Beautiful 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!
Upvoted 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?
Actually, 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.
Didn'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.
That 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.
That 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).
Very 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).
It'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.
My 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.
My 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.
You 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.
Not 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?
> 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 ), so yup, that seems likely.
Oh 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.
The 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?
Yup, 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.
As 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, 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.
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.
It'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.
Google 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.
Could you explain your calculations on that? How is building new infrastructure with brand new technology cheaper than plugging into the existing infrastructure?
In 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.
If 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.
Although 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.
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!