On 6 Feb 2001, at 17:40, Steve wrote:
[... snip ...]
> Some of you seem to misunderstand what I am getting at. I'm sure most
> serious contributors don't want a screensaver (I detest them), but in a
> situation where a friend or co-worker lets you install Prime95 on their PC
> but just HAS to have one (especially a really slow one), I would like to
> give them an option which:
> #1 - is Prime95 friendly and
> #2 - is easy to convince them to use.
> The "personal photo slide show" fits both of those criteria wonderfully.
[... snip ...]
Well, I, for one, am in complete agreement with this!
I think maybe we need to do two things:
(a) continue to provide the existing "console" version of Prime95,
which will run all the time - but also document which screen savers
are "reccomended for use" with it; perhaps, if some shareware
products are suitable, we could mention them specifically in the
Prime95 documentation i.e. provide free publicity for the author -
the payback for us is, of course, that we get more people to run
Prime95;
(b) provide something like a slide show screensaver which shows in
rotation all the files in a directory, and runs the Mersenne Prime
client only whilst the screensaver is active. We could also provide a
few free pictures e.g. portraits of Mersenne, George & the four GIMPS
prime discoverers, and anything else Mersenne prime related we can
turn up. It would probably be nice to put the program title, the
exponent being tested and the current iteration on a status line at
the bottom of the display.
A couple more "geekish" ideas for something a screensaver might do
(though I must admit a user-definable slide show would probably be
more appealing to most users):
(a) a sort of "marquee" displaying the decimal expansion of M6972593 -
or alternatively the actual number the program is testing;
(b) similar but displaying the last hexit of the residual actually
calculated in the current iteration.
Both of these could update the screen display each time an iteration
completes.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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