Mersenne Digest       Thursday, January 13 2000       Volume 01 : Number 679




----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 18:58:04 -0800
From: "John R Pierce" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mersenne: Re: The Second Mersennium Behind Us, How Now For MyriadThe 
Third?

> >If I recall right, the guy who owns the patent wasn't asking for much in
the
> >way of royalties from each company (but amounts to a lot when totalled),
but
> >I think the fight revolves around whether this guy really invented the
idea,
> >or whether it's just one of those common sense things that can't be
> >patented, or something like that.
>
>
> This is getting off topic, but:
> The criteria for something to be patentable is that the average
> practitioner in the field wouldn't think of it.  So it boils down to
> whether the average programmer would think of windowing, given the
problem.

There also can't be 'prior art'... "windowing" has been used since the 70s
if not earlier.  There were some early 1960s systems that used a single
digit for the year... they used windowing as a way of dealing with the Y1970
problem :)

- -jrp


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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 00:52:29 -0700
From: "Aaron Blosser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: Mersenne: Re: The Second Mersennium Behind Us, How Now For MyriadThe 
Third?

> " Dickens applied for the patent in October 1996 "
>
> I was using windowing in 1987, so his patent is invalid (prior invention).

The problem now becomes, will these companies choose to challenge the patent
in court, spending millions of dollars, or will each company alone figure
it's cheaper to pay this guy than to pay their lawyers.

Apparently, that's been the tactic for many other similar "patent" cases
lately.  What the article termed "submarine patents" for their stealth.

Sad...isn't it?

Let's all be thankful that neither Lucas nor Lehmer decided to patent their
formula! :-)

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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 03:34:54 -0500
From: "Vincent J. Mooney Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mersenne: RE: The Second Mersennium Behind Us, How Now For Myriad The Third?

I read a few days ago that the patent office is considering withdrawing the
patent.

It was stupid to grant it in the first place, but what is the effect if
patents granted can be withdrawn (as has happened in a few other cases)?  

At 12:52 AM 1/12/00 -0700, you wrote:
>> " Dickens applied for the patent in October 1996 "
>>
>> I was using windowing in 1987, so his patent is invalid (prior invention).
>
>The problem now becomes, will these companies choose to challenge the patent
>in court, spending millions of dollars, or will each company alone figure
>it's cheaper to pay this guy than to pay their lawyers.
>
>Apparently, that's been the tactic for many other similar "patent" cases
>lately.  What the article termed "submarine patents" for their stealth.
>
>Sad...isn't it?
>
>Let's all be thankful that neither Lucas nor Lehmer decided to patent their
>formula! :-)
>
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>

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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 01:06:33 -0800
From: "John R Pierce" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mersenne: RE: The Second Mersennium Behind Us, How Now For Myriad The 
Third?

> It was stupid to grant it in the first place, but what is the effect if
> patents granted can be withdrawn (as has happened in a few other cases)?

basically, it will be as if it was never issued.  The ex-patent-holder will
be sitting there with egg on his face, and quite likely a candidate for
lawsuits from anyone foolish enough to have paid him royalties on the patent
which is no longer valid.

just desserts if you ask me.   We need a few precendents for strong
deterrents to discourage future grandstanding like this.

- -jrp


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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 10:15:32 -0500
From: JON STRAYER <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: Mersenne: The Second Mersennium Behind Us, How Now For Myriad The Third?

It looks like what we've done is turn the Y2K bug into a couple of dozen
smaller bugs.  I wonder if anyone is keeping track of the various dates the
new bugs will pop up?

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Tony Forbes [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2000 6:03 PM
>To: Mersenne@Base. Com
>Subject: Re: Mersenne: The Second Mersennium Behind Us, How Now For
>MyriadThe Third?
>
>
>Aaron Blosser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>>Dunno 'bout all that, but another problem was that in order 
>to do a "quick
>>and dirty" fix of the Y2K problem, a good number of people implemented
>>windowing.  Some used a window of 1930-2029 (which most 
>Microsoft software
>>uses to interpret 2 digit years), some used 1940-2039, etc.
>>
>>That gives those idiots another 29 years to fix the software 
>the right way.
>
>One software company I know of is using a window of 1948-2047. So they
>could have a date problem in 2048. Surely this is the real 'Y2K bug'. 
>
>-- 
>Tony
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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 13:34:38 -0500
From: George Woltman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mersenne: New Prime95 Setup Program

Happy new year to everyone,

Thanks to Wise Solution's generous donation of their InstallMaker program,
http://www.wisesolutions.com, and Geoffrey Faivre-Malloy's programming
efforts, Prime95 now has a fancy setup program!

