At 05:04 PM 2/27/2002 -0600, Steve Harris wrote: > >Whilst I appreciate Steve's motives in making this suggestion, I have a > >philosophical problem with it. If a few people hog these exponents, > >[Who said anything about hogging exponents? 2 or 3 exponents should suffice, >which most people probably already have queued up.]
Philosophically, I think that most anything you can do with the user interface is fair play. If Steve wants to increase his days-of-work-to-get number to 60 for a month or two to get more-efficient-for-a-P4 exponents, that's great. Other P4 owners are welcome to do the same as it will increase GIMPS' total throughput (albeit marginally). A similar stir occurred a few years ago when someone learned when the server recycled expired exponents and wrote scripts so that his clients contacted the server at that time. Over time, his machines had a great number of the smallest exponents. Again, fair play - any other highly motivated user can do the same thing. Poaching - not fair play. There is no means of grabbing someone else's exponent using the user interface. _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
