thinking the same as you as to what it symbolizes. If so, happy to see it was at least represented on the tour.
- inportb 14y agoIn Chromium on my netbook, I could not figure out how to view this awesome thing that everyone's talking about. It looks like the page is supposed to scroll down, but I could not do it for lack of a vertical scrollbar. The horizontal scrollbar doesn't reveal anything useful.
- tripzilch 14y agoOh wow, a blank white screen. Took me a while to figure out what's going on, but I disabled Javascript for google.com (makes their search result pages so much less annoying). Guess they forgot to put a "please enable JS to view this" message in. But it looks nice! I haven't watched it entirely yet, though.
- redstripe 14y agoIf google was truly sincere about going green then it wouldn't be so protective of it's data centre energy efficiency innovations. It's great that they're doing lots of work to benefit themselves - but don't try to spin it like it's done out of concern for the environment.
- slewis 14y agoThey did help start this: http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/about http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/about
- nanijoe 14y agoThe data you send through google spends very little time touching their own equipment, so the energy efficiency is of little , if any impact unless it can be spread to a majority of the providers whose equipment my data touches on its was to and from google.. A quick traceroute shows me that there ar 10 router hops in between my Laptop and www.gmail.com. If all the 10 devices are not 'green' , then what net impact does Google's data center being 'green' have?
- Drbble 14y agoTransmission is a small fraction of the work that goes into your email experience.
- mkopinsky 14y ago100 Searches = 1 hour of a laptop Really? That seems like a heck of a lot for just 100 searches. I guess this must be including all the googlebot etc. consumption as well.
- hsuresh 14y agoYup, that caught my attention too. And i think it puts things in perspective - Google search is a really really complex system. The fact that 1 year of Gmail usage roughly translates to about only 6% power usage as 100 searches is insane.
- rurounijones 14y agoCan anyone explain the following in the code? <div class="overlayContentWrapper video displayNone" data-id="1" data-url="lJnlgM1yEU0"> <h5> Title 2 </h5> <div class="overlayViewWrapper"></div> <p> Chupa chups caramels tart carrot cake gum bears bear claw. Topping powder chocolate bar dragée. Tootsie roll tart lollipop pastry pi donut faworki danish. Jelly beans pudding jujubes bear claw jello marshmallow marzipan. Icing powder jelly beans. Pie sweetly rolling topping donut ice cream sweet roll cake a cheesecake. Candy chocolate cake gummies powder pudding pie sweet. </p> </div> Some sort of placeholder used to size elementS?
- eevilspock 14y agoProbably a list of future Android version names :)
- mlf 14y agoAlthough the page and everything on it are beautiful, I can't help but think that this kind of portrayal perpetuates the "series of tubes" myth about how the internet functions.