There is no need to upgrade (prime95.exe did not change), but if you are
curious you can download it from http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm

Regards,
George

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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 15:48:40 EST
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Mersenne: Why 2K?

Jud McCranie wrote:

>This is getting off topic, but:
>The criteria for something to be patentable is that the average 
>practitioner in the field wouldn't think of it.  So it boils down to 
>whether the average programmer would think of windowing, given the problem.

Well, that's the major criterion (non-obviousness) if no one has explicitly
demonstrated or patented a similar thing previously...

>" Dickens applied for the patent in October 1996 "
>
>I was using windowing in 1987, so his patent is invalid (prior invention).

...in that case windowing is considered "prior art," and the patent is invalid
on its face. Jud, assuming you have reasonable supporting documentation for
your use of windowing prior to 1996, you should consider sending it to the
U.S. patent and trademark office, http://www.uspto.gov (even if you have no
desire to attempt to patent it - clearly, showing that you merely thought of
it before 1996 in order to invalidate Joe Schmoe's patent is much easier than
proving that you thought of it before anyone else did and seeking a patent
yourself). Note that prior art is most easily established via publication,
public use or sale - if you only wrote a windowing script for your own use,
it may be more difficult to prove.


>From a programming perspective, my own top "why 2K" question is this this:
even given that the person(s) who first used a mere 2 characters to store
the year had good reason (e.g. severely limited computer memory) to do so,
why didn't they use those 2 precious bytes as a 2-byte integer?
Had they done so, we'd be talking instead about the "Y32K" or "Y64K" bug,
and even Microsoft might have had sufficient time to fix their software
by then. :)

- -Ernst

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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 15:48:35 EST
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Mersenne: Re: Status of last discoverd prime

Paul van Grieken wrote:

>Last year there was a email about the new found prime.
>I could read there was a second check to see if it was really a prime.
>After that I did not see any result.
>Can someone tell me what the status is of the last found mersenne prime.
>just because I am curious about it.

Hi, Paul:

I'm not sure just what you mean by "After that I did not see any result."
Nayan Hajratwala performed the run that found M6972593 to be prime using
George's Prime95 code, and David Willmore confirmed it using my Mlucas
code. Since two different codes running on two different types of hardware
agree on the result, it is considered verified. Currently GIMPS still has
several thousand exponents below 6972593 to finish testing, i.e. assuming
no further primes are discovered amongst these, we still have several
months to go before we can say with > 99% confidence that there are
no Mersenne primes between M3021377 and M6972593. (Although this seems
likely, given that there are over 200,000 candidate exponents between
3021377 and 6972593, i.e. nearly 99% of these have been tested at least
once, with no new primes found.)

Best regards,
Ernst

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------------------------------

Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 22:32:16 -0000
From: "Daniel Grace" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mersenne: Re: The Second Mersennium Behind Us...yeah more bad code

If the windowing is used correctly there is no
reason why a system cannot go on "indefinitely"
processing "current" info.  The idea is tie the
split date to the current date so that the window
"slides" along.  However, knowing what commercial
programmers are like most will just do a dirty fix like
WindowStartDate:='1/1/1997' or such like.  I hate
seeing numbers scattered through code obviously
such programmers miss the point of sticking
constants at the top of their source files or using
initialisation files.  This style applies also to number
theoretical programs e.g. a "31" in one part of your
program may not be a "31" for the same reason as
a "31" in another part of the program - so why not call
the first "ELEVENTH_PRIME" and the second 
"N_BITS_LESS_1" and declare them/calculate them
accordingly at the top of the code. The advantage being
that when you eventually get that 256 bit machine you have
always dreamed of you do not have to re-write you're whole
program ... catch my drift?  Of course this does not work
if you've unravelled lots of loops for speed - but honestly
modern compilers should sort that one out for us or at
least provide some mechanism where by you can say
something like:
"function MyFunction(my_var); inline for my_var=1
to MY_CONST; ..."

