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Backup Your Life on a DVD
matt20 writes "I've often wondered what it would take to condense the essence of my life and put it in a searchable format. Well, it looks like that may become a reality. Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything. Here is the article found in New Scientist."
Sounds kinda redudant to me ... isn't this what the new dept. of homeland security is going to do?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Will it remember where I put my @#$!$ car keys?
Now I'll NEVER be able to forget my ex-girlfriend!
do you really want to commit everything to a nice simple, searchable, disc that can be used as evidence against you?
Ok, so I fork over my money, I've got this shiny new DVD with the sum total of my existance on it. Aside from being horribly depressing, so what? What can I do with it? Store it for safekeeping in case of a terrible car accident which leaves me without my memory? No problem! A quick hard reboot with disc inserted (yuck) and I'm better?
Seriously though, aside from being incredibly cool, what's the use of this thing? To pass on to relatives after you're gone? Nefarious use in our legal system? Coaster ("Don't put your drink on the table, use Aunt Jenny instead...")?
What if I forget where I put the dvd?
It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable.
Anyone want to take bets on how fast MyLifeBits will be selling off your personal info? True if you doubt Microsoft's dubious motivation and believe they're working for the greater good, this still brings a new meaning to 'single point of failure'.
--- What
Since I have no life, mine could probably fit into a 3.5" floppy
Does this mean I'll be able to bring out extended special editions? Deleted scenes could be amusing... Out-takes and a gag reel! Woohoo!
I could get my folks to do Director's Commentary... ^_^
"I hate Cthulhu, Cthulhu hates me, I kill his cultists, He eats worlds for tea"
I for one would read the licence agreement on such a thing really, really carefully...
Imagine... All the information submitted to the system becomes copyright of Organization X...
Or am I just being paranoid?
.: Max Romantschuk
How long after this becomes avaliable will the first supeona for full access be issued - for example in a divorce court, patent dispute antitrust case...
Umm....Why do I feel that was one sarcastic comment in the article???
"Do something man. Right now."
The letter combination DVD isn't to be found anywhere in the article.
/. in a while...
There's talk about 1000gb harddiscs, but not DVDs.
One of the stupidest headlines on
As to the idea it self: why? I don't need to excatly what or how I said something to my friends or family. In fact I dont want to...
One good idea, that they don't mention, would be automatic transscription of the audio conversations, thrus making them searchable. Now, that would be nice...
TC - My Photos..
Seriously?
Do the guys at Microsoft seriously consider the PC to be a most reliable of entities? Man, you think after years of running Windows you'd know better.
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up, and wouldn't be that useful day to day unless you were carrying it with you. I forget to take pictures, how am I going to remember to upload the pictures I actually take? And has anyone ever gone back and reread their old email...BORING... unless you're narsisistic who cares what you posted on
This thing sounds good in theory, but in practice people just are not taking that many pictures or writing that many memorable letters. This will be a product for the vain, the famous and the rich who don't know what else to spend their money on.
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project is called MyLifeBits
That's cool. I'm about to start my own project, called MyLifeBites. It'll be a focus group helping nerdy Slashdotters come to grips with the fact that there's nothing in their lives worth backing up.
In the compliance lab I work in, anything we do needs to be documented to prove that it happened. We always joked that we need miner's helmets with little cameras attached that always film what we do. That's what this looks like...
Would it record reality or my distorted perception thereof?
Of course, that is assuming you are just treating the data as still frames, not taking advantage of using the similarities between frames to save space. Also, a great deal of time is spent sleeping, and unless you are recording dreams (which can be too abstract for video to record), that time can be cut, as well as blinking. Let's assume 1400 kbit/s (Mpeg4 coding looks acceptable to me at this rate for everything, on average would preserve more than you can remember at any rate...
4 ,300,000kbit/yr
1400*60=100320kbit/min
*60=6,019,200 kbit/hour
*24=144,460,800kbit/day
*365.25=52,76
*60=3,165,858,000,000kbit
=~360 TB
So to record 60 years of concious, non-blinking time at 1400kbps, you just need 1024 disk arrays like I have at my house...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
A system like MyLifeBits was first suggested in 1945, when presidential technology adviser Vannevar Bush hatched the then farsighted idea of an infinite personal archive based on the emerging digital computer.
Hmmm, sounds like the Farleyfile.
(copied from Jerry Pournelle's page): Big Jim Farley was a New York Tammany Hall politician whose success was partly due to the "Farleyfile": a collection of facts about everyone he ever met. If you went to see Big Jim, by the time you got into his office he knew your name, your birthday, the names of your spouse and children, and what you liked for lunch. It was all on file.
Also, there's a program (Lifesigns?) that's based around a chronological history of data (there's a PC version, and there was a Newton version). You don't go searching for "Letter about Enron", you remember that it was 7 or 8 months ago, and look at email then. Clever premise, loved by all the people who adopted it. Never could get the hang of it myself.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
The writeup makes you think they are sucking memories out of the brain and capturing them to disk. Simply not true. There is nothing at all revolutionary about what they are doing. They are basically designing a sort of journal or ultimate blog. Non-computer related experiences must be fed in and probably commented on (photos, etc). Some computer experiences may be captured automatically (this wasn't very clear, the article was more hype than substance), but nothing too difficult. The 'revolutionary' part they are claiming is the organization and search engine, and maybe some of the computer-auto-capture stuff (again, I can't tell if this is a claim or just an example..). This is not worthy of a Slashdot story, its just another blog...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.