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Microsoft's "Immortal Computing" Project
SeenOnSlash writes "Microsoft is working on a project they call 'immortal computing' which would let people store digital information in durable physical artifacts and other forms to be preserved and revealed to future generations, and maybe even to future civilizations. The artifacts would be designed to make the process of accessing the information clear with instructions in multiple languages or hieroglyphics. In one possible use, messages for descendants or interactive holograms might be stored on tombstones. The project was revealed when their patent application recently became public."
Did anyone else also read 'immoral computing'? :)
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Microsoft is working on a project they call 'immortal computing'
As far as projects like this are concerned, there can be only one.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
This is from the company whose business model is built around proprietary document formats - the sole purpose of which is to lock users into a never-ending upgrade cycle.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
in tombstones? i start to understand the vision behind the zune ...
They can't even manage to preserve "digital artifacts" between two different versions of Word, much less forever. If you want to preserve a document forever post it in plain text on the Internet and hope that other people find value in it. You can still find 20-year old documents from the BBS era on the Internet because people found value in them and kept reposting them. And none of those documents are in a proprietary document format!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If there's one company I think of when I think "Easily decodable, well documented and long lived archive data formats" it's Microsoft.
Just think, in 150 years from now some poor bastard could be trying decode an OOXML document on his quantum computer and has to figure out what a WordPerfect 5.1 footer is supposed to look like.
I guess the main question, is what kind of data will they store for future generations? porn? videos of coke and mentos?
Locksmith
In 1000 years, people may try to read that data, but then they'll quickly loose interest when they realize it's in an ancient proprietary format that can only be interpreted with an application that hasn't existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. And who says technology will be more advanced in the far future than it is now, allowing people to read it regardless?
One scenario the researchers envision: People could store messages to descendants, information about their lives or interactive holograms of themselves for access by visitors at their tombstones or urns.
Here's the thing about this. It seems really fixated on physical storage formats (i.e. floppy disks, CD roms, etc), ignoring the whole probability that more and more, storage in the future will be a network service. Take Amazon's S3, for example, or google's online storage plans. It won't simply be the case that a bad hard drive, or a faulty CD-R will lose critical family data, as storage via internet will likely be distributed regionally, or nationally.
Now, file formats are another discussion entirely, but I think things are heading in a good direction with things like ODF.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
... is not to make the material support last forever, but to make as many copies as possible, and replace them often.
If the goal is to keep valuable information for future generations, a regularly upgraded, Internet-based distributed storage system would be a better bet.
Have your PC encased in a block of amber so your descendants can marvel at how primitive our coding was.
"The artifacts would be designed to make the process of accessing the information clear with instructions in multiple languages or hieroglyphics"
This is Microsoft we're talking about, their idea of clear seems to be a bit muddy at best. Besides, doesn't Windows already come with unintelligible hieroglyphics, otherwise known as "error messages?"
In other news, the RIAA has filed suit against Microsoft over their "Immortal Computing" project, saying that if the general public wants perpetual access to their media, they should just keep rebuying the same crap over and over.
This (the problem with constantly evolving systems) is a problem which needs to be addressed in order that information or data created today can be accessible in the far future. That's not to say that everything and all information should be available to be stored (and retrievable) in this manner, but in the least public information.
One of my aunts did a Civil War battleground tour, recently, on the tail of visiting relatives in Pennsylvania, and sent me a really neat letter about it. I have a really peculiar middle name, a gift from my great-grandfather, and she managed to find out that he got it from his grandfather, who enlisted in a Pennsylvania regiment about two months before the battle of Gettysburg and died, there. Found his name on the monument and everything. I thought this was one of the coolest things I'd heard in a while, just because I personally feel so little connection with history or my ancestors.
It got me thinking about all the OTHER things I wish I could know about them. These were coal-mining Irish folks, not so much for the reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, so they didn't make a lot of efforts to record anything, at least not that's survived the years. In the other branches of my family, the more recent immigrants from Croatia and Spain, we have a few stories and a little jewelry, but past 1880 or so, there's just nothing.
I want to know more. I want to know what they thought about the current events of their world (why DID my great-great-great grandfather enlist, anyway? ). What did they think of their jobs, and their families, and about why they were in their places in the world? Did they wonder what I'd be like? What did they wonder most about the future, and did they care?
So... tell me, Slashdot, on this fine, dark, cold Tuesday morning: If this technology, or something similar, had been available, what do you wish your ancestors would have left behind for you to read, or watch videos of, or hear? And why?
They can sell upgrades to the dead.
When dealing with the dead, it's really more of a service.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I have seen more than enough science fiction to have seen this application in many forms. How can this initiative be patentable?!
It's a good idea, but not original. I read the article, but couldn't force myself through the whole patent. Still, it sounds to me like they are trying to patent the idea of a time capsule, with the only difference being that they are talking about information in a more interactive form.
They aren't even trying to patent a specific technique, but the whole idea. From the patent application (all the way at the bottom which I did read):
What has been described above includes examples of the subject matter. It is, of course, not possible to describe every conceivable combination of components or methodologies for purposes of describing the subject matter, but one of ordinary skill in the art may recognize that many further combinations and permutations of the subject matter are possible. Accordingly, the subject matter is intended to embrace all such alterations, modifications and variations that fall within the spirit and scope of the appended claims. Furthermore, to the extent that the term "includes" is used in either the detailed description or the claims, such term is intended to be inclusive in a manner similar to the term "comprising" as "comprising" is interpreted when employed as a transitional word in a claim.So basically they are claiming that any system which in any way is similar to theirs is covered. Ok, par for the course. It still isn't very original, and doesn't deserve a patent.
