Hello all, I guess I will give my oppinion as well, on all this racing business... It seems to me, that people generally are forgetting, what this is all about: Using SPARE computer cycles to improve the knowledge on mersenne primes. It appears that everybody is concerned about "will we make it or not?!?". Make what? There is no condition, that we will need to check and 2-check the ?M to ??M range before the year ????. The range we have started to investigate in this project is indeed indefinite, so don't worry about not having a task for YOUR computer! -and who cares, if someone on a slow computer still needs a few years to clear some exponent below your own. The information about those exponents WILL be known eventually. Of course, it is fun, there is a price, and George will have to do _something_ about accounts being forgotten by their owners, but don't worry too much about it, it is not that important, is it? I also have been wondering about those who wanted to build dedicated "prime searchers", machines doing nothing else than looking for primes at a minimum cost. Silly... Why spend even that minimum amount of money, energy, electricity to do a job, that has no deadline, and that will - let's face it - never improve conditions for life on earth, a job, that a few years from now probably will be some undergraduate student's task to verify on his pocket calculator before next monday!!! The only reason I can think of is: For the fun of it! - and that is a quite valid reason too, but isn't it just as fun just running a background task on your desktop, knowing that YOU are not wasting any computer power? I know that is what appeals to me, so let me be a snail, I am happy with it! In general: The work we are doing is not in a hurry, so let's remember the original idea behind it all: Let's put all the idle, that's *IDLE!*, computer power that is already out there, to work at this. Let's not spend our precious time and resources, just to be the first to ... what? To finish ... what?? Utilize your idle computer time, when you use your computer, and when you don't use your computer - turn it off, save some CO2, and go play with your kids! Just my 2 cents. Morten Due Jorgensen Seven Technologies
