Re: Extropians GIMPS team

From: Rik van Riel (riel@humbolt.nl.linux.org)
Date: Tue Aug 17 1999 - 07:57:52 MDT


On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Bryan Moss wrote:

> I have an idea to get all 5 of those (potential) undiscovered Mersenne
> primes and the $100K prize in maybe a year or less. We'll use the CPU
> cycles of internet users without asking them.

This is very rude and should be considered a Bad Idea(tm).

It would be better to code up such a program and include a screen
saver with it, and full documentation on what it's doing. Or a
news ticker, or...

Just make sure that people know:
- the program is doing useful calculations in the background
        (for the nice people who coded up the thing)
- and something nice/beautiful/useful in the foreground
        (for me)

Maybe a science/scifi trivia&news ticker would be nice and even
a little bit on-topic for us extropians...

Rik

--
The Internet is not a network of computers. It is a network
of people. That is its real strength.
--
work at:	http://www.reseau.nl/
home at:	http://www.nl.linux.org/~riel/


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:04:47 MST