What do they want to achieve anyway? Will you have to buy a renewable licensing scheme for accessing this information? Will it contain drm? Will sony end up owning your grandfathers immortal thoughts?
So what if I write an interactive information system as described, with the one difference is that I'm still alive, and I just want my genius available to my friends and family without actually having to talk to them. Does the system all of a sudden owe licensing costs to MS when I die?
This has to be one of silliest patent ideas I've seen. Of course, I haven't seen all that many and remain convinced that there are many more that are sillier.
Let's get the joke out of the way first... As this is Microsoft, we will have to keep updating to newer versions of Microsoft Immortal Computing? Will they be backwardly compatible? ;)
I think we all wish our precious data would live forever, or at least a lot longer than it's likely to at the moment. My parents have stacks of old photographs in boxes... will I have such a collection when I'm older or will I only have a smattering of stuff I've taken recently? I'm just a couple of hard disk crashes away from losing most of my stuff, after all.
Oh, and did anyone else find the "youtube videos from beyond the graaaaaaaaaaave!" concept a little bit creepy?
I say we take-off and slashdot the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure
deus does not exist but if he does
Here's a snapshot of a prototype of what these artifacts will look like.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
I think I'd be correct in saying that most demonstrable long-lived storage medium is vellum. It doesn't take long to think of the most demonstrable short-lived medium... Actually I think that the British laws are still recorded on vellum. They've been doing it for hundreds of years. Computers are just a fad.
-1 not first post
It's nice to think that all the technology we're used to will endure forever, but history goes in cycles, not straight lines. Civilizations fall as well as rise. When this civilization falls, it's possible that the infrastructure to build laptops, hard drives, and routers may disappear too, not to mention the power grid to support them. Whether that happens in 100 years or 10,000, it would be nice to know that the stuff we've learned can be preserved past that date.
I would be really happy to work on a way to take the most practical 10,000 pages of the Wikipedia in a few languages and put them onto some physical media that doesn't require tech to read, and doesn't deteriorate much over time.
Even a book, if it's printed on nearly-indestructible paper, would be good.
I've actually tried to get Wikipedia to think about some form of this, but they think I'm predicting doom n' gloom. I'm not, I'm just hedging bets. If I'm wrong, all we lose is some time and effort. If I'm right, the payoff is huge.
Clearly this is just the beginning of work whose logical conclusion is Bill Gates merging with the Helios core.
I think this is rather funny actually since NOTHING lasts forever. Nothing.
Punched Tape!
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Wow, for a second there I thought Microsoft was doing something for the good of all mankind! Preserve data for future civilisations? Great! Then I clicked the link to the patent application. I almost forgot Microsoft's (or any corp) actions are solely driven by profit. Damn writeup.
Good question and I think it depends on the number of generations they are removed from me, the information I'd like my parents to store is much different to the information I'd like a Great Great Great Great Granparent to store for me. This is assuming there is a limit to the amount of data they can preserve into the future.
With the more ancient relatives I'd be more interested in the day to day trivia of their lives since their lives would quite likely be very different from the life I'm used to but the more recent relatives I'd like to know more about their relationships between other branches of my family. For everyone I'd like some insight into any large decisions they have made, e.g. going to war or whatever.
I often wander to what extent my perception of the past is influenced by black and white photographs or grainy footage, it's strange that when I see some of the very rare pioneering colour film from the Edwardian period it seems a lot easier to relate to as the past being a real place than it does in black and white and I wonder what effect this will have on our ancestors as they view our lives today in full colour.
Easily. The similar sci-fi projects did not contain enough technical details, or the details they contained aren't applicable to this particular galaxy due to the local physics laws, and this is a necessary requirement for filing a patent. It's like denying a patent for a warp engine suitable for interstellar travel just because a ton of sci-fi writers has already described it.
P.S. IANAL.
Bill's just trying to find the ultimate storage device he can download his consciousness onto for a future advanced civilization to recreate into some sort omnipotent being. I for one welcome our descendants future supreme overlord.
They want it to last forever, but then patent it to not allow anyone else to use the technology?
Oh, wait... that's Microsoft. They don't need to make sense at all, silly me!
So say we all
Microsoft the one to finally bring to the world an absolutely universal and timeless standard of communication with which all future generations of not merely systems that humans create but also the humans that created them themselves will be compatible...
A HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA !!!!!!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
OpenDocument or ODF "became an officially published ISO and IEC International Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) on November 30, 2006 ... The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats so organizations and individuals can avoid being locked in to [and outlive] a single vendor."
Reduce, reuse, cycle
http://missioneternity.org/
...It's anything relating to Microsoft.
Erasing them and everything they touch from the face of the earth is one of the most helpful things we can do for future civilisation.
you had me at #!
"How interesting. This ancient culture seemed to communicate solely by using images of nude females."
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
http://free.patentfetcher.com/Patent-Fetcher.php?s ubmit=Fetch&PN=20070011109
Go to the link above and it will get the patent docs into a PDF format so that you don't have to install that ridiculous TIFF plugin. And if someone out there knows an easier way to view the page without a ridiculous plugin (under Linux+Firefox) please tell?
