Just as a side note, these comments are precious because they come from
the viewpoint of someone who is very new to GIMPS. New people are just
the ones we are trying to attract and I can't help but wonder how many
participants we lost becuase they did not have the tenacity of Tom. Just
my 2c worth...
-Chuck
On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Tom Goulet wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> Firstly I think the GIMPS is a great thing and stuff, but I wish to offer
> constructive feedback. If I'm venting in the wrong place, just let me know.
> If you must flame me, do it off-list. :)
>
> I'm one of many who got fed up with distributed.net and cracking rc5des.
>
> So I hunted for another project to devote my spare CPU power, and I thought
> the gimps was cool.
>
> I had trouble finding the gimps, and the gimps client, and instructions on
> how to join. I found www.mersenne.org and entropia.com. I still don't
> understand the relationship between the two, and I would like to.
>
> I read some documentation about the gimps and I didn't understand most of
> the questions. But that's ok, I'm not overly interested in the actual
> mathematics involved.
>
> The GIMPS clients does a lot of self-testing...is that really needed?
>
> Also, I can get the client to segfault at least two different ways.
>
> The 'packet' sizes are very large...I have lost weeks of work due to
> power failures and friends.
>
> I also accidentally ran two or three instances of the client, and it complained
> about it's work file or something, and delete it. 89% complete doing whatever
> it was doing, and it restarted at 0.
>
> So anyways, my comments can be summed up in that it isn't easy for the newbie
> (even the very nerdy types like myself) to find their way around the gimps
> project and become efficient contributers.
>
> Now, distributed.net (yes, I hear some moans) has a very slick interface, and
> helpful documentation and navigable websites and easy to understand overall
> structure. (I will be writing another letter to dnet sometime soon...
> complaining that they have all these neat things and are wasting them.)
>
> Hopefully this explains to some of you why the gimps is not growing very fast.
>
> Please forgive me if I was rude, responses are welcome. :)
>
> TomG
>
>
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