For three years it was possible to do without it. But now it's become necessary again. This coming New Year's Eve, the radio controlled clocks will, after 0:59:59, instead of jumping to 1 o'clock at the next tick of the second, pause shortly in order to insert a small portion of extra time: a leap second. The International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) in Paris has prescribed this addition to coordinated universal time (UTC), as our Earth is again too much out of sync. The Earth lags behind atomic clock time, whose ticking seconds do not pay attention to any earthly fluctuation. This leap second will be dispensed to the German clocks by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig.

More information about time
Find all answers to your questions about time at http://www.ptb.de/en/wegweiser/infoszurzeit/index.html

PTB-contact
Dr. Andreas Bauch, Working Group "Dissemination of Time",
phone: ++49 (531) 592-4420, E-Mail: andreas.bauch@ptb.de

this is certainly going to be my last post for this year ... but unfortunately it will still be another very stupid post :)


I don't actually care if you're a pc or a mac man, I think you're saying this to us because of the Apple's campaign and honestly ...


... I don't even care if you connect to the world or not, I don't want to connect with you for sure, but what I want to say is just that you look quite stupid in this photo man and frankly you also look fat too! Maybe you would do better next year installing GNU/Linux on your PC

Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Thursday, December 11, 2008 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Cisco. The FSF's complaint alleges that in the course of distributing various products under the Linksys brand Cisco has violated the licenses of many programs on which the FSF holds copyright, including GCC, binutils, and the GNU C Library. In doing so, Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software.

http://www.fsf.org/news/2008-12-cisco-suit

Our licenses are designed to ensure that everyone who uses the software can change it. In order to exercise that right, people need the source code, and that's why our licenses require distributors to provide it. We are enforcing our licenses to protect the rights that everyone should have with all software: to use it, share it, and modify it as they see fit.

said Richard Stallman, president and founder of the FSF.

So Facebook, which has been letting people know it's on track for $150m in revenues in 2007, must be an awesome advertising platform. Well, sorry to rain on the parade, but no. Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They're mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook's members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.

Isn't that what one would expect on a highly social site, on which people interact rather than absorb? Well, even News Corporation's rival social network, Myspace, is a better medium for marketers: for a similar set of advertising campaigns, its click rate, a measure of the audience's engagement, was 0.10%, more than twice Facebook's. Complains one media buyer who spent heavily on a range of blog and social properties: "Facebook was consistently the worst performing site on just about every campaign we ever ran with them."

http://valleywag.com/tech/advertising/facebook-consistently-the-worst-performing-site-242234.php

To get at the principle, it's useful to look at the successful business models of a few 21st century pioneers, including Google and Red Hat:

* Google's model works because of an abundance of page views (Driven by searches, news, etc.). Google found a way to give away its service to drive abundance, and then monetize that abundance through advertising. (Interestingly, Google has failed to create any viable businesses that stray far from this principle, though it's likely that the company will succeed in doing so eventually--perhaps with its efforts in the mobile arena.)

Most interestingly with Google, nothing that it does--be it search or advertising--is inherently difficult to copy. The combination and brand associated with the intersection of them, however, makes Google very valuable indeed.

* Red Hat figured out years ago that the more open-source development, the more need for someone to boil down the community to its "binary" essentials. In other words, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from the Wild West of Fedora. The bits are free or abundant, but the service around them is not. Red Hat therefore wins the more that it and others give software away for free, because this leads to a greater need for its role as a gatekeeper on quality and stability.

The general principle seems to be to drive abundance (whatever the means) and then sell minimization of complexity as a value derived from that abundance. In Google's case, people search randomly for X, but Google points them to advertising that may help the would-be buyer discover X quickly and (hopefully) at a good price. Red Hat creates and fosters an abundance of software and then makes it consumable by stripping away all but the essentials.

How would this principle apply to other 21st century software businesses? Hint: the answer isn't advertising (not always, at least).

* Facebook. Facebook has done well at creating abundance (in terms of social interaction), but advertising has proved to be a poor way to monetize that interaction. It shouldn't be hard to see why: people are searching for and linking with people on the site, not goods.

Having said that, Facebook has a massive opportunity to monetize the primary thing that networking can engender: trust. As I've written before on this topic, trust is the basis for secure commerce, and it's sorely lacking online. If Facebook can turn its flimsy friendships into true indicators of trust, it will have a multibillion-dollar business on its hands.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9819669-16.html