hi, as we are just discussing the embedding of prime95 in a screensaver i wanted to share a thought with you: one thing which i noticed as i saw SETI running on a friend's machine was that it has a very nicely designed user interface that just 'looks cool'. i don't recall if it displayed a lot of useful data, but it 'looked scientific'. now look at prime95. i know, i know, this is some mathematics project etc. but as i had to notice with my own company selling our own shareware product: people often don't care about what things really do. they look at it and think 'this is cool' or (as it was in our case) they said 'your product looks boring' and they didn't _felt_ like useing it. what i am suggesting is, let somebody design or propose a cool, scientific design. something that makes people think they are working on some very top-notch NASA, government, KGB whatever _exciting_ project. i know this takes time to design, time to code and bytes in the executable. but i am very sure this will pay in more and more excitied users. primes have the stigma of beeing boring math stuff. we must make clear that it is exciting math stuff! even if it has "only" an exciting skin. we could display: - historical data of the processor time prime used (the last 15 minutes or whatever) as a graph - overall GIMPS performance graph (download it from primenet every day) (with estimates?) - my five cent to GIMPS (percentage of LL tests, factors found etc.) - chances of finding a prime in my range, in all of GIMPS, in the next n days... - time to next milestone, etc. ... just to name what comes to my mind right now. of course we would like to add a menu choice to have prime look and feel like always. but i guess the majority would like to use the new interface (me too, i must confess). and we could make it work like a screensaver, too. i have some sample code from MS here, it's not really that hard. what do you think? /chris/ [- http://www.cfos.de -- cFos DSL/ISDN/ATM driver -] _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
