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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!
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
"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.
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.
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.