On Wed, May 12, 1999 at 10:49:12PM -0700, Mersenne Digest wrote:
>From: lrwiman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Mersenne: Convincing administrators
>I'm going to try to get my school to install Prime95 on
>their >100 PII's. Does anyone have experience dealing with
>large stupid beurocracies? Any pointers? Who should I try and
>talk to first?
Sorry for being late about this. I just recently had the same
problem.
Point one: Show them that it's perfectly safe. The studies
pointed to on the GIMPS homepage made my sysadmin (which you
should obviously talk to first! This is usually one person,
and much easier to talk to than going via snailmail etc.) get
a litte less sceptical. (If you can, offer to compile it
yourself. You'll probably not have to, but it will probably help
their confidence.)
Point two: Show them that it doesn't have a speed impact.
Offer yourself to install it on one or two testing machines,
and show it doesn't even have to be noticed (the `No Icon'
option is very useful here).
Point three: Offer yourself to take all the burdens. Nobody
wants to maintain a project they barely know about.
Point four (your trump ace): The $50,000 price. While most
of us are in this for fun, $50,000 is a real lot of money.
To see it from their (your school's perspective): The chance
of winning $50,000, with no extra effort. (Considering you
don't want to keep the money yourself, of course... I
recommend discussing this after you've got the permission,
discussing such things _after_ the prime has been discovered
is nothing but trouble.)
Now, if you do get permission, I can recommend making a
self-extracting EXE that you can FTP over to every machine
and just run (all machines use the same computer ID, that
won't be any problem... you might want _not_ to include
local.ini, so Prime95 can determine the CPU type and speed
itself.). I've done this at school, and it takes me 30
seconds per machine (hit Ctrl-Esc (Win95 only) at the login
prompt, choose Run..., run "c:\windows\ftp <server>", FTP
over the file, choose Run... again, run it (make it default
extract to C:\Program Files\Prime95 when you make the EXE),
Run... "C:\Program Files\Prime95\Prime95" _twice_ and when
you see it's getting the exponents, minimize and forget).
Phew! Apologies for stealing your bandwidth :-) If you're
interested, drop me a mail and I could send you an EXE for
you to install (using your own account ID, of course).
/* Steinar */
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