unforum

[poozle]

[moongazer]

It would be good if chimera could at least give us an update about what is happening with this.

I messaged him on 29th April to alert him to the "starting 1 of 0" error, which I had not seen before, but never received the courtesy of a reply. The client then limped along spasmodically with various delays until 9th May when it appeared to fail completely, as the Stats stopped at that date and since then I have had a continuous row of dots.

It would be a great shame if this was abandoned at this late stage when we were so close to the end and the majority of processing had been done. There was such a push to get people on board at the beginning and many people were running whole banks of clients. My computer has been running it non-stop for over a year, and if the project stops, all the effort which so many people have put in will, in effect, have been a waste of time.

I have been manning the Help Room completely alone for weeks since Guin disappeared, during a period of many more visits than usual due to the errors and confusion, and it has been difficult to know what to tell people in the absence of any official information.

Chimera did a wonderful job of organising this, and we are so grateful for all he has done. In view of the great interest he took in this task and all the hard work he put in on it, I assume he would be as anxious as the rest of us to achieve a final result. I know he is a busy man and may just not have had time to fix it at present (in which case I am sure we would all continue to wait patiently), but 7 weeks have now passed without word and currently we are all left in limbo, so a post bringing us up to date with his intentions would be useful.

[Furry Mark]

I last heard from Guin on 22nd May - we were both trying to get a response from Chimera. I will be very sad if we don't complete this project - I have donated a lot of (CPU!) time and (electrical!) energy to this and I would hate to think it had been in vain...

[Mikeyj]

I know people have invested CPU time in this, but chimera (and Guin) has invested more.

It's certainly exam time (of various sorts) at the moment and has been for a while. We don't know what chimera's personal circumstances are and after his efforts he deserves our patience.

[Guin]

13th labour

[smartyman]

Thanks for the update Guin. Hopefully everything is ok with Chimera and he'll be able to come back to this in time, or transition it to somebody else. I arrived late to PXC so I've only processed about 125,000 units, but I'd still like to see it through to the end.

[jch02140]

Is there any update?... Hope this is not ended without solving this card... We are almost 10% left from cracking this card...

[Furry Mark]

I can no longer get to www.13thlabour.tk - I don't know if this is a DNS issue or if it is finally the end of the line...

[Mikeyj]

I think, and dear sirs please brace yourselves, this is it. Chimera has disappeared so we haven't processed any units in quite some time. The PXC fans still exist but are scattered in the wilderness. I think that even if it was working the number of people processing units would currently be tiny. Other projects have also stalled (Tales from Earth 2, maybe Find Satoshi, PXCtrades). I think the time to resurrect things would be when (if) the final two waves of cards are released and there is the interest back again. Until then I think it's best biding our time, counting our cards and awaiting the signal.

What do others reckon?

[myf]

I think it's time we raised our glasses and said a final huge thank you for the massive (and utterly amazing) effort that went into trying to crack this blessed card. It's sad that we never made it to the end and got a solve, but it was a brilliant attempt at something which I imagine most people would never have thought would get as far as it actually did.

So thank you Chimera, Guin, and all the other people that did clever coding stuff, fixed servers, created websites, spread the word, publicised the effort, ran the software, and did all the other bits that helped get things as far as they did. You all deserve and so much more

[aliendial]

Hear, hear!

[GuyIncognito]

[myf]

*Psssst............ I'm not a sir* (although the drunken eejit bloke at the pub this evening seemed convinced I was, even after being told that I couldn't possibly be my best friend's husband as I'm a girl )

But yeah, I think that had the ending been somewhat less abrupt, more people might have hung on for a bit longer. I certainly hope that when (if?) things pick up and the other cards come out, a decent proportion of the folks will appear again. Alas, I suspect that they've left it too long for that to realistically happen now.

[Furry Mark]

[myf]

I kept it running on my 2 computers for a while after it went down, just in case it came back up at some point.

I think that had the whole thing been kept running, there would have been enough people still going to reach the end of the workunits that were available. Of course, as has been said, there was no guarantee that a solution would have been found. It's just a shame that after all the work that went into it, the thing tailed off rather than reaching a definite stopping point.