>> People then said most consoles are really bad at
>> accurate floating point calculations because they aren't
>> used much in games.
>
>Who said that? Floating point maths is used extensively in 3D calculation,
>which all modern consoles excell at.
.. but unfortunately only single-precision floating point is needed ... this is
really not much use (you will get, at best, only 5 or 6 bits per element using SP
floating-point arithmetic in a discrete weighted transform)
>> I still believe we should make a mersenne virus which will let all
>> infected computer calculate mersenne primes.
>> unfortunately this would give a real bad name to GIMPS.
>> but lets hear your thought on this
>
>Nice idea! Unfortunately it would probably get GIMPS shut down.
As a "network policeman" I should point out that I am under an obligation to
try to _prevent_ access by any site distributing material in this way. However
well-meaning the intentions are. On my own I couldn't shut down GIMPS, but a small
number of people like me could certainly make the PrimeNet server pretty well
useless.
Also, remarks like this make it hard for me to "sell" voluntary participation in
this, or any similar, project. It's already hard enough to explain to average
users that having Prime95 running on their system has no measurable effect on the
ability of their system to carry out its "proper" work & does not (in itself)
cause any significant increase in energy usage or "wear out" the system at an
accelerated rate.
If we thought that we could cope with the workload on the server, I'd seriously
suggest that we get talking to either Microsoft or the major PC vendors (Dell,
Gateway, Packard Bell etc) about incorporating Prime95 into the default software
distribution. But I'd want to be pretty damn sure that we could cope with
(potentially) tens of millions of active clients first.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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