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MyLifeBits to Store Every Moment of Your Life
Dixie_dean writes "Microsoft researchers are developing a way to enable you to capture every moment of your life and store it on your computer. The principal researcher with Microsoft's research arm, Gordon Bell, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. 'The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages. Calculating that he saves about a gigabyte of information every month, he noted that he tries to only save photos of a megabyte or less. Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage." This is a project we've been talking about for a long time.
To forget is human. To be human is important.
Just need to find a good editor for the film of my lifebits to play at my funeral and i"ll be happy.
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
Finally, technology has caught up with narcissism.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Just what we need...
To remember what all the pr0n sites we visited when we were 15...
at age 70.
Something witty.
CAT: No, this isn't the one.
LISTER: What isn't?
CAT: I'm looking for this dream I had last month on the dream recorder.
It was sensational.
LISTER: What was it about?
CAT: Me, three girls and a family-sized tub of banana yoghurt!
RIMMER: You know, cats have a very strange attitude to women if you ask
me.
CAT: Say what, Goalpost Head?
RIMMER: It's all sex, and no sense of settling down and having a long-
term relationship.
CAT: Hey, I want to settle down. And as soon as I find the right small
group of girls, the seven or eight women who are right for me, my
wandering days are over, buddy.</pre>
This sig is umop apisdn.
What happens if he goes to watch a movie? If it were possible to store every moment of your life, and use it to augment your normal memory, would you need a change in the copyright laws?
Who ordered that?
What about recording me watching a recording of me watching a recording of me watching ...?
... Unless you're one of those perpetually smiling people only seen in corporate clip art, life tends to be full of more unpleasant, uncomfortable, and completely banal events than positive. I could not imagine anything worse than watching high school all over again. I would probably want to strangle myself for being such a horrible, awkward geek.
Really... How many moments of your life do you really want to relive? And wouldn't re-watching your most pleasant memories knowing what you know now dilute just how pleasant those memories were?
Although, seeing the borg icon makes me doubtful about how long it will be optional for
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Sorry, but this is just journalistic hyperbole. It's not every moment of your life. If you were to store every moment of your life as HD video, it would consume far more than a TB. And that still leaves 3 other senses we haven't devised recorders or storage formats for. Not to mention high-resolution PET scans for internal state, brainwave records and who knows what else. This project is a cute scrapbook instead, not full-time, automagic, all-encompassing archiving of first-person experience. But yeah, we have a lot of storage and a person obsessed with scrapbooking minutiae could have a field-day.
Google want you to store all your stuff on-line with them. Now Microsoft want to store your life off-line on your pc with them. Next thing you know your mobile provider will give you recording of all your phone calls you've ever made through them...(Well makes a change from them giving the recordings to the government!) :D
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
When I'm 53 years old and I'm carrying my grandkids on my lap, I want to be able tell them stories of the old days, like "You young whippersnappers think you have it tough? Back in my day, we couldn't just go out and buy unleaded gasoline. No sir! We had to scrape the lead out with our bare hands! And you think you have it tough with your complicated computers and what not. Back when I was a kid, we didn't even have computers to write with. We communicated entirely in ones and zeros ... written in PENCIL!
Imagine what would happen if they could just look up the past and say "Ha ha, Grandma! You're lying!"
Do not take away my golden years, dammit!
Wait till he gets his first subpoena. I'd love to see a court have to go through all of that just to not find anything of value.
But to make it a more useful measure, there should also be a way of adding "emotion" points to the total score (where users asign a level of emotion or fun to each event stored in their digitally stored lives) with a function such as {Adjusted true-life-years = life disk usage x total emotion points}. Then you can let the software do the calculation and tell you your ATLY score, perhaps as widget on your Facebook profile.
Finally we have a way of measuring who is more of a nerd than someone else, and all thanks to Microsoft. Who would have guessed?
