Re: Mersenne: [screen saver]
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 _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: [screen saver]
There's a rather good freeware screen saver written by Gianpaolo Bottin called GPhotoShow. It's just a slide show with transitions and provides a *lot* of free CPU time in between the pictures -- I run it along with Prime95 on this computer (450 pII) and there is no noticeable slowdown in either program on any priority setting. This could suffice unless a person wanted a GIMPS display integrated into the screen saver, though I'm not sure at all what there would be to display. Just throwing this out to the list. :) ~ Levi http://www.bottin.com/gpshow.htm - Original Message - From: "Steve" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 05, 2001 10:38 PM Subject: Re: Mersenne: Re: idea for a new prime95 version Excellent idea, Russ. I was discussing with Like Welsh the problem of people attached to their killer screensavers, and as he pointed out: "But maybe they'd watch pic of their kids/dog/vacation instead? The *particular* screensaver I was thinking of was the Photo Slide Show variety. Slap an image on the screen, wait 15 seconds, fade out, display another. Lots of free CPU time between pics." Certainly it won't work for everybody, but I'm sure there would be a lot of takers. Now, anybody know how to write such a thing? Could be released with the prime95/NT software or as a seperate item to be downloaded from the same site. Steve Harris _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: [screen saver]
Dear All, Let's face it, why should people who are primarily interested in mathematical computation divert their time to writing rather unimpressive screen savers? There are already plenty of programmers out there who can do that job better! So... Simply have an online list of "recommended" / "approved" / "suitable" screensavers. No-one has to write anything new. We just test those which already exist, and analyse what resource demands they make in terms of CPU usage, RAM access, process image size etc. Such a list can then allow contributors to select their preferred screensaver, and avoids introducing extra development complications. Yours, === Gareth Randall === _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: [screen saver]
Levi, does that GPhotoShow allow someone to use their own pictures? That's exactly what I was talking about. If so please let me know where I can get it. 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. I know there are a lot of freeware screensavers available, and I know a lot of them don't hog cpu cycles too badly, but if this is the best one for both reasons above then we should make it available to those who can use it. I am losing literally hundreds of P90 hours a day to screensavers but I can't tell my friends not to run them because they'll just tell me to remove Prime95 from their PC and that's even worse! You should all know by now that there are a lot of people running Prime95 who couldn't care less about it, but will let it run if someone asks. OK so I'm anal-retentive about optimization. Sorry :-) Steve -Original Message- From: Levi Broderick [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 3:45 PM Subject: Re: Mersenne: [screen saver] There's a rather good freeware screen saver written by Gianpaolo Bottin called GPhotoShow. It's just a slide show with transitions and provides a *lot* of free CPU time in between the pictures -- I run it along with Prime95 on this computer (450 pII) and there is no noticeable slowdown in either program on any priority setting. This could suffice unless a person wanted a GIMPS display integrated into the screen saver, though I'm not sure at all what there would be to display. Just throwing this out to the list. :) ~ Levi http://www.bottin.com/gpshow.htm - Original Message - From: "Steve" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 05, 2001 10:38 PM Subject: Re: Mersenne: Re: idea for a new prime95 version Excellent idea, Russ. I was discussing with Like Welsh the problem of people attached to their killer screensavers, and as he pointed out: "But maybe they'd watch pic of their kids/dog/vacation instead? The *particular* screensaver I was thinking of was the Photo Slide Show variety. Slap an image on the screen, wait 15 seconds, fade out, display another. Lots of free CPU time between pics." Certainly it won't work for everybody, but I'm sure there would be a lot of takers. Now, anybody know how to write such a thing? Could be released with the prime95/NT software or as a seperate item to be downloaded from the same site. Steve Harris _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Screen saver killers?
