Does this mean that the Europa mission goes down the drain now? Will they try to launch a simplified version of this CO2 monitor in the future? Or will they just "move on"?
The article seems to suggest that this device is capable of being manufactured (reasonably) cheaply. I don't see the problem in having several backups of your backup. That way, no matter how small this thing is, making redundancies should not cost an arm and a leg.
I like it how they say they "save hundreds of thousands of dollars" instead of saying "hundreds of lives". Everything is about money for these people! Disgusting.
I am amazed and saddened at the levels of scepticism shown by the/. community at large. Before this thing has even been formally released, you lot have descended upon it like a swarm of locusts. Have an open mind! If this goes ahead as planned, it will be a BIG thing for India and will bring education to a lot of impoverished regions in that corner of the world. It almost seems as if you don't want this to happen.
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your reply. You're damn right that I'm bitter. Everyone's had a paper rejected before. That's the very reason that they have reviews - so that someone can give you critical feedback which you can use to improve your work. I understand this and I welcome it. What I cannot tolerate is 3 reviewers returning blank feedback forms. TrackChair, which seems to handle most of these IEEE conferences, specifically asks you whether you want to review the paper or not. This is the first step you must complete before you can even see the review form. If these reviewers had been having a bad day or were extremely busy, they had every right in the world to simply refuse to review the paper. I have no beef with reviewers who give negative (yet constructive/helpful) feedback. This is, as I said before, the purpose of the review system.
The point I was trying to make with the badly formatted, academically rubbish papers is that IEEE should simply not be accepting them in the system in the first place. It is not very difficult to have a script check whether the submission conforms to the pre-defined standards or not. Having a simple sieve like this in place will prevent the really bad papers from entering the system. From my experience, most of the papers containing really bad research stems from these non-conformant papers. The review system is in place for papers that match the submission guidelines but are still of poor quality. Perhaps the reviewers got fed up of reading dozens of papers (this fall season alone, I got assigned around 15 papers, most of them rubbish, around 3 of them of very good quality) and when they got to mine, they couldn't care less. This should not happen. That's all I was trying to say.
I am so glad that someone has gone ahead and done this to expose what an embarrassment the IEEE review system really is. A few months ago, I submitted a paper to the Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (http://www.ieee-wcnc.org/) which is also an IEEE conference. Since I had entered my research interests and since I had submitted a paper here, naturally I was also assigned some papers to review. Most of the papers I got were of extremely poor quality. By that I mean that besides the content being absolute rubbish, the authors could not even make their papers to conform to submission standards. In contrast, the paper we had written had gone through 4 stages of internal review and aside from me (the PhD student), the other three authors were very respected members of the community. I am not lying when I say that our paper was several orders of magnitude better than any of the ones I was given to review. Yet, when the deadline of notification for acceptance came, our paper had been rejected. All of us were shell-shocked when we saw the reviews. Three of the reviewers had not written a single comment but had just given haphazard grades. One of the reviewers seemed to be pissed off for some reason. I quote: "this paper is lying" was one of his scientific opinions of our paper. Out of 7 reviews, only one contained comments that were coherent, to the point and sensible. Another thing is that you can see when the reviewer was assigned the paper and when he reviewed it. Three of my reviewers literally took around 2 minutes to review my paper. How can you assess months of someone's work in 2 minutes. It just makes me so angry thinking about it!
The problem with IEEE conferences is that they receive so many papers that the academics who are assigned to review them delegate them to their PhD and master's students. PhD students are fine, but anything lower than that is a complete travesty. The system itself is fundamentally flawed. If they could just reject papers that do not conform to the submission guidelines, IEEE could save themselves at least a third of the work. This way, people would have less papers to review thus being able to give each paper more of their attention. After all, this is someone's career here.
You, Sir, need to invest in a faster internet connection. What's more - you could join one of those torrent communities where everyone uploads from fear of ejection. This way you won't have to leave your machine on all day long, resulting in the saving of $$$!
This is certainly a stupid question, but here goes: Is there any difference between doing a clean install (format and install 8.10 afresh) and upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10 as detailed in the link? Is there any advantage of doing one over the other (other than the obvious you-don't-have-to-install-apps one)?
I am a huge fan of OSS. I have been using open-source stuff for some three years now and I think it's time I gave something back. To this effect, I have decided to donate a modest sum (modest by student standards) to the following outfits (one every month):
*Ubuntu (for showing me a world outside Winduhs)
*Gnome (ease of use)
*Inkscape (how would I ever make diagrams without this?)
*Kile (easy to use LaTeX editor)
*Amarok (not just music)
*other (this list will certainly be expanded)
Show your appreciation by donating!
Why would you want to subject your son to such torture? Poor kid will not get any sleep what with the humming of the projector and PC and all. What's wrong with those glow in the dark stickers?
The balloon system cannot be used as the payload's weight increases. This is why even the Phoenix lander had to use rockets. It was just too heavy for the bouncy balloon option.
It's really annoying when readers just post their bitchy comments without considering that NASA might have thought of these things before them!
I know this sounds like "invasion of privacy", etc. but if you really want to control what they receive, why don't you just forward their mail to your email account? Or better still, just have them set the password such that you know it too. That way you can log on every now and then and make sure that everything is in order.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that the Europa mission goes down the drain now? Will they try to launch a simplified version of this CO2 monitor in the future? Or will they just "move on"?
Neither should the Oscar story.
The article seems to suggest that this device is capable of being manufactured (reasonably) cheaply. I don't see the problem in having several backups of your backup. That way, no matter how small this thing is, making redundancies should not cost an arm and a leg.