Am I the only one who thought that they already put messages on tombstones, yknow, by carving?
BSOD taking on a whole new meaning.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Try starting by supporting vendor-neutral, open file formats! If Microsoft are sincere, they must realize that they're not going to be around when the information needs to be read.
In a 1000 years an advanced civilation stumble across an ancient artifact. The scientists begin to analyze the strange device by connecting it to their terminal. Suddenly panic breaks out, because across all the screens in the control room is the long forgotten "Blue Screen of Death".
... Alcor. They are much more user friendly.
"Help! Some bastard locked me in a box and buried me alive! Air supply is limited!"
... and then they built the supercollider.
It looks like you are tring to decypher this ancient artefact!
Does this mean we have to start calling it the "Blue Screen of Immortality"?
>wish your ancestors would have left behind for you to read
Where did you hide the money?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
From around the 1840s on, they left their local newspapers behind. You can read the news to understand what they talked about, and look at the adverts to see what they were buying.
Will they create Open Format, or use their propriatory format? I hope they would invent better one than their previous so-called formats.
I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said:--Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
I'm sure there's no place for such travesties as "useWord2002TableStyleRules" in a document format intended to last thousands of years and be readable by future civilizations ... nor in the tens-of-years timeframe which OOXML
pretends to address.
Now the blight of the Blue Screen of Death will be passed on from generation to generation and will last for eternity. Even if our civilization is lost, millions of years later our descendants will unearth the artifacts we have deliberately buried and have their computers promptly crash once they extract the data from them. Perhaps they will conclude that we were inept at computer programming - or perhaps they will have finally found the missing link in the mystery as to why there was a sudden shift over to Unix-based operating systems sometime in the 21st century.
"10,000 years this little appliance has been deactivated but perfectly preserved, my brothers and sisters. Let us switch it on and find priceless information out about our past..."
FATAL EXCEPTION 00000x010101011100E HAS OCCURRED. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR.
"Shit!"
2000 years later...
Archaeologist A: Wow! A graveyard from the early 21st century, and it's perfectly preserved!
Archaeologist B: An awesom find!
A: I can't begin to imagine how much we can learn from this...
B: Yeah... oh look! This one has a kind of primitive digital inscription!
A: Can you activate it?
B: Reconfiguring my power source now... ah yes...
A: What is it?
B: A strange message..
A: What?
B: "This gravestone has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Would you like to tell Microsoft about this problem?"
A: Who is Microsoft?
So much information is stored on media that may or may not last for more than a decade or so. Unfortunately for M$ though, while the data can be preserved or moved from physical representation to physical representation, the real danger to the longevity of the information is the format that it is written in. I have files on my computer that are 15 or more years old that i can still read and use because they are in ascii format. If they were in another format such as wordperfect, lotus 123 or even older word formats, i would have a hard time reading them today and an impossible time a few years from now. So the bottom line is that while preserving data to longterm physical media is a good idea, it should never be stored in a proprietary or envrypted format.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
What about prior art for storing information for future generations, things like actual hieroglyphics, dating back to pretty much the beginning of civilization? Why on earth would anyone take a stab at reinventing this, when we have physical examples of how to do it already. We know they last because they lasted.
This is a case where Microsoft needs to remember: gloves.
stuff |
The patent surrounds the method of storing data on an device to persist indefinately. I want to know any hardware vendor today that makes some form of silicon or any other storage medium that lasts indefinately, or one that has announced plans to make such a device. Microsoft has some really interesting things coming out of their research labs, but this one makes me scratch my head, since they are not a hardware company, and no hardware company has anything remotely close to handling this research. While it's very interesting to be thinking of these things, I don't see why this is a big deal as compared to any other research project any other technology company may be working on.
/. Compare this to all research being done in quantum computing arenas, where some rather radical advances and theories are being pursued, way more radical than this. Do you read about them here? Not usually.
Honestly, this is making headlines because whenever Microsoft files for obscure patents that their rather talented architects and strategic planners can forsee, they are challenged on the basis of validity for their patent. If some startup somewhere was doing this research, it would have never made
Then again, the ol' rock, chisel, and hammer seemed to hold information for a damn long time...
Kal-el, I speak to you from an ancient time...
And I, for one, welcome our holographic interactive ancestors overlord
Seriously, I've been thinking about this matter.
I mean, a CD or a Hard Disk, at first glance, might seem tougher and more durable than a hyeroglyph on a wall in a pyramid....but it's not!
And all of our knowledge might be gone if not backed up, in not so much time...
640KB of virtualized ram will be enough for everybody
MS couldn't be original if their lives depended on it:
http://www.longnow.org/about/
Very, very clever. If I had mod points I'd give them! If Microsoft is really serious about doing this, then they will be doing the very antithesis of what they have been doing since, well, ever. Proprietary file formats anyone? Secret protocols? DRM? All of these things which they've been doing and promoting from the very beginning are precisely the sorts of things that will frustrate future digital archaeologists to no end. Consider the simple fact that we can still read Galileo's technical writings from the 1560's, but not Marvin Minsky's technical writings from the 1960's, thanks to proprietary storage hardware. Stuff is basically written on the wind these days, and Microsoft has done more than any single organization (largely because of their market monopoly) to make information as evanescent as it is now.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Replication is one part of the answer; the more copies of something that exist, the less likely it is that all will be destroyed or lost.
