Archive for January 12th, 2009
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BEVERLY HILLS (Reuters) – Low-budget movies blew by their major studio rivals at the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday as romance “Slumdog Millionaire” won a leading four honors, including best drama to give it a push in the race for Oscars.
“Slumdog,” which tells of a young Indian man looking for love and competing for money on a television game show, also earned awards for director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and composer A.R. Rahman for best musical score.
Boyle thanked the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which gives out the Golden Globe Awards, for supporting his movie that captures the frenetic pace of life in Mumbai.
“Your mad, pulsating affection for our film is much appreciated, really deeply appreciated,” Boyle said. “The film was made from the heart, really. We never expected to be here.”
In other major honors, director Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” was named best film musical or comedy but Allen was not on hand to accept the award.
A big surprise of the night came when Kate Winslet grabbed two Golden Globes, only the third time in the history of the awards that one performer has won two acting awards.
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BEVERLY HILLS (Reuters) – Low-budget movies blew by their major studio rivals at the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday as romance “Slumdog Millionaire” won a leading four honors, including best drama to give it a push in the race for Oscars.
“Slumdog,” which tells of a young Indian man looking for love and competing for money on a television game show, also earned awards for director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and composer A.R. Rahman for best musical score.
Boyle thanked the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which gives out the Golden Globe Awards, for supporting his movie that captures the frenetic pace of life in Mumbai.
“Your mad, pulsating affection for our film is much appreciated, really deeply appreciated,” Boyle said. “The film was made from the heart, really. We never expected to be here.”
In other major honors, director Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” was named best film musical or comedy but Allen was not on hand to accept the award.
A big surprise of the night came when Kate Winslet grabbed two Golden Globes, only the third time in the history of the awards that one performer has won two acting awards.
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Not long ago, answering a query meant traveling to the reference desk of your local library. Today, search engines enable us to access immense quantities of useful information in an instant, without leaving home. Tools like email, online books and photos, and video chat all increase productivity while decreasing our reliance on car trips, pulp and paper.
But as computers become a bigger part of more people’s lives, information technology consumes an increasing amount of energy, and Google takes this impact seriously. That’s why we have designed and built the most energy efficient data centers in the world, which means the energy used per Google search is minimal. In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query.
Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses “half the energy as boiling a kettle of water” and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.
In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don’t reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.
We’ve made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centers, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use. In 2008 our philanthropic arm, Google.org, invested $45 million in breakthrough clean energy technologies.
We’re also working with other members of the IT community to improve efficiency on a broader scale. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a group which champions more efficient computing. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That’s a lot of kettles of tea.
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Back in June, we rolled out a new favicon — the small icon that greets you when you access Google on your URL bar or your bookmarks list — and we encouraged our users to submit their ideas for this important piece of Google branding. We were impressed by the volume of submissions we received, and today we are happy to introduce a new Google favicon inspired by those submissions by our users. While the final icon is a reinterpretation of one contest submission, it draws on design elements and ideas from many of them.
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Google’s new favicon |
André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired our new favicon. His placement of a white ‘g’ on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google.
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by André Resende |
Although we changed the color layout slightly and moved the ‘g’ off center, his submission formed the basis for our new design.
Incorporating all four of Google’s colors (red, yellow, green, and blue) into the four corners of the favicon was a theme we liked in many submissions. We also saw this idea in the designs submitted by Hadi Onur Demirsoy, Lucian E. Marin, and Yusuf Sevgen (pictured below).
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by Hadi Onur Demirsoy |
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by Lucian E. Marin |
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by Yusuf Sevgen |
We hope you like the new favicon, which nicely integrates all of our original criteria: distinctive in shape, noticeable, colorful, timeless, and scalable to other sizes.
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Back in June, we rolled out a new favicon — the small icon that greets you when you access Google on your URL bar or your bookmarks list — and we encouraged our users to submit their ideas for this important piece of Google branding. We were impressed by the volume of submissions we received, and today we are happy to introduce a new Google favicon inspired by those submissions by our users. While the final icon is a reinterpretation of one contest submission, it draws on design elements and ideas from many of them.
|
Google’s new favicon |
André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired our new favicon. His placement of a white ‘g’ on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google.
|
by André Resende |
Although we changed the color layout slightly and moved the ‘g’ off center, his submission formed the basis for our new design.
Incorporating all four of Google’s colors (red, yellow, green, and blue) into the four corners of the favicon was a theme we liked in many submissions. We also saw this idea in the designs submitted by Hadi Onur Demirsoy, Lucian E. Marin, and Yusuf Sevgen (pictured below).
|
by Hadi Onur Demirsoy |
|
by Lucian E. Marin |
|
by Yusuf Sevgen |
We hope you like the new favicon, which nicely integrates all of our original criteria: distinctive in shape, noticeable, colorful, timeless, and scalable to other sizes.
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After months of anticipation, Macworld 2009 is finally here. Throughout the four days of the expo (from now until Jan. 9), more than 100 Googlers from several product teams will be available to demonstrate Google software for the Mac and the iPhone.
Picasa for Mac made its debut yesterday, and you can follow along on the Google Mac Blog for more details on what we have in store for the rest of the week.
If you’re going to Macworld, we invite you to stop by. And for those of you who can’t make it, many of the demos are available via video at google.com/macworld.
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Every year right about now we round up our blogging activity across Google. Ready? Here goes.
This is our 368th post of the year on the main Google blog, which is 23% more than in 2007. In addition to more posts, we are thrilled to know that we have many more readers now — 78% more, to be exact. The number of unique visitors jumped from 6,738,830 last year to more than 12 million (12,000,723) in 2008. And readers are coming from all over: the UK, Canada, India, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan and beyond. The top non-Google referrers are Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, Lifehacker and Slashdot.
We posted quite a bit about new products (10) and new product features (56), but nothing caused as much excitement as our earlier-than-planned unveiling of Google Chrome. This post alone had 1,735,093 unique visitors and generated 12% of our total-year pageviews on the blog! There was also the much-anticipated announcement of the first Android-powered phone. And people enjoyed reading about our design philosophies. Who knew a little change to a favicon would generate such interest?
But it wasn’t all just product news; there was much else to cover in 2008. To mark Google’s 10th birthday, we took a moment to reflect on the enormous impact the Internet has had on people’s lives since our founding. Some of our in-house experts shared their thoughts on how various technologies will evolve in the next 10 years.
Like many of you, we were on the edge of seats watching all of the U.S. election action. We posted 27 times about political subjects, providing information about voting tools, how the political process works, and what was top of mind on Election Day. It’s clear that technology will be playing an even bigger role in politics in years to come.
Of course, we had some fun too: We kept our long-standing April Fools’ Day tradition going with the announcement of Project Virgle; we covered new ways to get around the Googleplex and the masterminding of a giant Ferris wheel; and we raised our glass to a couple who got married with Google.
We’re looking forward to another robust year of keeping you informed of all the goings-on at Google. In the meantime, we wish you and yours a very happy New Year.
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