[...snip...] Now, how to incorporate that in Prime95 is another matter, especially as I don't think George would like too many zeroed-out security codes due to people running own-compiled versions. I _know_ it's not as efficient in the absolute sense, but, if people would prefer to run a screensaver _and_ a version of Prime95, I wonder if it would be worthwhile updating the old Win 3.1 screensaver version. The point is, we want to make it attractive for people to participate. Perhaps we should wait a few weeks, then poll a selection of users as to whether they prefer to participate using a "Prime95 style" background program or a "Seti@home" style screensaver. I mean the style of interaction, not the way they percieve the project. What if you periodically had each machine copy it's P/Q files to some central location on a server. Something like this may possibly be required in the long run, as run times on the very large exponents which v19 can cope with could be more than the lifetime of a system! However, a few megabytes per savefile times tens of thousands of systems is _still_ a lot of filestore, and shifting that much data across dial-up network links is going to be painful. Questions have also been asked in the past about what use could be made of a number of machines which are only available temporarily. Being able to upload partially completed assignments would be useful from this point of view, too. There are technical (security) and non-technical (what happens to the prize money if more than one PrimeNet user has worked on the assignment) problems, but I don't see these as insuperable. When an exponent is checked out by your pseudo proxy, have it check if there's a partially worked on P file and send that out or something. At the very least, it'll be nice to back those up on occassion to prevent lost work when someone formats their drive. I take it that's your own pseudo proxy, in which case it can do more or less what you want it to... I would have its clients check in fairly frequently (assuming permanent network connectivity a reasonable bandwidth) upload the P file for the exponent it's working on. If a client fails to check in twice running, the next time a client wants a new assignment, give it the assignment and the last P file from the "broken" machine. And log the event so someone can check out what went wrong. How? That is the question... I guess I need to get VC++ back, enter Windows (yuck) and do something smart (an FTP upload, for instance). If any coders out there are willing to help me, it would be nice. Doesn't sound too hard. The psuedo proxy could run OS/360 or Multics for all the clients care. I guess all you need to do at the client end is to find a FTP client which can be run from the command line, then have the Mersenne client simply construct the command, fork off a copy of the FTP client to do the file transfer, leave FTP to do its thing get on with crunching numbers. You might want to worry about what happens to the client if it wants to rewrite the save file before the FTP finishes, my guess is that the best thing is to (a) abort restart the FTP _and_ (b) double the interval between writing save files. Actually, for local groups, you could probably just use the ordinary OS "file copy" command across filesystems shared using Windows, NFS, Netware or Samba (depending on the (N)OS or mix of (N)OSes). George - suggestion for V19 - option to run an external command (supplied by user as value in local.ini file) at fixed intervals (time again supplied as value in local.ini file) ? Those who think it's justifiable _could_ use this option to kill screensavers ;-) Regards Brian Beesley Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
Re: Mersenne: Screen saver killers?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Perhaps we should wait a few weeks, then poll a selection of users as to whether they prefer to participate using a "Prime95 style" background program or a "Seti@home" style screensaver. A working Prime95 screensaver program will certainly make it a lot easier to distribute the program on machines in offices and networks etc. The Prime95 program we now use does do something we don't understand and does not do anything useful. I think a screensaver could be written in such a way that it also chunks up cycles that are spilled when the machine is used normally. Furthermore the small image floating over the black screen should be a little attractive. If Prime95 is a screensaver, we all know what is does do (It prevents the screen from burning in, and at the same time it tries to win $50,000 from a bunch of math geeks) YiS, Henk Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
Re: Mersenne: Screen saver killers?
At 02:37 PM 5/16/99 +, you wrote: I _know_ it's not as efficient in the absolute sense, but, if people would prefer to run a screensaver _and_ a version of Prime95, I wonder if it would be worthwhile updating the old Win 3.1 screensaver version. The point is, we want to make it attractive for people to participate. I don't read the group regularly. But I guarantee that if you try to tell me that I can't run a screen saver on my machine, then I'll tell you to jump off a bridge. (Disclaimer : I probably will be somewhat less polite than that.) Telling me "Oh, you can run our program, *and* if you want to run a screen saver for some stupid reason, you can run out screensaver" isn't any better. You'll lose more cpu cycles than you'll gain if you try to tell people "Do it our way or else". I run Prime NT as a service. I run a screensaver, *just because I like it*. IF you tell me that I can't do that, *I* will dump PrimeNT in a heartbeat. There isn't anything in it for me. I do it to help out, because it sounded like a cool project. Now you guys think you are big brother, able to control what I can and can't do with my machine. That plan sucks. --- Stephen Whitis Visit http://www.whitis.com for information about Delphi, NT4.0 software, and more. Support the anti-Spam amendment Join at http://www.cauce.org/ I won't do business with spammers, but I will report them, ridicule them, etc. Spam me at your own risk. Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
Re: Mersenne: Screen saver killers?