Another part of the answer is to keep the stuff online. That would require special services of course, don't expect your Geocities page to still be around 100 years hence, but if you can get it onto www.archive.org it has a much better chance of survival. I think there's a market nice for a "perpetual server" service, something which accepts a big upfront payment and promises to keep your data online "forever".
If Google had been the owner of this patent, I would love the idea. When it's Microsoft I feel the inclination to slap my hand over my wallet. Not only don't I trust Microsoft to get anything right, but I'm sure they would find a way in the future to tap into my wallet after I was already committed. If Microsot cannot get their bread and butter OS to work correctly after all these years and attempts, what would lead anyone to believe they could get this right?
Methinks that's taking backward compatibility a bit too far.
Personally I would preserve the original 'Prince of Persia' for our millenial descendants to enjoy, nothing else.
Nothing witty
It's clear, I can see it now....
"Come on kids! Lets see who can get the highscore on grandma!"
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
...if it will be in a proprietary Microsoft format.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
* Paris Hilton Video
* George Bush dropping the First Dog
* Wikipedia: The Greatest Edits
* Donald Trump's Hairpiece
* Star Wars where Han shoots first
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
...that with ancient texts, the challenge is more in the decyphering of the language in which they were written, not the storage format (be that stone, papyrus, cuneiform or whatever else). The issue here is that if the content is locked up in a proprietary format, it stops the decyphering of the content. After all, the excitement in ancient texts is mostly in the message, not the vessel containing it.
Hell, we have enough issues understanding older forms of languages still in use (German shorthand schrift from the nineteenth century, for instance), let alone the heirohlyphs of the Maya. Even with the text readable, the significance still remains to be discovered. That is the challenge - not the digital format of a Word document (except for the IT brigade, perhaps).
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
if Microsoft is really thinking about trying to patent and own this technology. I've thought about for years of making a computer controlled stylus that would encode information into clay tablets. Like the old cuneiform tablets that have been around for oh 3000+ years. Unlike Microsoft I would never try to own or monopolize this kind of technology, especially with the stupid broken corrupt corporate controlled US Patent system. Anyone who disagrees can kiss the shiny metal *ss of the beings who will dig up my tablets.
... if you believe in life after death. clearly, the zune wasn't meant for living people.
And no windows.
Magneto-optical storage technology uses a Natural phenomenon that allows geophysicists to determine the direction of the Earth's weak magnetic field, millions of years ago. Is that kind of data storage long-term enough for you? The sad thing is, because ordinary hard drives have so much more capacity these days than MO disks, the makers of MO technology are considering shutting down the production lines. I don't like this at all, and hope to stock up on spare drives and disks before they are gone forever. My personal needs don't require terabytes of storage; gigabytes are sufficient for me. MO is perfect for this. And long-term access to that data, no bit-rot allowed, is what I need the most.
After reading the patent application it sure sounds like Microsoft has managed to patent the Golden Records sent out on the Voyager spacecraft back in to 1970's. Way to go US Patent Office.
IMPORTANT-READ CAREFULLY: This End-User License Agreement ("EULA") is a legal agreement between you (either an individual or a single entity) and Microsoft Corporation ...
Not anywhere near enough caffene for the morning...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The key concept is the interactivity. The idea of interacting with a dead relative on a borthday is not so much creepy as it is incredibly sad. The primary reason we're able to carry on as normal people is the natural fade of intense emotions over time.
If you were continually reminded every year of some tragic loss, with the same intensity as when it first occurred, would that be a benefit or detriment to your life? This is not a choice to be made lightly, and it's certainly not the promotional use case I'd like to hear if it does evolve into a product-service.
-BA
Lovely post, but I think with people looking back at our generation it's going to be the other way round: there are going to be so many videos/ photos/ emails etc available that future generation will be utterly sick of knowing what we thought about various issues that by then will be of no interest.
You identify an ancestor who died at Gettysburg whose name you share -- it is is altogether fitting and proper to be interested in someone you're linked to, and who was connected to such an historic day; but what about his father whose main interest was the price of coal in the 1810s? And his father? etc. I think ancestor fatigue would soon set in -- and so it will be, I think, with our descendents.
I suggest the solution is not software, but brevity: keep it short; leave one 5-minute movie in which you say it all, and junk all the other emails, videos, etc. They might have time to look at that in 2082.
No one seems to have mentioned that some people are probably going to advertise something as a final act. Worse, maybe some companies out there will pay to bury you if you let them stick an advertisement in your memory device. "Brought to you by Wonder Pictures. If it is a good picture, it's a wonder."
This has the nice bonus that usually no-one cares about information that's boring, so as time goes on the good stuff lingers while the blogs die; it's very similar to natural selection, right down to the immortal digital information being stored in temporary bodies.
Richard Dawkins, is that you?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Whatever future generations will need they will retain continuously.
Tell me about any practical help we have got from the suddenly discovered things of the past.
Nothing but artefacts of sheer entertainment.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Yeah, this promise has been made before. I heard back in Egypt they sold Pharaohs on the idea of recording sound in pottery. Not even the mythbusters could replay the sound....
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
Well, this may be the first product where the 20 year span of the patent doesn't bother me.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
that reminds me of the rings found by the scientist in the original "time machine" film. They were simple to use and contained all the information needed.
althought the photonic computer in the remake was way cooler
"Oh my, I'm sure that people thousands of years from now will want to know all about me, too."
