Hi there Lucas
> What an odd coincidence! I just posted on sci.math yesterday complaining
> about this. No responses yet.
I think you're one of the few people who can empathize thoroughly with
this... after all, you're probably more inclined to *read* a faq with your
appreciation of the effort that goes into *writing* one! Seriously, though,
I think we have a lot to be thankful for here - at least your FAQ is one
click away from the tagline on every mailing list message (at least, for
those of us with Web access). Waiting for a FAQ on a newsgroup or digging
one out of the archives is beyond a lot of people's attention span - not to
mention newsgroup FAQs are typically over-sized...
> Maybe if George (or me, as I might be more sympathetic, knowing what it's
> like to not want to update the FAQ) sent an email, then we could start
> to run this section of the sci.math FAQ (as long as it doesn't get too
> out of control).
The web-based FAQ wins again! How much easier things are with hyperlinks...
I'm almost led to believe the sci.math faq's age indicates that it's
probably not being maintained... so use caution, unless you want to
'volunteer' to maintain that too. As you say, as long as it doesn't get out
of control.... at least that part of the FAQ shouldn't be too huge.
> Yes, I should say so! Perhaps Chris Caldwell could keep this part of the
> FAQ up to date.
Probably the easiest thing for sci.math to do is to refer to
http://www.utm.edu/research/primes and at least safeguard themselves against
obsolescence. It occurs to me that the data in the sci.math faq was written
when this lowly P-200 was good prime searching fodder. Now things have
changed a lot and I'd expect things to be moving along at quite a rate from
now on.
If you do get in touch, perhaps they ought to just refer to *your* (*our!*)
FAQ in their Mersenne section... but by the looks of things, the sci.math
faq probably needs the dust blowing off it in general. You can never force
people to read a faq (but I'd hope everyone here has looked at ours), but
perhaps getting in touch with them would at least find out if it *is* being
maintained and perhaps get them to look over it. After all, if the Mersenne
section is two years out of date there could be all sorts of other
omissions...
Chris
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