Re: Extropians GIMPS team

Rik van Riel (riel@humbolt.nl.linux.org)
Tue, 17 Aug 1999 15:57:52 +0200 (CEST)

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

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