Maybe somebody should just get over themselves already.
For as long as man has been man the problem of how to bequeath one's experience of life to those who follow has brought us to the contemplation of the true meaning of life. Only now would someone be so self-obsessed that they would want to claim the problem and its solution as their own.
At least the patent doesn't try to claim as one of the implementations "tears in rain."
Live fully in the moment, and eternity will take care of itself.
I think "Immortal Computing" is a misnomer. Maybe "Immortal Data Storage" would suffice, but when I think of computing I think of software - something that executes. Their term would better suite software designed to be highly portable, that survives independently of hardware (java?).
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
They're talking about using this on gravestones, but I think it could be better used at places like Yucca Mountain. It seems that a place that will remain toxic for several thousand years would be a good place to keep information in a form that could be accessed for all that time. This would be especially important if, say, we somehow forget about it and then "discover" it again centuries or millenia down the road.
Seriously. Shut the hell up.
Please. Stop hating a company because they make ***gasp*** PROFIT and ***gasp*** try to make MORE profit. Last time I checked that was the purpose of buisness.
Whether you like them or not, they must be doing something right. ~90% of the computing world is a much bigger number than you realize. And don't give me that lock-in crap monopoly anti-trust crap, because there are obviously people that still function just fine without using anything Microsoft.
No one is FORCING you to use their products, just like no one is forcing the millions of people that DO use their products. They won. Get over it.
Living With a Nerd
> Microsoft ... which would let people store digital information in durable physical artifacts
> and other forms to be preserved and revealed to future generations, and maybe even to future civilizations.
When I first read this, my first thoughts were about Digital Rights Management...
I childed myself, hey, Microsoft can do projects for public good to propel
humanity into a better future too, like the old timers' IBM. Maybe Microsoft
are just looking for some good karma and good PR?
But then my hopes were dashed:
> The project was revealed when their patent application recently became public."
Someone at Microsoft smells a buck. At that, a buck out of the dead.
Really, Microsoft? Does anyone sell "I am not a Cash Cow" T-shirts?
Holograms on your tombstone? Now you can get DMCA MPAA notices when you're dead too.
I know what to do with all that porn I've been stocking up on.
Wow. You have no idea how a monopoly operates in the real world, do you?
Back when AT&T ruled the telephone market, would you have told people to shut up about that anti-trust crap and say things like "AT&T must have been doing something right" every time someone complained about having to rent their handset?
After all, no one was FORCING anyone to use AT&T. They could just go without a phone. They won. Get over it.
So let's all roll over and die because making an effort to improve compatibility in the entire computing world might affect Microsoft's profits.
The Eternal Blue Screen of Death... "It just wont go away!"
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
If you're going to think "long term", think millenia, and see how such approaches would fare:
10,000 years from now, people will not be speaking the same languages we speak today. Computers, if they exist, will not work on the same principles -- we're just at the beginning of the computer age, and already quantum computing is threatening a new revolution.
The Egyptians had the right idea: chisel pictures into rock, and put them inside a big stable structure made of rock, located in the desert.
An excellent book by Stewart Brand on this topic is "The Clock of the Long Now", which describes the challenges in creating a clock that will run -- reliably and unaided -- for 10,000 years. Part of this thought experiment is the design of an accompanying library of information.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
It will probably work about as well as this picture from the zune site. Ghostly, for sure, but right in line with other dissapearing data formats. It worked OK until Word 2025 came out and required an upsell.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If we do trust Microsoft with this kind of project, people of the future will think that blue was a very popular color.
This sig is false.
It's too early in the morning :-)
I have some web pages from a dozen years ago reflected in the search archives and I suspect they'll be there as long as the net exists. Particularly since the cost of storage continues to drop dramactically and investors pay hundreds of billions of dolalrs to fund search companies.
MONEY! You fool.
...will be stored using a patented, proprietary techinque. This fact will say future
generations more abaout us as all of the the stored data.
they'll never release the information to access the data... unless you purchased immortal assurance.
Unfortunately they were encrypted with Microsoft Hieroglyphics RC-2 and the license key expired when v1.0 came out.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
At first they'll just try to run bits of our code...then more..and more..until they have a few functionnal applications. They will feel like Gods as they recreate our intriguing code and apply it to their system to ressurect the dreaded primitive beast known as "Windows".
And then all Hell will break loose. The BSOD wil run rampant, terrorizing the populace. Somewhere along the way Ian Malcom will probably spout nonsense while high on morphine, too.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Beep ... No keyboard detected ... beeep ... press F5 to continue.
Anyway, my point is: while all of that data-timecapsule stuff is a noble intent, I won't be surprised if "immortal computing" morphs into a new backup technology for corporate servers.
Multipass!
Hello. The initial C14 content of this artifact is X%. Measure its current C14 content, then travel back in time the appropriate interval and purchase a license from Microsoft to access this data.
Thank you,
The Microsoft Immortal Advantage Team
That's an "insightful" point of view I also once held.
Then I grew up.
You can speculate about alternate realities and "what would have happened" as much as anyone else, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has been at the center of the personal computing revolution, one which has profoundly shaped how people communicate and interact with each other across contentinents and across all segments of life (work, play, love, etc).
