I wanna do DC for Cancer, BUT.........

[Insidious]

I'd really prefer to do it for a non-profit organization.

I have begun to get the impression UD is a for-profit outfit... is this true?

Anyone have a suggestion for me?

I love the Cancer research donation, but I don't want to just be another user taken advantage of to line someone's pockets.


I'm not intending to flame UD... not in ANY way. I just want to give free service to an organization that is service oriented, not profit oriented

 

[Robor]

What about the Distributed Folding or Folding@Home projects? These both benefit medical research. I'm new to the Distributed Folding team myself and I can say it's pretty cool so far. 🙂

 

[ViRGE]

I wouldn't call UD profit orientated(some of their employees are from Dnet), but yes, they are a for-profit group. However, I believe at least one of their projects is non-profit. Check out Intel, they have some information on non-profit projects, and some info on UD's project.

 

[Freewolf]

I'm running tsc myself which is a nonprofit project doing research into childrens cancers and seems to work along side seti pretty good as long as you have 256 megs ram ,less than that and it can slow your machine down unless you run it by itself in which case it is just fine and has no slowdown on your machine at all that I can tell.

 

[Robor]

Link to the other TSC thread. 😀

 

[muttley]

If you look at the structure of most every non profit orginization the employees have to get paid that are full time. UD United Devices started out as a company that was a business to sell big companies spare computational power and pay the 'home' computer some money. The business basicly didn't succeed and they had to change stratagy.
UD did their part to make the cancer program come to fruition and the goal was achieved for the crunching of data for Lukemia and the question was would funding continue for other types of Cancer and the system is still running but I don't know the status and future of grants and funding for the program I do know that Intel was/is involved.

This is my knowledge of the operating structure of the program from years ago to somewhat of the present. UD supplied the program to make things work and it is propritary and not open source as last I know. And that is how the 'Cancer' program got started and there is possibly some DC computing programs still sold by UD for the needs of businesses.

Muttley

 

[Mardeth]

There is also a new project going which is still young and there arent any big teams like us and DPC participating. But its also researches other diseases but the main disease in cancer. It also faster than UD. You can dl it at here.

 

[Insidious]

Ok, TSC on one comp. and UD on the other.

This will be a good (and fun) comparison/compromise for a while.

Thank You all for your suggestions!

-Sid

 

[MemnochtheDevil]

United devices is a for profit company. If you allow them to, they sell some of your bandwith to companies to test sites. You can (last I checked) opt out of these programs and just run cancer. The cancer project however is a demonstration of their distributed computing engine (they also sell this to companies to run on internal networks) and all the data goes to Oxford. UD will not own any of the results/benefits of the cancer project. Oxford will analyze all the data and take the research into the lab phase. There are a couple good FAQs at the UD site if you want more info.

I haven't noticed my computer running the non-cancer projects in the year or so I've been running it. The way I see it, even if their using a small fraction of my computer time to pay the bills to support the infrastructure, it's not a big deal.

Memnoch

 

[Insidious]

I couldn't agree more!

I am not disgruntled or upset with UD in any way.

I'm just looking for the best "warm and fuzzy" I can find. For this, I need to feel like my little insignificant CPU is making some sort of difference towards a humanitarian (ie: not finincial) goal.

I noticed that UDs' scoring explanations describe that some CPUs aren't up to their standards in terms of output and are penalized because of that. This is fine, and I am not complaining, but I'd rather be with a group that feels like they need help and is willing to make me feel as though my tiny little contribution is actually helping. (Not "wasting bandwidth" as UD described "lower end" setups)

So anyway, right now it looks like TSC is a good choice for me.

I support and want to offer a cheer to every DC project and everyone willing to participate, no matter what the goal of their favorite DC contributions.