On 19 Oct 99, at 15:05, Ken Kriesel wrote:
> Surely there are other programs. There must be various factoring efforts
> running on non-Intel processors under non-Microsoft operating systems.
Indeed there are. There are several factoring programs in the mers
suite, also Ernst Mayer's Mfactor program.
Actually there is a _big_ performance gain in using 64-bit processors
(instead of IA32 architecture) to trial factor up to 2^63 (or perhaps
2^64), particularly as Alpha, Sun Ultra etc. have (integer) divide
instructions which are more efficient than Intel's rather weak
effort. (39 clocks ...)
My guess is that someone really needs to make these existing
factoring programs easier to use in order to make them more popular.
Factoring programs need savefiles rather less than LL testers;
perhaps they need their own format savefile, rather than trying to
"overload" the LL savefile format with complications it doesn't
really need.
> I took the 4-byte number present in your first recent post to be the
> version information of the program that generated the file, not the
> file standard version. After rereading Brian's comments and your reply
> to him, I think I get it; Brian's modification adds the program version
> levels, and the original had the standard's version.
That's exactly what I meant.
> (Feeling fuzzy from the flu, please pardon the increased noise level.)
Commiserations. Did you try the cure involving the hat and the bottle
of whiskey? (Place the hat at the bottom of your bed & get into the
bed. Drink from the bottle until a second hat appears. By the time
you can get up again, the flu should have flown away...)
I think the conventional cure involving hot lemon drinks &
paracetamol is probably more reliable, but a small shot of whiskey in
the hot lemon drink seems to do me no harm 8*)
Regards
Brian Beesley
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