On 9 Mar 2001, at 15:35, Joshua Zelinsky wrote:
> 1. How will Prime95 affect security? I don't think there would be any major
> problems created, but the readme doesn't discuss this much and this isn't my
> area of expertise. Any thoughts?
The _only_ security risk to the user associated with Prime95 is the
same risk associated with downloading and executing _any_ program.
Possibly we should be providing MD5 checksums to go with the binaries
so that they can be checked for non-interference.
The network communications between the server and client pose no risk
as there is no instruction payload. All the code you need is in the
binary executable and the DLLs supplied.
> 2.What the are actual monetary costs would be of running Prime95. In
> particular, what are the percentage increases from normal costs.
Depends how much extra you're running the system ... if it's on 24
hours a day anyway, the answer is _nothing_. Normally I switch off
monitors on systems left running unattended (this is in any case good
practise from the fire prevention point of view); power consumption
of system units does vary but somewhere around 150W would be typical.
So allow 1 KWh per 6 hours extra running. How much that costs
obviously depends on how greedy your utility provider is.
Concensus of opinion is that running a system 24x7 does not affect
significantly the expected time before hardware failure.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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