> My boss knows what is going on, but we were bought out before xmas by
> Nokia, I believe they have a policy of 'approved' software only.
> Nobody has
> got round to checking our site yet, but I am putting together a case to
> keep running the software. Best reference I have so far is Marc Getty and
> TempleU <G>
Good luck with that then... As for me, my current boss is sympathetic to
my strange desire to find prime numbers and is actually digging up about 70
machines and a couple midrange *NIX boxes just for me to goof around
with... He's ever so much cooler than US WEST! :-)
I showed him the TempleU team's page, and some other team pages where
they're using lots of computers with no ill effects, plus I've been running
it on some non-production machines lying around. He thinks it's pretty
cool stuff. Now I just need to convince him to run it on his machine! :-)
> Yep, they would be miles clear at the top by now. BTW I think that their
> actions were way over the top and as for calling in the FBI....I
> just hope
> that when it is all resolved that common sense and sanity
> prevails and that
> you get back your good name and all your equipment.
Thanks...I'm still waiting and wondering what will come of all this. Had I
known they would have reacted as they did, I wouldn't have used my own
account, maybe just used the challenge account or something. They still
would have known it was me, since I really didn't try to hide it at all,
but it's not like I just wanted to shoot to the top of the list. I was
already doing pretty good. At the time, I already had over 10 CPU years to
my name which put me in the top 50 I think, and at points in the past I was
in the top 10...all of that without the US WEST machines.
> >I *used* to have as many as 5 computers at my home running, but with my
> >current situation I'm lucky to have one P166 and a laptop on loan from
> >work...double sigh...
>
> Well you never know, when I found M2976221 it was on my only home pc, the
> P100. Mind you now that exponents are getting larger...I am
> current testing
> in the 20million range on the PII-300. It started last July and will be
> finished in May this year. 10 months for a simple yes/no!
Yikes...that's a big exponent to be testing! 10 months...I wonder how soon
before we all end up testing in that range...
Of course, it would be nice to actually find one, but I work with computers
all the time and for some odd reason, it strikes me as nearly criminal that
all those CPU cycles are being wasted. US WEST spent millions on all new
machines and NT to run on 'em, and they only use them for dumb
terminals...running X-Windows emulators to access mainframe stuff.
In any given day, the "idle" cycle on the boxes would have about 23:45,
meaning the CPU was only in use 15 minutes. Thus my unusual quote, taken
out of context and printed in the papers, that "...all that computational
power was too tempting for me." It really was too tempting... :-) But
some folks just don't get it I guess...sigh...
For what it's worth, a friend of mine on the inside recently told me that
the problems that US WEST had that led to their discovery of the program
was only affecting a handful of machines, i.e. less than 10.
I suspect some machines were acting up, as NT boxes sometimes will, and the
first thing they noticed on all the machines was some unusual process
called NTPRIME.EXE. It was showing near 100% cpu time so they freaked I'm
sure and soon discovered it running on other machines.
It's unusual though that they imply that all 2500 machines in their Phoenix
center were affected when the original problem was almost certainly related
to something else and was only seen on a small number of PC's... Dagnabit!
:-(
Aaron
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