Google's buckyballs doodle KILLED THE PLANET

[riso]

I can't quite believe I'm writing this, but: Google's buckyball doodle probably did enough harm to the planet to counteract every 'carbon offset' initiative the big G has ever been involved in.

A plucky investigative journalist over on ZDNet, irked by one of his computers locking up at 100% CPU utilization after loading the Google homepage, decided to do a little research to see just how malevolent this buckyball was. He turned up some disgruntled users on the Google help forum, but it pales in comparison to what one of his Twitter followers discovered: he checked his household electricity monitor and -- get this -- the buckyball doodle, coded in JavaScript, requires a massive 15 to 20 watts.

Now I'm going to add a little of my own hyperbolic, Monday-morning tabloidery. Early reports would suggest that lots (hundreds of millions) of people sat and played with their buckyball for minutes. If you consider that the Pac-Man game caused the average user to spend 36 seconds longer on Google, you can begin to appreciate just how many extra kilowatt hours were used by Google's buckyball doodle. I lack the cranial capacity to work out the exact figure (I'm a blogger, not a bona fide investigative journalist!), but I reckon we're talking about 'more electricity than Wyoming uses in a year'.

[javajolt]

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one of his computers locking up at 100% CPU utilization after loading the Google homepage
I was really PO'd that day as, I had the same problem and set my homepage to about:blank with only 2 browsers running 100% of my CPU was being used and I typically have min. of 6 browsers 3 of which are dedicated to w7ni, w8ni, and w9n.info the rest are used for browsing.  All music and video is played on another system.

[Jake]

Today's makes my processor jump to 50%, which is probably closer 100% since it's a Pentium 4 w/HT and the extra thread (contrary to what you'd find in Windows Task Manager) is NOT a second core.