In my own (short) life time, the personal computer (and the internet) has gone from something squarely the realm of nerds, hobbyists, and weirdos, to something indispensible to anyone which has the means to access it. The OLPC project discusses sending laptops to places that have basic disease, food, and other issues because the impact a connected computer can have on a person's present and future cannot be overstated.
Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for bringing computing, such as it is, to everyone. There's a lot to dislike about the Microsoft shaped idea of "computing", but it is what it is, and they played a central role, perhaps larger than even intel, in making it happen.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Sigh. Microsoft just patented the concept of people leaving information about themselves for future generations.
What's the catch? Oh, yeah "electronically". WTF is wrong with the patent office that they allow applicants
to append whatever the prevalent technology of the day is, to the end of their patent application as a sign of
originality.
The formula looks like this: [standard idea with which everyone is familiar] + ["The Web"] = [New Concept]
Obviously in this case we're talking about consumer electronics and not the web, but the point is the same.
Microsoft just patented the "Time Capsule", in fact I'll be amazed if they don't call it the "Microsoft Time Capsule"
in a fit of creative brilliance. Never mind that the idea is a standard part of cultural awareness, they've added something
new and its -- yes -- today's standard technologies for data storage. Sure there are plenty of time capsules out there,
but there's no prior art for this one because Microsoft was the first to marry all those 'pre-personal-computing' ideas
with their obvious 'post-personal-computing' counterparts.
And with an army of lawyers, there's a whole lot of work out there applying that formula above to each and every
concept on Earth.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Ask to http://www.johntitor.com/! He said that Microsoft will not exist in the Future... [OMG: I can believe I cited *that* piece of crap] eNjoy
Amazing that they don't see the irony in developing a patented proprietary process for "immortal" computing.... I guess they think they are immortal.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
We'd need to replace them first. Specifically windows XP, which is essentially the same as 5 years ago (it was released 2002 right?), and is still quite easy to get working, and quite easy to use. I mean, contrast the following:
.tar.gz from the firefox website. Open it to find what appears to be all the files that make up firefox. Extract it and attempt to run various things, firefox, updater etc. Nothing happens (at all). Attempt to read the readme, which seems to contain just a web address. Go there, and look at the woeful "install instructions", which don't actually say anything[1]. Go hunting on the net. Eventually find that the best way to get FF2 is to run a few command-line commands on yum to activate the "Development" download repository and download FF2 for Fedora Core 7.
a senotes/#install
Installing Firefox 2.0 on XP:
Download the installer from the firefox website, run and keep pressing "next".
Installing Firefox 2.0 on Fedora Core 6 (linux):
Download a
[1]: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0.0.1/rele
Installing Firefox 2:
Please note that installing Firefox 2 will overwrite your existing installation of Firefox. You won't lose any of your bookmarks or browsing history, but some of your extensions and other add-ons might not work until updates for them are made available.
And then there's the struggle to activate hardware-acceleration on my Radeon X1900 under FC6. Apparently just installing the ati driver isn't enough, I have to use the command-line-login to run some really long commands at run-level 3 (without the help of copy-paste), followed by modifying the X config file myself to undo some of what these commands did, specifically reverting the modules section back to the default 7 or so modules (just removing the whole section works), instead of just loading dri, which the defaults included anyway. Then I had to add some more lines to disable some things so that it didn't drop back to software rendering for no obvious reason.
On XP? Just install the drivers, and the newest direct-X as part of whatever 3D app or game wants to use it. Works first time.
So... tell me, Slashdot, on this fine, dark, cold Tuesday morning: If this technology, or something similar, had been available, what do you wish your ancestors would have left behind for you to read, or watch videos of, or hear? And why?
I'm adopted and would like a generic family history info. and some genetic medical history information. I've go through phases of genology, and most of it is just person's first & last name, when they were born, who they married, when they died, how many kids did the have, and who their parents were. That's 90% of what most people have to work with or leave behind. Think about that. Now think about myspace, slashdot, youtube, and even google or yahoo mail accounts that you could leave a username and password in your will. This is just the tip of the information that we are about to collect. Shortly within 10-20 years, I could see an ipod sized device with several TB recording damn near your whole life or atleast the segments you bookmark that you want kept, your entire entertainment history be it books, music, movies or even games could be stored and logged on a single device. Think of this as the collected info that your grand kids might leave behind. 3-4 generations of that, and they'll start to think that of this era as having almost no personal information left behind.
"Jeff's autobiographical epitaph brought to you by Miracle whip! Don't forget that tangy zip!"
If Microsoft is really serious about doing this, then they will be doing the very antithesis of what they have been doing since, well, ever.
I wonder how long it will take Slashdot posters to figure out the difference between Microsoft product groups and Microsoft Research? Every time there is any positive press about Microsoft Research (which is a totally separate division) the little minds come out sputtering...but...but... that's not what their products do! Guys: that's the whole point of having a Research group: to be far ahead of product. You might as well express wonderment that a photocopy company could work on Ethernet. Is Microsoft "really serious" about this? Of course not. If an article about Microsoft mentions a "researcher" then it means that they aren't really serious about it yet. If/when they get serious they will talk about product. They are a product company after all.
I post this because it is really dull to come to an article about Microsoft Research and be inundated with Microsoft bashing. Did you know that Microsoft Research has a world-beating collection of Haskell programmers? If one of them is discussed on Slashdot will I have to hear about how people hate VB and Visual Studio? Or maybe, just once could we talk about the research and leave the bashing to an article about Microsoft products.
