It finally happened!
I got home the other day and my PowerBook was powered off. I don't know the
cause but the result is that the saved.state file stored on the ram disk
was lost. I had a backup of the saved.state file from the day before so my
dilemma was: restore the old saved.state file and repeat the last 24+ hours
of work (about 1.5*10^9 iterations and 1 found point) or start from scratch
with a new series of points.
I estimated that the saved.state file represents an average of 32*10^9
iterations or about 4 weeks of crunching. I decided to restore the old
saved.state on the assumption that after I finish repeating the lost work
the subsequent found points I find will be more valuable and after about 3
days I will have improved my odds of delivering a matching point even
though I will always be about 1 found point behind. The only way I can
loose is if a match is found in the next 2 days.
Despite the hazard, I'll still keep the saved.state file on the ram disk
because if I had to listen to the disk ticking all day I would not be
running the ECDL client.
-- Dan Oetting <oetting@ghtmail.cr.usgs.gov>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Feb 19 2000 - 03:28:02 MET