Slashdot Mirror
Google's Internal Company Goals
Rockgod writes to mention a Google Blogoscoped article about an internal company paper. The paper details Google's big goals and directions for 2006. From the article: "The list included several items, for example: Google wants to have an improved infrastructure to make their engineers more productive. This includes allowing employees to have a universal search tool "containing all public Google information searched on all Google searches." Google also wants to build 10MW of green power to be on track to be carbon neutral. (They also want to reduce "Borg disk waste" by 50%... hmmm, Borg?)
i.e. cluster
Welcome to the Googlepshere... resistance is futile... but at least we dont have chairs.
He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
I think it's really an important step for Google to aim for carbon neutrality, starting with green power. Nowadays green power, green building, and other sustainability practices have substantial financial benefits in addition to their environmental ones. Companies are starting to recognize this too, thankfully--Bank of America has a LEED certified building going up in Manhattan that will save massive amounts of emissions of carbon and other pollutants and save massive amounts of money.
What makes me happiest about seeing Google do this is that they are such a role-model for next-generation businesses. If Google achieves carbon neutrality, even partially, the message it will send to corporations, start-ups, and individuals will be, "You can be environmentally conscious and financially successful; the two are not mutually exclusive." That's an important message that is only beginning to spread.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
move along nothing to see here. Not desparaging the submitter of the article but don't we by now know what google has acomplished and hasn't this year. Hit us up with 2007 and i'll mod you up...going once..going twice...
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
You really don't see this very often. What short-term or even mid-term payoff could there possibly be to being carbon nuetral? I don't think anyone can stand back and say that Google fits into the mold of what most Companies in this world have become. I applaude Google. I think they are a role-model that other companies (Including the existing big boys) should strive to be more like.
This isn't that much of a suprise though. When you have such a great product & a motivated team, you tend to attract the best & brightest. The best & brightest usually have the best ideas....
Brad
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Borg waste is disks! Keep that in mind the next time one asks to use your bathroom. Those bastards'll clog up your plumbing with 9000 free hours of AOL.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
No no no, they meant "bork waste". The Swedish chef translation of their search engine is just taking up too much space. Bork bork bork!
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Except this information was an internal gaol for 2006. If they where doing it for good press...it would have been 'revealed' earlier in the year. I mean think about it...if this was a PR ploy...with no backbone, then they woulda made out with this ASAP. Except they didn't. They made it an internal thing. They didn't announce it, they didn't make any commercials about it.
PR is an immediate short term payoff.
Environmentally friendly practices are cheaper mid/long term. They're also more reliable if you consider the rate of electricity generating capacity being added in North America.
> Brain exploded, WISEASS.SYS corrupted.
> (A)bort/(R)etry/(F)ail?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Well, since they are beginning by building a 10MW solar electrical generating station, I would imagine at that scale solar is probably cheaper than the rate they are getting from their electric provider. If not, as a shareholder, I'm upset they are pissing away my dividends.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
I'm not sure I believe they're only using 10MW across their entire worldwide campus. I would bet that's a fair number for their datacenter(s).
:)
. jpg
If they were to do this via solar:
315 peak watts per pannel at 1560mm x 800mm per pannel
31,746 pannels required assuming peak of 10MW and not constant
1.248 square meters per pannel times 31,746
425,000 square feet of space (approximately)
For those still with me, that's 9.8 acres of solar pannels, producing [in that region of CA] approximately 18GWh per year. That's about $3,600,000 worth of energy per year in CA.
Some recommendations: Don't just cover the tops of your buildings. Created additional semi-covered parking with solar pannels atop, consider wind. GE makes one of the most efficient wind turbines out there. For each one of those you can fit on your property, you're likely to save about an acre of land required for solar. And though their peak power coverage isn't as great, they're in operation when the sun's down
Unfortunately for google, the wind in cali is not that good for wind power [except offshort]. Though, some parts near the SF area do have slightly better ratings.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/maps/wind/WIND_POWER_50M
I think the one thing that companies overlook is. There's no absolute requirement that being carbon neutral requires you to power your own stuff with the energy. How about investment in a wind farm in southwest kansas [excellent location for wind power]. Or 10 acres of Solar pannels in Mexico? I think helping Mexico reduce carbon usage is probably better (polution wise) than helping the US...
I'm sure that it's a reference to the Billgatus of Borg or maybe the old joke
This morning 50% of Denmark's power supply was covered by wind power, due to a storm. During the peak (at 4 in the morning) it reached 80%. Generally about 20-25% of power is supplied by wind here.
If you'd bothered to read their IPO or other documents, you'd know that common shareholders have nearly no control over the company due to the voting structure the owners set up.
They note that their policies may not maximize profit. Their policies are set based on doing what's right, as deemed by the founders.
Maybe you should sell your shares.
Yet. Officially.
If you think that someone is posting "internal" goals on the Internet without at least the tacit approval of the company, you're drinking Google's cool-aid. On top of that, you don't get as much bang for your buck if you announce in 2006 "We're going to strive for carbon neutrality sometime in the next couple of years" as you do announcing in 2007 "This year, Google met an 'internal' goal of becoming carbon neural."
I'm not saying that there isn't some portion of this that's genuinely driven by the desire to be a "good corporate citizen." Certainly it is possible, especailly for a company, to have multiple motives in pursuing this sort of goal. I'd even go so far as to suggest it's more likely that this sort of thing is done for many reasons instead of merely one.
As mentioned before, they have a good product. But their provision of an adequate search tool (for profit) hasn't completely eliminated my interest in rationally assessing their motives.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Reading the comments of the article, "Jake" suggests that borg refers to borg.google.com, a very important internal subdomain. (James Bradbury)
A quick search revealed:
Google Finance Leaks Version Two Information (Search Engine Watch Blog, 2006-07-21). com/finance, which seems to not be accessible from my location, or outside of Google's network. Notice the sign of the borg again? borg.google.com from before. So, now we have rumors that Google is going to be launching a version two of Google Finance soon. Maybe it includes stock indices from other worlds? :)... (http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/seo-news/topic -16812.htm)
Garett Rogers stumbled upon a link in Google Finance at the top right corner that said "v2 (test)" in red font. The link points to http://0.frontend-live.sfe.scrooge.hs.borg.google
I found this to be a little funny as well.
Welcome to the Googlepshere... resistance is futile... but at least we dont have chairs.
And neither do we have Steve Ballmer to throw them...
And their goals for 2007 include becoming uranium-neutral. Perhaps in 2008, they'll be helium-neutral.
By 2020, they hope to be matter-neutral.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Borg disk waste refers to the unfortunate results of an experiment creating autonomous software-based administrators. They had code to spread to different machines around the world (much like a trojan, but with good intentions). Unfortunately, they ended up doing this a little too well, and ended up archiving much more content than was originally intended... on servers across the world.
They use pagerank to determine what needs to be archived more/less, but the algo is too agressive... and the only way to communicate with them is on a one-by-one basis. Once you get one archiver killed on the machine, another is likely to be placed there by a different archiver.
Last march everything went wild and almost brought us down. They're nicknamed borg since they take over just about everything they touch. Since then we've created new bots to fight the archivers... the fight is predicted to continue well into next year.
(posting anon for obvious reasons)
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
-1 troll on a comment that removing pingpong tables might increase productivity?
I guess google engineers get karma, too.
They're there affecting their effect.
Disclaimer: I work at Google.
They're also more reliable if you consider the rate of electricity generating capacity being added in North America.
And more specifically, Google's main offices are in California, so this also pays off in the categories of "outage prevention" and "minimization of utility company shenanigans".