A few minor comments. 1. A while back I remember someone making a 2/7 or so serious comment about using advanced cell phones and such for factoring. That idea was shot down because of lack of computing power/download time + expenses. What about some of the new gaming platforms. I think some have computing capabilities equivalent to P133s and they have modem hookups. However, I'm not sure how feasible/worthwhile it would be to write progamrs to do this. 2. Has anyone considered backing up primenet? Conceivably we could farm out back up to different computers which are using Prime95. Hardrives just keep getting bigger, and most people have tremendous amounts of free space. 3. Recently people have been discussing that the long times it takes to finish a batch of work makes GIMPS less appealing than other distributed computing systems. What if we gave out factoring in small bunches for multiple possible Ms. Since we know that any prime divisor of Mn is of the form 2kn+1, the person could check a set of values for k for a large set of n. This would allow us to have much shorter runs. Unfortunately, this would require some major changes on how everything is done. 4. Is there ever going to be a Mac version for searching? This would be really helpful for a lot of people. 5. One reason SETI is more popular is that they seem to have good media relations. Even if we could get a small mention of GIMPS in some non-math publication, the effect could be enormous. The Science Section of the NYT would be really amazing. Any thoughts? _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
