On Mon, Jun 14, 1999 at 11:21:58AM -0500, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
>I guess I'm fighting a losing battle here. My thoughts:
I don't consider myself fighting, BTW.
> - If George or Scott decide that for the GIMPS project to continue to
> be viable, anyone who participates MUST be able to reply within one
> week (or be "kicked out"), my feeling is that it is their project,
> and they can set the rules.
Of course. Perhaps they should be doing the `poaching'. Aaron was perhaps
a bit too quick.
> But here we have OTHER PARTICIPANTS
> suggesting such a rule; when I do not see HOW such a rule would
> improve life for those others who are making this suggestion.
I don't really understand you -- do you mean they did this poaching only
for their own good? OK, perhaps Aaron was wrong. (I'm not sure how much
I've commented on this case at all.)
> In my own case, I never learned about the v17 problem until
> George's newsletter - I'm a long-time subscriber to the mersenne
> mailing list, but unknown to me the listserver had had trouble
> sending me mail, and had *removed* me from the mailing list.
> My point is that emails might get lost (ISP problems); also,
> people might be out of town for more than a week.
I'm not setting `one week' as a hard limit -- it could be one month,
or one year for all that matters. My point is, that we should be
relatively sure that people are, in fact, alive. (If there are ISP
trouble, the mail will bounce anyway. The inventors of our current
e-mail systems (SMTP, POP et al) have thought far enough to implement
receipt systems, so we can be sure that the e-mail is actually
delivered.)
> - Will the world come to an end if certain exponents are not
> completed before the end of 1999? WHY are some "interfering"
> with others for being slow?
Again, I'm not supporting them in any way. But I'm not directly against
them either, I can somewhat understand them. But perhaps getting George's
blessing first would be an idea.
>> I have to agree on this policy. One mail, give them a week or so to reply,
>> and if they don't, take the exponent. (Didn't IPS have an automatic system
>> at one point? If you look in the readme file, it said it didn't work at
>> expected, so they took it out.)
(I'm not sure if people have misinterpreted me here. My point was: If
you _are_ going to grab an exponent, an e-mail first would be better
than nothing.)
Now, please: This mailing list was supposed to be `an in-depth discussion
about Mersenne primes', not `an in-depth flamewar about 15 exponents'.
George and Scott should have the last word, and since they're the
demigods, we should all respect their decision.
/* Steinar */
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