At 09:10 PM 1999/05/14 +0200, "Steinar H. Gunderson" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK, second message in a row, I just thought it would be nice to separate them. Has anybody got experience in turning off/disabling screensavers under Win95? We run Prime95 at 40 machines (most of them 486'es, though) at school, and screen savers are CPU hoggers (I suppose... at least everybody tells me so). Two solutions I could think of (both ideally incorporated under Win95): 1. Have Prime95 reset the screen saver every 5 minutes or so (possibly when it's outputting) to `Blank Screen'. Would need fiddling with the Registry. 2. Do a call to mouse_event() or keyboard_event() (possibly hitting Ctrl, or any not-so-important key, or moving the mouse one pixel), preventing the screen saver from being run at all. Prime95 already has priority levels that are settable. The default is lower than screensaver, but you don't have to run at default setting. Have a look at the readme.txt for Prime95 V18.1 (or any version at least since V14.4 which had command line argument -P settable 0 thru 5, where 3 is equal to screensaver priority and 0 is near the level of the idle loop). Especially avoid the use of OpenGL screensavers; these are very cpu-intensive, and run at higher priority than remote (network) file access, for network- based backup, for example. Putting both intermediate files and the prime95 executable file on a file server is a nice way to ensure work is backed up, updating executables is straightforward, and space used is efficient. It does have the disadvantages of requiring someone logged in unless the security configuration is unusually lax, and presents a single point of failure. (When the server reboots, all 40 instances of prime95 stop but may appear to still be running until a mouse cursor crosses the prime95 icon.) An alternative is to write a script which normally copies the pq* files from local disk to server space, at whatever interval you prefer. They get backed up with the server, so if ghost wipes the workstation clean, you can easily restore an exponent that's 90% complete. As we move upward in exponents, this will be of increasing interest. The script runs when there's a logged in user. In general, if you'd like to automate a task in Win95/NT, take a look at Winbatch from Wilson Windoware; it's very handy for some things. Another possibility is Active State perl. Ken Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
RE: Mersenne: Screen saver killers?
From: Henk Stokhorst. Sorry, I wrote the text from the point of view of someone in an office using his computer on which someone else installed prime95. I don't need the version for myself, but it's great to distribute among people who have no clue about primes. Don't be sorry! I think this just shows what a difficult thing it is to implement. We both are pretty familiar with the program that exists, and what we want it to do...and we still get lost in misunderstanding. Rick. - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alienshore.com/ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
Re: Mersenne: Screen saver killers?
Why not just write a piece of code that (during installation of Prime95) removes the screensaver start-up line in the ini (windows) files. Then, restart the PC with these new settings and the screensaver start-up lines will be invisiable to the bootup. This would automatically turn off screensavers. Once the Prime95 program is uninstalled (forbid that to happen), the screen saver can be added back into the ini file and the computer can load the screensaver files. or perhaps just copy the screensaver files into a temp directory while the Prime95 program is running. That way, the computer cannot run the files at all. When Prime95 is ended, the files are returned to the original directory. hope this would work... -oliver On Fri, 14 May 1999 21:10:17 +0200 "Steinar H. Gunderson" [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: OK, second message in a row, I just thought it would be nice to separate them. Has anybody got experience in turning off/disabling screensavers under Win95? We run Prime95 at 40 machines (most of them 486'es, though) at school, and screen savers are CPU hoggers (I suppose... at least everybody tells me so). ___ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866] Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
RE: Mersenne: Screen saver killers?
-Original Message- From: Steinar H. Gunderson [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, May 14, 1999 12:10 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Screen saver killers? OK, second message in a row, I just thought it would be nice to separate them. Has anybody got experience in turning off/disabling screensavers under Win95? [Gilmore, John (AZ75)] Start - Settings - Control Panel - Activate "Display" Icon - ScreenSaver Tab - then in the Screen Saver window, select either "Blank Screen" or "(None)" Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
Mersenne: Screen saver killers?
OK, second message in a row, I just thought it would be nice to separate them. Has anybody got experience in turning off/disabling screensavers under Win95? We run Prime95 at 40 machines (most of them 486'es, though) at school, and screen savers are CPU hoggers (I suppose... at least everybody tells me so). Two solutions I could think of (both ideally incorporated under Win95): 1. Have Prime95 reset the screen saver every 5 minutes or so (possibly when it's outputting) to `Blank Screen'. Would need fiddling with the Registry. 2. Do a call to mouse_event() or keyboard_event() (possibly hitting Ctrl, or any not-so-important key, or moving the mouse one pixel), preventing the screen saver from being run at all. If anybody could submit some code (hopefully ultimately being incorporated in the official Prime95 program, I guess this is a common problem), I would be most grateful. (I could compile the program on my own, but the best thing would get it into an official version, so we wouldn't need to have the security code problem.) BTW, we had another problem that I'm in the process of fixing: Every now and then, these machines will be reset using Ghost, losing both the [pq]* files and the worktodo.ini files (the rest of the files are not that important). I'm now writing a Linux pseudo-proxy that will give out the same exponent every time if it has not been cleared. (The [pq]* problem remains unsolved :-( ) If anybody are interested (I could make this work under Windows, too, if there is a need for it), let me know. (Of course, if there is no uncleared exponent, the request will be forwarded to the standard PrimeNet server. I'm wondering how Prime95 will cope if it wants more than one exponent, and gets the same all the time. Setting `Days of work to get' to 1 should fix this problem.) /* Steinar */ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