"Mom, I'm going outside to play"
"OK dear. Just make sure you don't directly come under the rectenna"
This is how evolution works, mate. Multi-tasking humans with multiple brain cores is the next step!
I go for "Cubix".
I like it how they say they "save hundreds of thousands of dollars" instead of saying "hundreds of lives". Everything is about money for these people! Disgusting.
ctrl+l -> 'stop being slow'
I am amazed and saddened at the levels of scepticism shown by the /. community at large. Before this thing has even been formally released, you lot have descended upon it like a swarm of locusts. Have an open mind! If this goes ahead as planned, it will be a BIG thing for India and will bring education to a lot of impoverished regions in that corner of the world. It almost seems as if you don't want this to happen.
Hi Phil, Thanks for your reply. You're damn right that I'm bitter. Everyone's had a paper rejected before. That's the very reason that they have reviews - so that someone can give you critical feedback which you can use to improve your work. I understand this and I welcome it. What I cannot tolerate is 3 reviewers returning blank feedback forms. TrackChair, which seems to handle most of these IEEE conferences, specifically asks you whether you want to review the paper or not. This is the first step you must complete before you can even see the review form. If these reviewers had been having a bad day or were extremely busy, they had every right in the world to simply refuse to review the paper. I have no beef with reviewers who give negative (yet constructive/helpful) feedback. This is, as I said before, the purpose of the review system. The point I was trying to make with the badly formatted, academically rubbish papers is that IEEE should simply not be accepting them in the system in the first place. It is not very difficult to have a script check whether the submission conforms to the pre-defined standards or not. Having a simple sieve like this in place will prevent the really bad papers from entering the system. From my experience, most of the papers containing really bad research stems from these non-conformant papers. The review system is in place for papers that match the submission guidelines but are still of poor quality. Perhaps the reviewers got fed up of reading dozens of papers (this fall season alone, I got assigned around 15 papers, most of them rubbish, around 3 of them of very good quality) and when they got to mine, they couldn't care less. This should not happen. That's all I was trying to say.
I am so glad that someone has gone ahead and done this to expose what an embarrassment the IEEE review system really is. A few months ago, I submitted a paper to the Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (http://www.ieee-wcnc.org/) which is also an IEEE conference. Since I had entered my research interests and since I had submitted a paper here, naturally I was also assigned some papers to review. Most of the papers I got were of extremely poor quality. By that I mean that besides the content being absolute rubbish, the authors could not even make their papers to conform to submission standards. In contrast, the paper we had written had gone through 4 stages of internal review and aside from me (the PhD student), the other three authors were very respected members of the community. I am not lying when I say that our paper was several orders of magnitude better than any of the ones I was given to review. Yet, when the deadline of notification for acceptance came, our paper had been rejected. All of us were shell-shocked when we saw the reviews. Three of the reviewers had not written a single comment but had just given haphazard grades. One of the reviewers seemed to be pissed off for some reason. I quote: "this paper is lying" was one of his scientific opinions of our paper. Out of 7 reviews, only one contained comments that were coherent, to the point and sensible. Another thing is that you can see when the reviewer was assigned the paper and when he reviewed it. Three of my reviewers literally took around 2 minutes to review my paper. How can you assess months of someone's work in 2 minutes. It just makes me so angry thinking about it! The problem with IEEE conferences is that they receive so many papers that the academics who are assigned to review them delegate them to their PhD and master's students. PhD students are fine, but anything lower than that is a complete travesty. The system itself is fundamentally flawed. If they could just reject papers that do not conform to the submission guidelines, IEEE could save themselves at least a third of the work. This way, people would have less papers to review thus being able to give each paper more of their attention. After all, this is someone's career here.
It's one of these: http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/images/miracle3.gif
You, Sir, need to invest in a faster internet connection. What's more - you could join one of those torrent communities where everyone uploads from fear of ejection. This way you won't have to leave your machine on all day long, resulting in the saving of $$$!
If they cover your area, go with them. I really do get the 20 Mbps (almost) that they advertise.
Sure, dude. (joking, relax)
There's no such thing as -20 K
If you're satisfied with travelling a few meters everyday, go get your NASA car!
http://www.viemu.com/vi-vim-cheat-sheet.gif
This is certainly a stupid question, but here goes: Is there any difference between doing a clean install (format and install 8.10 afresh) and upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10 as detailed in the link? Is there any advantage of doing one over the other (other than the obvious you-don't-have-to-install-apps one)?
I am a huge fan of OSS. I have been using open-source stuff for some three years now and I think it's time I gave something back. To this effect, I have decided to donate a modest sum (modest by student standards) to the following outfits (one every month): *Ubuntu (for showing me a world outside Winduhs) *Gnome (ease of use) *Inkscape (how would I ever make diagrams without this?) *Kile (easy to use LaTeX editor) *Amarok (not just music) *other (this list will certainly be expanded) Show your appreciation by donating!
McCain is Palin comparison to Obama.
Why would you want to subject your son to such torture? Poor kid will not get any sleep what with the humming of the projector and PC and all. What's wrong with those glow in the dark stickers?
The balloon system cannot be used as the payload's weight increases. This is why even the Phoenix lander had to use rockets. It was just too heavy for the bouncy balloon option. It's really annoying when readers just post their bitchy comments without considering that NASA might have thought of these things before them!
I know this sounds like "invasion of privacy", etc. but if you really want to control what they receive, why don't you just forward their mail to your email account? Or better still, just have them set the password such that you know it too. That way you can log on every now and then and make sure that everything is in order.
Why not turn your machines into a high performance cluster where graduate students can submit research jobs (in a queue)?