Maybe we need to review what is on topic and what is not.
It seems that this list believes arguments about which operating system rules is
on topic.
How about which email program is better.
Should I trade in my PPro 200 and get a Hyundai 650 Turbo?
How about Yuri Sorkin's email address - can we think of more ways to argue about
that one.
How about whether or not the Universe is going to expand or contract and whether
Unix or Windows will be around when it does.
Are we becoming children here, or what?
How about whether 1000 Intel 8088's connected in parallel will find more primes
than an Alpha chip overclocked to 100000 Mhz? Wow, that's really on topic. I
guess if I put the word prime in it, it's on topic.
How about this: 'I have set up a Celeron 300A with 128 Ko L2 cache, ... This is
much faster for the price than any Pentium II.'
Or how about this thread: 'It's used for modeling nuclear
processes, "to maintain USA's nuclear stockpiles without the need of
further nuclear tests". - similar to 'how many supercomputers does it take to
screw in a lightbulb?' You make up the answer.
My latest favorite was the 128-bit precision thread. We couldn't even decide if
an increased number of bits was going to give us increased precision or speed of
calculations. Dr. Montgomery even calculated how much more it would be and
people still didn't believe it. He works at the Netherlands National Research
Institute for christ's sake.
Now, I did like the Goldbach conjecture thread, once we were clear about what a
conjecture was, as apposed to a theorem. Here's the latest (courtesy of CWI):
The Goldbach conjecture has been checked now completely up till
the bound 10^14 and partially near various powers of ten up till
10^300. This result has been applied to reduce the lower bound in
the three-primes version of the Goldbach conjecture as studied by
Hardy & Littlewood and by Vinogradov. A next study, related to
the Goldbach conjecture, will be devoted to the number of
Goldbach decompositions of the even numbers in a given interval.
So...what's on topic?