I do not know if you can do this in C, I do not think it
is possible with Pascal compilers - if not it should be
made a feature of any serious compiler.

Thoughts?

- ----------------------------------------------------------
Daniel W. Grace
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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------------------------------

Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 21:35:46 -0000
From: "Daniel Grace" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mersenne: Re: The Second Mersennium...and sequences

I know that in Delphi (the best pascal for
Windows) that there is a variable that specifies
a century "window" around the "current" date so
that two digit dates can be interpretted as "current".

On the more relevant issue of storing Mersennes
is this question and storing numbers from
Mathematical series (particularly primes)
in general is:
Has anyone worked out an efficient way to
compress the primes or prime exponents that
produce prime Mersennes?  Is such a method ever
used to reduce the relevant patterns and then
backtrack to find new conjectures or avenues for
research?  I would guess myself that with only
38 numbers there are too many possible compression
algorithms, even if you reduced the possible
space down by only considering "quick ones".
However this might make for an interesting project
if one considered primes of the form (2^n)k+/-1.

Along similar lines, recently I was reading Hofstadters
"Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies".  In the book he
shows an interesting project he worked on from an early
age of counting triangular numbers between squares
which inspired me to come up with the following questions:
How many primes of the form (2^k)n +/- 1 with n>1, k>=3
are there between Mersenne primes?
Or just:
How many primes of the form (2^k)n - 1 with n>1, k>=3
are there between Mersenne primes?

Any takers?

- ----------------------------------------------------------
Daniel W. Grace
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 23:22:32 -0000
From: "Brian J. Beesley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mersenne: Why 2K?

On 12 Jan 00, at 15:48, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> ...in that case windowing is considered "prior art," and the patent is
> invalid on its face. Jud, assuming you have reasonable supporting
> documentation for your use of windowing prior to 1996, you should consider
> sending it to the U.S. patent and trademark office, http://www.uspto.gov
> (even if you have no desire to attempt to patent it - clearly, showing
> that you merely thought of it before 1996 in order to invalidate Joe
> Schmoe's patent is much easier than proving that you thought of it before
> anyone else did and seeking a patent yourself). Note that prior art is
> most easily established via publication, public use or sale - if you only
> wrote a windowing script for your own use, it may be more difficult to
> prove.

What about all the dialects of various languages which allow one to 
declared windowed arrays? (e.g. Microsoft QBASIC released circa 1988 
allows e.g. DIM PROFITS (1984 TO 2018))

Or, sliding variable-size windowing has been in the TCP definition 
for at least twice as long as that.

I think the reason no-one bothered to patent or copyright the idea of 
windowing is it is that it's so obvious ... 

> 
> >From a programming perspective, my own top "why 2K" question is this
> >this:
> even given that the person(s) who first used a mere 2 characters to store
> the year had good reason (e.g. severely limited computer memory) to do so,
> why didn't they use those 2 precious bytes as a 2-byte integer? 

COBOL programmers probably declared the year variable as PIC(99) - 
and a COBOL programmer has no direct means of knowing how that's 
stored in memory. (Note that PIC 99 USAGE COMPUTATIONAL (binary) 
would still require 7 bits whereas PIC 999 USAGE COMPUTATIONAL would 
require 10 bits. PIC 9(4) USAGE COMPUTATIONAL is as near as you can 
get to a 16-bit integer using COBOL but still only stores values 0000 
- - 9999. Anyway, back in the '60s, lots of systems had word lengths 
based on multiples of 6 rather than of 8, so manipulating an explicit 
16-bit integer would not neccessarily have been efficient!
Note that, on an 8 bit machine, COBOL compilers would group together 
variables defined as PIC 99 and align them on byte boundaries, this 
actually gives quite reasonable packing & makes arithmetic easy 
provided you have BCD arithmetic instructions. In fact, this is why 
modern processors retain BCD arithmetic - the instructions are hardly 
ever used, except by programs written in COBOL!


Regards
Brian Beesley
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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 19:29:19 -0500
From: Jud McCranie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mersenne: Re: The Second Mersennium...and sequences

At 09:35 PM 1/12/99 +0000, Daniel Grace wrote:
 > On the more relevant issue of storing Mersennes
>is this question and storing numbers from
>Mathematical series (particularly primes)
>in general is:
>Has anyone worked out an efficient way to
>compress the primes or prime exponents that
>produce prime Mersennes?