Wait, you're talking about Shaft?
Then we can can dig it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I've worked in the field since 1975. I distinctly remember reading a complete article about doing just this using the technology of the day. It was in one of the well-known hobbyist magazines (73, Kilobaud, Creative Computing and the like), and included the idea of using then existing technology to create a long-term tombstone with interactive features.
The article also referred to similar proposals dating back to recording technology, along with a bunch of "Buried Alive" Alarms.
OOh! I'm so impressed! Current products are almost compatible with ones from five years ago! You must be so proud.
Don't mind me, btw, I'm just opening some Quark XPress 2.1 files from 1990 in my new copy of InDesign. I'll use them in my layout with my Filemaker docs from '92 and my Photoshop files from '93.
Yet again an M$ stooge acts as if any functionality at all = best possible option.
Yeah, right.
Kinda like this article. Out here in reality we know that folks like the Long Now Project have been working on these issues for over twenty years. So, as usual, M$ shows up pathetically late, does a slight variation, and announces, Look At Our Brilliant NEW Idea!
Bullsh*t.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
but how much DRM will be built in? will future or alien technologies be able to decipher it?
Power to the Penguin!
I could see doing that for your kids - after all, when you're old and cranky, you will want to get back at them somehow for putting you in that dingy nursing home.
But what do you have against your future generations? Why do you hate them so much?
Of course, this is slashdot, so it's an entirely theoretical discussion, but still....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Go figure: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2001- July/093153.html
I really don't mind the opinions of brutal, dumb, nationalist, racist, sexist, religious humans.
I just have to ask one question. Immortal means that an object is unable to die. Since Microsoft is providing for "immortal data", does this mean that data can be considered alive?
Looks like somebody may have indulged is some prior art. And I am sure they are not the only ones. I recall someone from a few years ago developing a project to laser enscribe data on a titanium disc for archive purposes. All you needed was a microscope to read the data. with many many thousands of pages on something smaller than your hand. Better than sheets of copper, for sure.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
We just can't figure out what the shiny blue things mean the ancients left, it's supposed to be some type of information but we can't figure out why the numbers are there or what they mean.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Just to show that you can't plan for everything (Wikipedia)
--
E
"People in the 21st century must have really loved these grey characters on blue background" -- A 31st century archeologist.
This pretty much, at first glance, reminds me of a similar project by etoy.CORPORATION called "Mission Eternity". A second look, of course, shows a lot of differences, but hey, this is definitely an interesting subject!
Maybe you want to see what etoy is doing here: www.missioneternity.org Anyhow, I prefer etoy's version of this ambitious ideaFrom the linked patent: " Assignee Name and Adress: Microsoft Corporation Redmond WA " ... wtf is an adress?
You would think they would run their own patent through a bloody spellcheck.
"Dictator Flakes. They WILL be delicious."
> Besides, doesn't Windows already come with unintelligible hieroglyphics, otherwise known as "error messages?"
PC LOAD LETTER
I see a big liability here. If for some reason MS fails to deliver a dead person's emails/records to the descendents, the dead would come after them. From all those movies, the dead coming after you could really be messy business...
Life is about being a Phoenix!
Great X-files episode. Voice of Christ raising the dead recorded in ceramic.
Loose lips lose spit.
Do NOT under any circumstances press "any key" when ready...
How long before someone of Egyptian decent claims prior art & sues Microsoft ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
So, someday some future linguist will be saying "This system was once used in a security capacity. And, clearly this screen is of EXTREME importance. It is all blue with white lettering and states that there has been a General Protection Fault, and it gives a location. I expect that the infrastructure that this system monitored is no longer in existence, though the machine still generates these warnings at unexpected intervals. Oddly, to clear the message one must restart the security device."
First, how much money will Mocrosoft make from this?
Secondly, if the goal is to keep valuable information for future generation, your scheme will require a massive duplication of all the data trash we accumulated today. This is a big waste of resources (hardware and energy) that people often envision as the solution. Are we going to build all kinds of data warehouses cooled by running rivers in order to store this massively duplicated data? We better pray we don't run out of electricity, if that is the choice we make.
Ray Kurzweil's First Law said, the destruction of information is the first sign of intelligence. We are very good at collecting information - we have cardiogram data from millions of patients everyday, traffic cameras on major highways in near-real-time, and weather satellite feed all over the world. Most likely we don't keep the information; we overwrite the memory once it is no longer critically important. This is equally true for blogs that contain links to other blogs with links to other random odd news that few will be interested in a month from now.
Maybe we feel the need to keep every piece of information intact, since we are the ones who crafted the zesty blogs and posted the witty comments. Realistically this is pointless. Human brains are designed to sleep and forget, so that unnecessary data does not clog the system and degrade performance. Those who don't usually suffer from attention deficit and random memory dump. (Wonder how this coincide with the Microsoft experience.) Most people have tons of data on their PCs that subconsciously they know they will never read again. They just keep them because a) it took a long time to create, b) it has entertainment or sentimental values, c) it may become useful one day, d) the hard drive is big enough. This is equivalent to a garage or an attic full of assorted junk... except all the junk is digital and easily duplicated, and thus has even less resale value than that kayak collecting dust in the corner.
Does it really make sense to make them immortal?
