PE1NUT

The second is still defined as 9,192,631,770 periods of the hyperfine Cesium-133 transition. But there are now several optical atomic clocks that are much more precise than Cesium standards. Is there any talk about 'upgrading' our definition of the second, too?

Then let me tell you of all the ways in which I hate Unity.

Whenever I move a window and it touches the top of the screen, it threatens to become full-screen. I don't need nor want that, it's silly when you have a 1920x1080 screen. Haven't found a way to disable it.

The application menus are now detached. So actually using the menu for an application becomes sort of a Kessel run where I have to make sure that my mouse-pointer does not touch any of the other windows on my desktop. So I end up having to move windows around manualy just to get at the menu.

I tend to use a lot of xterms while working. But I can't just click on the 'xterm' icon, because that goes back to whatever desktop I was on, as Unity can only deal with a single instance of 'xterm' or any other application. So to launch extra xterms, I apparently have to use the middle mouse button. This is very counter-intuitive and tasks me with remembering that some applications require a different mouse-button than others.

These three things make Unity a complete drag for me, and make using it a constant frustration. I've been actively searching for alternatives but haven't found anything that worked as well for me as Gnome2. Tried gnome-shell but that was very crashy and has some of the same issues as Unity, and KDE4 has too animated sillyness and didn't perform very well.

Hi Justus, I've been wondering about these secondary mirrors in the interferometer, and the claim of the kW power in the arms. I would imagine that you get a standing wave? So you have a high energy density, but no real power because as soon as you load that cavity, it's all gone?

I also don't quite understand how that increases the sensitivity, as all that light being contained in each arm doesn't go back to the half-silvered mirror. Or is the power periodically dumped out of the arms?

Hello Mr. Gates,

How do you feel about how Windows has been doing lately?

And how do you feel about Linux and open source these days?

There currently is a Russian VLBI antenna in orbit: Radio-Astron in an elliptical orbit that goes almost as far out as the Moon. The spacecraft consists of a 10m parabolic mirror that unfolded once in space, and it carries hydrogen maser atomic clocks for VLBI timekeeping.

The nice thing about the elliptical orbit is that it covers many different distances, both short and extremely long baselines.
(Source: we process some of its data where I work).