I doubt that the Mersenne exponents can be compressed much.  As far as a 
general prime list, there are several ways to save space.  One is to store 
the gaps between primes instead of the primes themselves, and reconstruct 
the primes as you read through the list.  One byte for the semi-difference 
suffices to fairly large primes.  Another way is to use a bit vector 
indicating whether the given number is prime or not.  Which method is best 
depends on the size of the list, and how you want to use the list.

+--------------------------------------------------------+
|                  Jud McCranie                          |
|                                                        |
| 137*2^197783+1 is prime!  (59,541 digits, 11/11/99)    |
+--------------------------------------------------------+

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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 19:34:57 -0500
From: "Vincent J. Mooney Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mersenne: Why 2K?

At 03:48 PM 1/12/00 EST, Ernst wrote:
>Jud McCranie wrote:
>
>>This is getting off topic, but:
>>The criteria for something to be patentable is that the average 
>>practitioner in the field wouldn't think of it.  So it boils down to 
>>whether the average programmer would think of windowing, given the problem.
>
>Well, that's the major criterion (non-obviousness) if no one has explicitly
>demonstrated or patented a similar thing previously...
>
>>" Dickens applied for the patent in October 1996 "
>>
>>I was using windowing in 1987, so his patent is invalid (prior invention).
>
>...in that case windowing is considered "prior art," and the patent is invalid
>on its face. Jud, assuming you have reasonable supporting documentation for
>your use of windowing prior to 1996, you should consider sending it to the
>U.S. patent and trademark office, http://www.uspto.gov (even if you have no
>desire to attempt to patent it - clearly, showing that you merely thought of
>it before 1996 in order to invalidate Joe Schmoe's patent is much easier than
>proving that you thought of it before anyone else did and seeking a patent
>yourself). Note that prior art is most easily established via publication,
>public use or sale - if you only wrote a windowing script for your own use,
>it may be more difficult to prove.
>
>
>From a programming perspective, my own top "why 2K" question is this this:
>even given that the person(s) who first used a mere 2 characters to store
>the year had good reason (e.g. severely limited computer memory) to do so,
>why didn't they use those 2 precious bytes as a 2-byte integer?
>Had they done so, we'd be talking instead about the "Y32K" or "Y64K" bug,
>and even Microsoft might have had sufficient time to fix their software
>by then. :)
>
>-Ernst
>
It wasn't so much the computer memory, Ernst, as it was the disk storage
space.  An insurance application record would have perhaps 6 dates within
100 bytes:  date of applicant's birth, date application for insurance was
taken, date of proposed enrollment, date the first premium was due, date the
premium was received/recorded in the system, date of expiration if the
payments stopped, and probably more.  Saving the "century" field 6 times was
12 bytes saved in COBOL PIC 99 mode.

Clever was the use of COBOL PIC XX as a COMPUTATIONAL field to store a date
in 16 bits (which was the length of PIX XX).  7 bits for year since 2^7 =
128 so a year value up to 99 was stored there; 5 bits for day since 2^5 = 32
so a day value was stored there and 4 bits for month as 2^4 = 16 so a month
value was stored there.  Two bytes for a YEAR-MONTH-DAY value was great.
Adding century was a bummer to this idea.  The programmer had to have a
REDEFINED PIC 99 COMP-4 of the PIC XX and then use a routine to extract
three fields.

As some may recall, the packed-digits format (COMP-3) was also used to store
disk space on the file's record.  IBM created/used this format to allow
space savings. 

But the bottom line was that in the 1960's and 1970's, disk store space was
expensive and saving it was worth the effort spent in more programming
(people were cheaper that computers, in a way).  Yes, memory was expensive
and limited, but it was not the cause of the Y2K issue.

No one in the late 1980's EVER believed that the PC would be as powerful as
it is now, that disk storage would be as cheap, and that all these
improvement would be in the home !!  Only the 1.44 MB diskette of ten years
ago remains the same. 

And I am delighted that MERSENNE.ORG lets me hunt for giant primes even if I
never find one. 

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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 20:41:40 -0500
From: George Woltman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mersenne: Why 2K?

