Re: FN-FORUM Untided Devices - Please help

date posted 9th April 2001 10:44

Morgan Richards wrote:
>I don't know if anyone else has heard of united devices, www.ud.com. It is
>a small program that uses your spare CPU cycles to compute information for
>good causes, like cancer drug research, and returns the information to be
>used by whoever it is useful to.
>
>Please visit their site and see what they are doing, I have had friends and
>family die from cancer, as I am sure you all have, and would be very
>appreciative of your help for this good cause.
>
>Thanking you in Advance
>
>Morgan Richards
I joined this but have had several problems:

1) The program is supposed to run in the background and be non-
intrusive, but I have found that it creates a memory leak and can render
other programs inoperative.

2) It suffers from what is known as "the molecule from hell" in that it
may take over 48 hours to calculate a molecule and if you switch off it
goes back to the start. This in combination with (1) is really
frustrating and not advisable if you are carrying out a job on the
computer in question.

3) It can crash. This is very annoying especially if you have got
several "hits" i.e. molecules that could be developed for a cure. It
seems to gather information for a new set of molecules after the crash
but I am not at all sure that the information calculated is sent to the
server. It seems that the programmers have assumed that the computer is
on line all the time and if it can't get through, it crashes. This
happened to me twice, the second time after I had 43 hits.

UD have assured members that the problems are being cured, but I really
feel that they should have been sorted out in beta testing. The thought
that a potential cure has crashed with my machine is very depressing.
Go ahead and load it by all means, but I would urge you to keep looking
at the site and wait till the glitches have been sorted out.
Sincerely,
Mike Preston