Greetings all,
Firstly I think the GIMPS is a great thing and stuff, but I wish to offer
constructive feedback. If I'm venting in the wrong place, just let me know.
If you must flame me, do it off-list. :)
I'm one of many who got fed up with distributed.net and cracking rc5des.
So I hunted for another project to devote my spare CPU power, and I thought
the gimps was cool.
I had trouble finding the gimps, and the gimps client, and instructions on
how to join. I found www.mersenne.org and entropia.com. I still don't
understand the relationship between the two, and I would like to.
I read some documentation about the gimps and I didn't understand most of
the questions. But that's ok, I'm not overly interested in the actual
mathematics involved.
The GIMPS clients does a lot of self-testing...is that really needed?
Also, I can get the client to segfault at least two different ways.
The 'packet' sizes are very large...I have lost weeks of work due to
power failures and friends.
I also accidentally ran two or three instances of the client, and it complained
about it's work file or something, and delete it. 89% complete doing whatever
it was doing, and it restarted at 0.
So anyways, my comments can be summed up in that it isn't easy for the newbie
(even the very nerdy types like myself) to find their way around the gimps
project and become efficient contributers.
Now, distributed.net (yes, I hear some moans) has a very slick interface, and
helpful documentation and navigable websites and easy to understand overall
structure. (I will be writing another letter to dnet sometime soon...
complaining that they have all these neat things and are wasting them.)
Hopefully this explains to some of you why the gimps is not growing very fast.
Please forgive me if I was rude, responses are welcome. :)
TomG
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