Simple enough, right? Well, actually, the Earth is still too wobbly for these simple equations, so we lose and gain a few milliseconds here and there. Atomic clocks occasionally have to use a leap second to keep things lined up with astronomical time. Doesn't matter much to us, right? But imagine you're not just trying to keep your appointments straight. Imagine you're trying to keep all of Google's computers from crashing. Then what do you do?

If you're Google, you can't just repeat a second at the end of the day whenever the IERS announces a leap second, because you're running too many time-sensitive operations. What happens if two delicate processes happen one second after another, but the computer thinks they took place at the same time? Kablooey, right? Well, believe it or not, Google has solved the problem.

The Google Site Reliability Team just published a fascinating and in-depth post explaining how they solved the leap second problem. They call it a "leap smear." It involves gradually "lying" to the computers by a few milliseconds over the course of the whole day. After a leap second hiccup in 2005, when some Google systems stopped accepting work, the team devised this solution.

Check out the post on the Google Blog.

Photo 1 credit: Cornell University Library Photo 2 credit: Smithsonian Institution

So what does Zuckerberg have to say about the man who peeled back the curtain from the internal discussions among diplomats for history's most formidable empire? Not much. Time's press release included a rambling pseudo-statement from Zuckerberg on WikiLeaks. Read it below and ask yourself: shouldn't he have put a little more thought into such an important matter than this? Wasn't there anyone available to edit these statements for coherence?

"Well, at a very high level some of the themes could be connected. I mean we mostly make so you can understand what's going on with the people around you because we think that that helps you connect with them more broadly.

I mean the wikileaks story is fascinating, but I also just don't think we're anywhere near the end of it. And I personally feel like, from the coverage that I've read, that I don't understand enough to fully comment on it, so I won't.

But I do think it's a fascinating kind of turn of events, and watching how the different institutions react to it is also fascinating....We definitely don't wake up in the morning and think about toppling institutions.

But one of the things that I think happens from people being able to share their opinions with their friends or more broadly. You know I really do think there is this concept where the best stuff spreads."

Seriously? That's the best that one historic figure could say about another historic figure, as the former accepted a prestigious award widely expected to go to the latter? Sorry, Mark, but I think you should have done better than that when this question was raised. Congratulations, by the way, for the recognition; Facebook has truly changed the world and definitely for the better.

The content of the Wikileaks statement, though, is essentially this: he doesn't want to comment on WikiLeaks, but its supporters should know that Facebook vaguely upholds some of the same most general principles ("at a very high level") and WikiLeaks detractors should know that Facebook is very different and much safer. ("We definitely don't wake up in the morning and think about toppling institutions.")

A grammatically poor, high-level hedging of bets: that's what we get from Zuckerberg? And why would Time or the Facebook PR team not take this part of an interview more seriously? Perhaps because they don't really take any of this, much less WikiLeaks, seriously.

Zuckerberg is famous for pushing privacy and transparency. WikiLeaks is shaking the world up with that paradigm taken to an international level. Some people love it. Some people hate it. Zuckerberg should have had a better statement prepared about it.

Perhaps the statement itself isn't even unreasonable, but the fact that it's as unclear as it is feels like a show of disrespect to an organization that deserves thoughtful engagement and comment.

Just One Example of Facebook's Role in International Relations

For what it's worth, Facebook can hardly be said to be disinterested in the kinds of international relations that WikiLeaks speaks to, either. Zuckerberg almost always starts telling the story of Facebook with a reference to its use in organizing big protests in Colombia, against the violent left wing insurgents in the world's longest civil war. The U.S. government has long backed the right wing government and brutal paramilitary army in that conflict, in full knowledge of the deep drug corruption of all sides of the conflict, but especially among U.S. allies.

That's a simplified but essentially accurate telling of how it's gone down in Colombia for decades. It's a nasty conflict and the left-wing rebels have made a whole lot of enemies with their violence as well. When the urban public says it's had enough of rural rebels attacking them, they organize big protests on Facebook.