To collect is an evolutionary trait - our ancestors gathered and kept things for times of need. Our 20th century affluence has overcome much of the material poverty, but the human nature hardly changed. This resulted in a twisted culture of anti-utilitarianism. We even arrogantly think our future generations will one day benefit from our collective wisdom - and we are willing to waste precious computing power to prove it.
Est ubi gloria Babylonia? I'm not saying there is nothing we need to keep from our culture, but the idea that Microsoft can engineer the 'immortality' of anything is just blasphemy.
It's called open source. 500 years we'll still be able to use it.
:)
And ummm also Amiga
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
In a few years a Word document may seem like digital garbage but add another 400 years to that and it will be insight into today's society, no matter how trivial.
"pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma"
From A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The fuckers wont even let me upgrade my motherboard board without reactivation/reinstallation , i can just see it now in a million years some 4 armed hyper monkey tries booting my seagate only to be greeted with that damn blue screen,
When I read Microsoft and Immortality in the same context I am thinking immediately about Undead and Zombies. Fortunately mummies and pyramids are prior art, so sink in the patent hell, Microsoft, for eternity.
There you are, staring at me again.
2053 01 18
Mood: Frustrated
An old big band tune finally made it into the public domain today, and put me into a nostalgic mood. So I went digging through my backup archives for an old disk image of some stuff I downloaded way back in 2010.
It was corrupted, unfortunately; I was so pissed off with it being broken the year after that I never bothered to repair it before I just said screw it and moved to another OS. So I finally get the thing booted, and I come to find out that the only thing that can play the music I bought is the Windows Media Player that came with it. WMP requires something called "WGA validation", that wanted to connect to Microsoft to get permission. Needless to say they went out of business YEARS ago, along with the company that bought them.
I know, I know - why don't I just crack the damn crypto with my phone, and be done with it? Well, I was on my work PC at this point, and they're monitored for illegal activities like that. DMCA violations aren't as easy to hide now as they were back then. I'll have to *cough*NOT try this at home tonight.
*sigh* so much for history...
In light of a recent
* This is "Hello world" in notepad...
* This is "Hello world" in wordpad,
*
I could see an ipod sized device with several TB recording damn near your whole life
I could see doing that for your kids - after all, when you're old and cranky, you will want to get back at them somehow for putting you in that dingy nursing home.
But what do you have against your future generations? Why do you hate them so much?
Of course, this is slashdot, so it's an entirely theoretical discussion, but still....
Are you implying that I hate future generations because I can envision a device that could potentially record an entire human life span of audio/video/GPS/web content/entertainment data? I'll admit that I couldn't careless about "reviewing" the bulk of my life. Heck, I slept through 5-8 hours daily talk about how you could compress that down! Of course, it could be a boon to doctors/scientists studying sleep disorders and building better beds and pillows to have the sleep data of millions. I won't even go into detail how such a device could be used to record the entire familial sexual history back several generations and as people mature. Heck, "child" porn laws would have to be thrown out the window if any most "kids" record their "entire" sexual history from pre18 until old age. I'm not ready for that. The future is too scary for me. I'm only comfortable of seeing attractive strangers in their early 20s have sex. I don't think that I could handle a future where I could have access to my parents, my grand parent's, and my great grand parent's "entire" sexual history with ommentary and highlights. Sorry, you were right. I do hate the future generations.
This is one of the more short-sighted, egocentric proposals I've seen lately.
What makes them think that people in 1 or 10 kY from now are going to give a tinker's dam about us? There have been big chunks of human existence where nobody has had any perceptible curiosity about human history, or history at all.
What makes them think that people 1 or 10 kY from now will need their help? Let's pretend, for just a second, that we're a bunch of Cro-Magnons sitting around in a cave, grunting about how we should preserve our culture for people 10kY down the road, so we argue about the symbolism behind the alignment of the bat dung we've smeared on the wall as compared to the angle between the horns of the antelope we've scratched on the wall. Maybe in 10 kY they'll have a magnetooptic synaptosynergistic homologenizer that can scan corroded magnetic tape in a mass of dirt in a landfill in Queens, from their orbiting remote-control robot, or maybe they'll have bombed themselves back into the stone age and wouldn't recognize anything but bat dung and antelope etchings.
And, most of all, what makes them think people 10kY from now will give even the merest consideration to what we currently consider important? Why would they care about mpeg codecs or books on maritime law? Maybe they will: I certainly don't know, but neither do the people who are proposing this.
Maybe it's a good idea, but to me it sounds like it's going to end up as the equivalent of Citizen Kane gasping "Rosebud!": information without context.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Does this mean MS products will be forever backwards compatible?
A codebase of infinite and ever growing proportions?
BSOD = Beyond Sod?
Blue Screen of the Undead?
Put the new MS software/hardware into a ring shape that opens wormholes to other planets,
and then call me...
I agree with you but what I want to know is does SciFi count as prior art? I'm sure there was an episode of Andromeda where a tatoo was actually a printed storage medium.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I honestly do not believe I am reading THIS:
19. The method of claim 14 further comprising: encoding the information utilizing a nanotechnology-based process, an atomic arrangement-based process, a holographic-based process, a laser etching-based process, and/or
*** an etched rock-based process. ***
Microsoft want to patent TOMBSTONES?????
Stripped of the legalistic patent jargon, there's really nothing
here, is there?