Here are some possible problems... you can have the files subpeona'd for court cases. How do you secure them against someone who wants to know anything about you? Will your employer demand you submit the recordings each day?
I might be ok with it if the constitution was changed to make privacy an absolute right, and make the punishment for taking one of these files to be extremely severe.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Anyone who ever saw that icon on their Windows desktop that says "My Computer", and picture Bill Gates saying it, not themselves, should think about giving Microsoft that kind of complete access to their entire lives.
If the source were open, it were stored locally or encrypted at customer-selected third-party networked datacenters, this app could be wonderful, a lifesaver. But trust Microsoft with one's entire life? That sounds like putting it all in once place to be ruined or stolen.
--
make install -not war
I'm seeing more and more projects that simply have me saying, "why?"
Seriously. I think filling my drives with random bits and seeing if there is anything readable would be more interesting.
This project is trivially achieved but the product is doomed to be uninteresting: "I spent all my life taking and organizing photos of myself".
After all, the recording work must be recorded, and so must the recording work of the recording work, the recording work of the recording work of the recording work, ad infinitum. Get a life, microsoft.
"Honest baby! I'm not shooting home porn. It's a LifeBlog(tm). I film everything. No... Come back.... Come back!"
Unless you're dating someone with the IQ of Paris Hilton... Or the exhibitionist streak of Paris Hilton... I see some problems here. And if you are dating Paris Hilton, good God man, you've got problems enough.
how long before everyone is REQUIRED to wear one of these at all times so they can be checked on for terrorism or pedophilia 24x7x365? Microsoft can go die
I predict a service selling clipart LifeBits to people who have really boring lives. It's called MyLifeStore. You upload a picture of your face and for $25 you can buy a LifeBit of you doing exciting stuff like bungy jumping while saving rain forests in the Amazon. Use it to overwrite that day when you just stayed at home and read the newspaper.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I would guess the people who would be interested in this would be reeaally boring.
Ipso facto, their saved record/video/photos of their life would be reeally boring.
I seem to remember reading once that almost nobody ever used their web browsers history, so I'm guess this will never get off the ground.
Frankly I do not feel like I need my own black box, but I guess there will be some sound medical reasons why some people might want one (dementia?)
Wasn't there a lame movie about this starring Robin Williams... oh yea it was called The Final Cut
If a person using an app like this started seeing his future in it.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
FTFA:
Just goes to show you don't have much of a life if you could store the whole thing in one terabyte.
Just do the math: 1 terabyte (1024x1024x1024x1024)
divided by 80 year lifespan
= 13743895347.2 bytes
divided by 364 days
37,654,507 bytes/day
16 waking hours/day
2,353,407 bytes
divided by 60 minutes
39,223 bytes/minute
divided by 60 seconds/minute
653 bytes/second.
There's no way you'll record everything about your life in 653 bytes/second. And that's ignoring that lossy compression isn't an option, since then you *aren't* recording *everything*, and ignoring your dreams, etc.
All this is is an "enhanced blog" - big f*cking deal.
Old news. The Romanian secret service was performing this service for free for most people with a university education. Now, you can apply to see the old secret service files of yourself and any of your close dead family members. Complete with transcripts of every word you utter in your own home (courtesy of bugged telephones), your radio and preferences (to make sure you weren't listening to Western subversive material), and transcripts of the twice in your life that you went out to a restaurant. And there was the added bonus of testimonials from your friends, with a special emphasis on the things that could later be used against you (extramarital affairs, unhealthy sexual preferences, subversive rhetoric, etc.).
Why? So when someone steals your identity, they can steal your entire life history along with it? So the government can come along and seize it from you, tear it apart, and twist it into whatever foul thing they decide you should be guilty of? So every person who can get their hands on it can Monday morning quarterback every experience you've ever held dear and important decision you've ever made? Thanks, but no thanks. Somebody please round up all the people who think this is a good idea, put them up against a wall, and shoot them dead.
Google is already doing this for me... well at least, my virtual life :P