>At 03:48 PM 1/12/00 EST, Ernst wrote:
>>From a programming perspective, my own top "why 2K" question is this this:
>>even given that the person(s) who first used a mere 2 characters to store
>>the year had good reason (e.g. severely limited computer memory) to do so,
>>why didn't they use those 2 precious bytes as a 2-byte integer?

I think its due to punched cards.  Reading and writing 2 digit dates on the
punched card makes using PIC 99 COMPUTATIONAL inappropriate.

Regards
George

P.S.  Yes I'm old enough to have used punch cards.

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Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 03:17:58 EST
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Mersenne: New Mlucas README file

I have put together a new (HTML) version of the Mlucas README file, which
I hope will make downloading the code(s) and manual testing (especially
for new users) easier. Please update your links/bookmarks accordingly.

Cheers,
- -Ernst

ftp://209.133.33.182/pub/mayer/README.html
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Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 16:04:08 +0100
From: "Hoogendoorn, Sander" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mersenne: Archives

> Hi,
> 
> I've been reading through the archives the last days but the last one is
> from mid 1998.
> I found a online archive but dowbloading every single message 
> takes to much time.
> 
> Is there a place where i can download the more recent archives (in one or
> two zip files)
> or can some one send them to me?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Sander
> 
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Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 18:23:07 -0600 (CST)
From: gregory czajkowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mersenne: Interesting/Annoying Mersenne Side-Effect

Hello All,

I've been involved in GIMPS for about 2.5 years now, several machines,
OSes. Recently I installed prime95 on a IBM Intellistation Dual uproc. 
It seems my combination of  soundcard+headphones is VERY sensitive
since when I'm running 1/2 prime95s I can "hear" them chugging along on
the headphones. There is a low volume high pitch periodic (2/s) noise
emanating from the speakers. As soon as I turn prime95 off, it ceases.
The volume setting has no effect on it. 

Has anyone else had this problem? I'm pretty sure its a faulty sound-card,
just wondering if anyone had an idea on how to fix it.

Thanks in advance.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Czajkowski
College of Engineering
Computer Engineering BS 1999
University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------



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------------------------------

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 20:03:15 -0500
From: Bryan Fullerton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mersenne: Interesting/Annoying Mersenne Side-Effect

On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 06:23:07PM -0600, gregory czajkowski 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> I've been involved in GIMPS for about 2.5 years now, several machines,
> OSes. Recently I installed prime95 on a IBM Intellistation Dual uproc. 
> It seems my combination of  soundcard+headphones is VERY sensitive
> since when I'm running 1/2 prime95s I can "hear" them chugging along on
> the headphones. There is a low volume high pitch periodic (2/s) noise
> emanating from the speakers. As soon as I turn prime95 off, it ceases.
> The volume setting has no effect on it. 
> 
> Has anyone else had this problem?

Yep, I've experienced this as well, on a Seanix (clone) Celeron 333 at work.
Haven't bothered to fix it, don't use the sound that much.  Doesn't seem to
happen on my P3/450 at home, where I do use the sound a lot.

Bryan

- -- 
Bryan Fullerton                http://www.samurai.com/
Core Competency
Samurai Consulting
Can you feel the Ohmu call?
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Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 22:30:17 -0500
From: Pierre Abbat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mersenne: Interesting/Annoying Mersenne Side-Effect

On Thu, 13 Jan 2000, gregory czajkowski wrote:
>Hello All,
>
>I've been involved in GIMPS for about 2.5 years now, several machines,
>OSes. Recently I installed prime95 on a IBM Intellistation Dual uproc. 
>It seems my combination of  soundcard+headphones is VERY sensitive
>since when I'm running 1/2 prime95s I can "hear" them chugging along on
>the headphones. There is a low volume high pitch periodic (2/s) noise
>emanating from the speakers. As soon as I turn prime95 off, it ceases.
>The volume setting has no effect on it. 
>
>Has anyone else had this problem? I'm pretty sure its a faulty sound-card,
>just wondering if anyone had an idea on how to fix it.

I run prime95 on a machine at the office and mprime here. I can hear it running
on the machine at the office. The sound card on the box running mprime doesn't
work in Linux, and it's a 486 anyway so it's doing factoring. The box at the
office is a Pentium.

phma
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