And then Facebook tells the story about how it is a brand new instrument of political organizing for peace.

Colombia is one of the world's largest recipients of U.S. military aid. That story has been made much more clear by the work of researchers unearthing sensitive government documents - that's an important kind of work worthy of respect. Pic from ConflictPics.

What's the connection between these matters? It's that the same world of politics Facebook is proud to influence is also a world that needs careful scrutiny and research. Like it or not, that's the kind of work that WikiLeaks is aiming to do.

What ought Zuckerberg have said? I wouldn't presume to know - but I think it would have been appropriate for the leader of what would be the third largest country in the world if it were a country (500 million plus people) to have come up with something good and meaningful to say.

It's unlikely that Zuckerberg has nefarious intentions in all of this. But neither is he taking it very seriously. The least he could do is speak thoughtfully about those who do, like WikiLeaks, as he accepts an award that many people expected that organization's leader would win.

Zuckberberg was chosen "for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them ... and for changing how we all live our lives."

But was Assange robbed?

The photo TIME picked for Zuckerberg is the first thing we noticed in reviewing the article, now posted online at TIME.com. Those eyes! That creepy stare! It seems that the photo may end up being as controversial as the winner itself. TIME obviously wanted to imply something about Facebook's privacy issues by choosing a photo where the young CEO seems to gaze right into your soul, as if he knew all your deepest, darkest secrets.

Facebook's Privacy Issues Dominated Half the Year

But the photo may be an appropriate choice, given the context. Facebook had a tough year when it came to privacy, thanks to a long-running privacy debacle that began in late December/early January, where a host of forced, opt-out (not in) changes were switched on, affecting all user photos, videos, links and even status updates. Automatically, seemingly overnight, those items went from being privately shared to becoming public, unless you, as a user, manually switched them back to private.

Millions, of course, didn't, either not knowing or not caring about the impact of that choice. We would argue that it's the former, given the embarrassments published daily to youropenbook.org, a Facebook public search tool that reminds you how "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Whether you want to or not."

And with Facebook's launch of Instant Personalization, a feature that let Facebook partners immediately tap into user profile data to customize websites to your needs, Facebook even came under scrutiny from federal regulators in the U.S. April. E.U. regulators weren't happy either.

By May, the debate reached a boiling point, leading Facebook's CEO to address the issue via press conference. At the event, Zuckerberg announced that the changes would be rolled back, would retroactively apply to all content and the company would introduce new, simpler privacy controls.

By doing so, Facebook seemed to have squelch the debate itself for now, but the damage to the company's reputation was done. The world was clued into Facebook's agenda at last. Simply put the agenda is: openness, openness and more openness.

2010: The Year of Openness

Another man who would argue for openness is Wikileaks' Juilan Assange. As TIME's managing editor Rick Stengel explained in an editor's note:

"Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin. Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: in Assange's case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg's case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people."

Assange Was Robbed!, Cry Journos

But who had more impact on the world this year? Assange with his political disruption? Or the CEO of a social networking site?

Several notable journalists disagree with TIME's decision and Michael Calderone rounded up a few of the more memorable comments, here on Yahoo's The Cutline blog:

• "The will of the people is fulfilled," wrote the New York Times' Dave Itzkoff. "Wait, no it isn't."
• "Once again Time editors demonstrate POTY no longer for the person who had the greatest impact on the year," wrote ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper, asking if "Jersey Shore" star Snooki will get the nod next year.
• Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg said that it was "gutless of Time not to name Assange."
• "Hmmm, in 25 years, will this make sense?" asked NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd.
• Alexi Mostrous, a Times of London reporter covering WikiLeaks, said that Time must consider Assange "too controversial" because WikiLeaks "certainly had greater impact than Facebook this year."

What do you think? Was Assange robbed? Or does Zuckberberg deserve the accolade?

Getting started with Dipity is easy. Simply start feeding the service your data: photos from Flickr or Picasa, blog entries, RSS feeds, music from Last.fm or Pandora, videos, or microbloging feeds. Anything that offers a publicly accessible feed is fair game.

