Sharing a brain

(Upstart) I don’t mean to pick a fight with a colleague, but I have to take exception to something one of my fellow Upstarters said.

In Thursday’s special, staff writer David Schober opined that “Free stuff always fails.” I beg to differ—respectfully, because he’s 6’2” of lean, mean whup-ass machine who they say shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

But the fact is that free has worked for some people. In this instance, I’m thinking of Juno Online, the Internet service provider that was born to offer free e-mail, then grew up into an access provider offering customers a menu of free and fee Internet services.

I don’t mean “worked” in the sense that it serves as the basis for a business that president and CEO Charles Ardai can hand down to his kids. No, Juno’s bleeding from ad cutbacks just like everyone else. But Juno has about four million subscribers, about 3.2 million of them getting the free service—and the on-screen ads—while another 850,000 pay for ad-free access.

And that’s okay, Ardai said recently: All part of the plan. “Free is principally great as a marketing device, but you have to charge something at some point,” he told a conference on the future of the Internet recently.

Now, Ardai has announced he wants to cash in on all the processing power hooked to his company’s no-pay network, selling that computational muscle to companies as a “virtual supercomputer.” He’ll rent out his subscribers’ computers to big science, mostly pharmaceutical companies mapping genomes and mathematicians chasing down big numbers. Subscribers would have to let Juno download the needed access software. Free subscribers would have to leave their computers on all the time and could not opt out of the program.

Critics object that giving third parties such access to subscribers’ hard drives could tempt some unauthorized snooping. Microsoft, they say, might not be able to resist the urge to go looking around for pirated software. They’re not too crazy-nuts, either, about the fact that Juno changed its subscriber agreement to reflect this new initiative on Jan. 18 but didn’t announce its intentions until Feb. 1.

Being a glass-half-full guy, I have a solution: In exchange for handing over their computers at odd hours, let Juno subscribers rent a few microseconds of this computing power for ordinary tasks at bargain basement prices.

It just feels right. Juno, the company that got its start by letting non-gearheads send e-mail for free, could now let them carve off a little piece of Kray heaven for themselves.

Just think of it: More than three million computers all whirring away to aid you in the complex computations you grapple with every day. What are the chances that load of laundry you’re about to put into the wash will come back with an AWOL sock? One in three, you say, Hal? You may want to wait and let your roommate go first.

You want to hit that snooze button, but you’re afraid you’ll miss your train. Log on and have 3.2 million of your neighbors calculate the likelihood that your transit system will experience delays in the next hour. Eureka! Chances are 73%. A ready-made tardiness excuse is at your fingertips, and you’re parked back in the percale for another 20 minutes.

A wireless hook-up could let you figure out the odds on beating that failure-to-stop ticket, factoring in the weather, the years the ticketing officer has been on the force, and five-year projections of the fiscal situation of the town where you ran the red light.

Do your taxes in .00045 milliseconds (not counting time to download the forms). Pick the winner of the sixth at Belmont in the blink of an eye. Generate a computer model of the perfect roll to pick up that 7-10 split. Calculate the odds that some Hollywood producer will say, “You know, it’s not too early to talk sequel to Battlefield Earth. Get me Travolta, and make sure he’s in those platform shoes.”

With a supercomputer to work out real-life solutions like these as the carrot, I bet plenty of people would be willing to let Juno set up housekeeping in their white box.

Hell, I’m willing, and I’m not even a subscriber. But if they can figure a way to work it out, Ardai and company are perfectly welcome to take the wheel and drive my Dell.

And while you’re in there, Charles, maybe you could clean up a few old programs—that 1997 TurboTax, and the LotusNotes I never use. You can dump that SETI program, too; alien races can find us without my help, but Searle needs me.

Just don’t change the Britney Spears wallpaper, and don’t mess with my Sims. I’ve got them just the way I like them.

Editor-in-Chief Brian Quinton just missed a golden opportunity to title a column “Charles in Charge.” Drop him a line at brian_quinton@intertec.com.