This article was posted on The Screen Savers website. Written By Megan Morrone. This isn’t about filesharing but I personally feel that we should feel good about donating extra CPU cycles. Hope we all download this.
“Last July I received an email from Matt. He wrote:
Here’s a quite noble Download of the Day that I truly love.
It’s called the United Devices Cancer Research Project. It’s a minimal download (approx. 2MB) which uses some of your computer’s resources to help work on a cure for cancer. Researchers estimate that if enough users download the software, they may have a cure for cancer in 6 years, as opposed to the 12 years it would take them otherwise.
If you don’t want to have it on while you’re surfing the Net there’s an option to have it as, oddly enough, a screen saver. This is just another example of how broad and powerful the Internet is, and how any one person can help make a difference.
Matt’s suggestion seemed great, but sometimes these projects are too good to be true. I downloaded the UD agent to my system to see for myself. It didn’t seem to affect my PC’s performance, and it has some interesting features. You can watch the project as it happens, you can benchmark your system against the main PC, and you can even earn points that make you eligible for prizes. All the while, you’re helping scientific research.
This is a joint project with The Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, the National Foundation for Cancer Research, and Intel. Don’t be scared away by the Intel connection. I ran Ad-Aware after I downloaded the agent and I didn’t find any spyware on my system.”