And that means, that it's not just your data. It's any publicly accessible data. If you want to add data from other RSS feeds - say you wanted a timeline showing when the top tech blogs publish stories - you can do that, as well. Or maybe you'd like to add content from a Google alert or Yahoo! Pipes? Or build something with Dapper to populate your timeline? All viable options. Suffice it to say, there are any number of ways to feed Dipity.

But, the true value of Dipity is how it lets you visualize that data. Once the sources are added, the service plots each discrete element along a timeline. And that view of the data provides a very different perspective of "what's happening when." You can also zoom in and out of the timeline - down to hours or out to years - to help provide additional perspective.

It's a like a graphing engine for your lifestream - or any combined stream of reference data.

After only a few minutes, I was working to push all sorts of random collections through the tool. No doubt, you're already thinking of some very interesting data sets to run through it, as well. And if you're short on ideas, the folks at Dipity have compiled some interesting timelines to inspire you.

Interested in taking a different view of the data you're producing? Visit Dipity and register for a free account.

TimeBridge's stand-out feature is the simplicity with which it gives recipients alternative times and dates for each appointment. The appointment organizer sends out invitations with five optional times, and attendees are requested to select "Yes," "No," or "Best." If a particular time appears to be the "Best" for all attendees, TimeBridge will automatically set it as the time of the appointment. Otherwise, TimeBridge notifies the organizer of the alternatives and awaits confirmation.

We'll go into TimeBridge and other scheduling applications, such as Doodle and Tungle, in more detail in an upcoming post.

"A new search engine is Google.com, founded by some kids out of Stanford, the same university where Excite and Yahoo spawned. You might think the search engine market has already developed and today's leaders -- like Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite -- are going to be the search engine leaders for years to come. Guess what? You're wrong. Start-ups like Google will offer better services, and unless the established players react, they'll lose market share. Whether you like the name or not, Google is going to be a search engine to be reckoned with."

"While Google won't be #1 overnight, they'll get up there because people will like their search over Yahoo, Lycos, or Excite. Google produces accurate results, and that is what search is all about, right?"

"Can just a search engine company support a $1+ billion market value? Those billion dollar companies have more services like personalization, chat, and message boards other than search. You're right, but if you take search away, you take away the basis of the whole site. Users don't go to a portal to get stock news, they go to a portal to get to where they want to go. They might stop for a couple minutes on the portal using the extra services, but internet investors have to remember the epicenter of the whole business is the search engine. Instead of portals putting search on the backburner and letting their indexes get outdated, they should be buying out companies like AskJeeves and Google. They are the future."

Original article

Time Inc. launched its much anticipated magazine meta-subscription service Maghound today. The idea is that for a small fee, starting at three titles for $4.95 a month, you can swap out magazine subscriptions every month. It's like Netflix for magazine subscriptions, but unlike Netflix the selection is awful. We like the idea a lot though and we hope it will improve.

At launch, it has 240 titles, about 40 less that what Time Inc said at a trade show in June, Folio notes. In addition to all Time inc titles, of course, it has titles from Conde Nast (not all), Rodale, and others. Notably missing is any magazine from the Hearst stable, including Esquire, Cosmopolitan and others. Some of the other notables I checked on which are missing are The Atlantic, Business Week, Wired, The Economist, Reader's Digest, and National Geographic .

There's a whole world of independent magazines beyond the big titles as well, see directory sites like NewPages.com and Mygazines. We'd love to see Maghound include titles from those directories. Is it in Time's interest to do so? Probably not.

We had high hopes for another magazine experiment called Brijit, but that innovative service went belly up in May and is no longer even online.

We hope print periodicals aren't dead, because we really like reading them. If this is the best the industry can do, though, then there's probably not much hope.

We like what Maghound is trying to do, and Time's distribution largess might help it work, but the service at launch isn't interesting enough to leave us anything but dissapointed.