Seniors Search For Virtual Immortality

Hugh Pickens writes "Most ancestors from the distant past are, at best, names in the family records, leaving behind a few grainy photos, a death certificate or a record from Ellis Island. But J. Peder Zane writes that retirees today have the ability to leave a cradle-to-grave record of their lives so that 50, 100, even 500 years hence, people will be able to see how their forebears looked and moved, hear them speak, and learn about their aspirations and achievements. A growing number of gerontologists also recommend that persons in that ultimate stage should engage in the healthy and productive exercise of composing a Life Review. In response, a growing number of businesses and organizations have arisen to help people preserve and shape their legacy — a shift is helping to redefine the concept of history, as people suddenly have the tools and the desire to record the lives of almost everybody. The ancient problem that bedeviled historians — a lack of information about people's everyday lives — has been overcome. New devices and technologies are certain to further this immortality revolution as futurists are already imagining the day when people can have a virtual conversation with holograms of their ancestors that draw on digital legacies to reflect how the dead would have responded."

Comments

that would mean...

[able1234au]

putting names against the people in those millions of digital photos

Re:that would mean...

[hairyfeet]

Ya know, the guy that invents a truly "smart" file system is gonna make Bill Gates look poor. What we need is a file system that can actually "look" at the videos and pics and "learn" enough about each one that if I say typed "Aunt Edna" it would know which videos and photos contain Aunt Edna without having to label thousands of photos, or if I typed in "green dress" as that is all I can remember about a photo I'm looking for it can show me the photos with green dresses in them. Bonus points if you have the info embedded in the file during indexing so that I can drag photos from one family member's PC to another and have all the data.

because at the end of the day the problem with TFA, with our world in general really, is total information overload. We got too much stuff and too little time but we do have these uber powerful multicores so what we need is truly smart indexing. If its not sure have it ask and learn so if I drop a ton of pics and say "These are of my grandfather" it will ask "Well what was his name?" and update and put in the metadata and that is that, no sitting there editing all that data.

Re:that would mean...

[Charliemopps]

Microsoft has already invented this (sort of), no-one really used it because it was slow, buggy, and made your entire computer run like shit. But that didn't stop them from patenting it. So rest assure, Bill Gates will get the money anyways. And now you know why Microsoft is still in business and will always be in business as long as there isn't any patent reform.

Re:that would mean...

[mcgrew]

Microsoft has already invented this (sort of), no-one really used it because it was slow, buggy, and made your entire computer run like shit.

That's certainly not uncommon for MS wares. Actually, most commercial software, not just MS.

But that didn't stop them from patenting it. So rest assure, Bill Gates will get the money anyways.

You can't patent a concept, just its implementation. Viagra's patent didn't stop their competition from patenting Cialis. Plus, MS's patent runs out 20 years after they filed it.

Re:that would mean...

[dotancohen]

Microsoft has already invented this (sort of), no-one really used it because it was slow, buggy, and made your entire computer run like shit.

What was it called? I'm not finding anything from casual googling.

Re:that would mean...

[ultrasawblade]

WinFS?

Re:that would mean...

[AliasMarlowe]

arrogantly expecting that some of your descendants might actually take an interest in your life...
At best, they're likely to have it synopsized by some AI which is tasked with going through it, and through the better records left by intermediate descendants. The synopsis is likely to be short: "dude lived, had kids, then died". Another likelihood is that most of them won't care at all.

Re:that would mean...

[ultranova]

You can't patent a concept, just its implementation.

But you can add the words "using an algorithm" at the end of the description of the concept in your patent application.

Re:that would mean...

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention its as much vaporware as the 2002 DNF demo. What he is talking about is the Longhorn tech demo which showed off a metadata based file system called WinFS but we don't know how it actually ran because it was never released. Every. single. thing. we know about how WinFS supposedly "worked" is based on MSFT tech demos which frankly could have been pre-rendered BS for all we know and what they showed off in 2004 as WinFS never ended up in the hands of the public.

But I repeat, the guy or company that comes up with this, whether bolted onto an existing OS like Linux or Windows or built around the tech it honestly won't matter because it would truly be a GAME CHANGER. I mean think about it, imagine something similar to how you can instantly search txt docs only a hell of a lot more advanced and using a combination of facial recognition and pattern matching so that I could just point it at a folder and while I surf it indexes the entire thing, asking when it runs into a file it doesn't have a context for but otherwise filling in ALL the metadata and creating a searchable DB so I could say ask for " me and Ex GF, I'm in a blue shirt" and it could go "Oh there are 3 videos and 2 pictures where he is in a blue shirt but only 1 where his ex GF is also there so it must be this" and handing it up, no muss no fuss.

Lets face it McGrew this is one area where OSes frankly haven't gotten any better in ages, I can have my PC show me say every .AVI file or every song I have by Ozzie but it can't tell me which of my photos have my grandma in them. Considering how much video and picture data the average user ends up with in a year (which I should know as guess who has to try to save all that data when things go wrong, me) most folks end up with videos and pics all over the place with such "helpful" names as 001,002 or 12/11/2012 which really doesn't help us any. With a FS that could actually look at images and videos and build relationships between them based on content? We would be one step closer to the Star Trek computer where we can just ask real world questions and get useful answers. I'd sure as hell buy that in a heartbeat, wouldn't you?

Re:that would mean...

[hairyfeet]

What he is talking about is "WinFS" which was NEVER released and the supposed abilities similar to what I described was only shown in a pre-rendered tech demo in 04.

Considering how MSFT has been known to show off vaporware that they never intend to release when they feel threatened (such as how they kept many businesses off of BeOS and OS/2 by hyping WinNT a decade before it was released with features it didn't actually have) I would say its just another case of MSFT vaporware meant to get the tech sites and geeks to wait for Longhorn (which was never released, Vista was just Server 2K3 with a bunch of half baked tech bolted on while Longhorn was based on XP and was tossed in 05) because they didn't have anything to actually sell.

But imagine how much of a game changer this would be man, imagine being able to type say "give me all pics of my mom where my sister is also there" and have the OS look at the indexes and DB based on relationships and go "Well here is 40 pics of his mom but only 3 have his sister and that is what he wanted" and it hands it up right then and there. Frankly with background indexing speed wouldn't be an issue as it could do it in the background when the PC is twiddling its thumbs from lack of useful work to do and if it embedded the data in the file itself (which is why I said a FS and not a program) then once ANY member of my family had indexed the file when i dropped that file into my PC it would add the metadata to the OS DB and be ready to go.

Re:that would mean...

[mcgrew]

Lets face it McGrew this is one area where OSes frankly haven't gotten any better in ages

Agreed, but pulling it off (and I'm sure it will happen sooner or later) would be one hell of a programming feat. And would probably need a lot more powerful hardware than today's PCs.

If MS did this (and I don't believe they're capable, I'm not the least impressed by MS programs; hell, Windows search in W7 isn't as good as XP's), computer makers would sell a lot of more powerful computers.

Come to think of it, if a Linux dev did it we'd see a LOT of folks clamoring for Linux computers.

Re:that would mean...

[hunterkll]

Vaporware.....

That I had alpha bits in my hands?

That I could develop for, link against, compile against, and work with?

That blew my mind when the whole project was scrapped?

THAT -worked- in longhorn alphas?!

I don't consider that vaporware - they delivered bits. It worked, it was horrendously slow and inefficient due to legacy trappings - but WinFS worked to it's design specs.

"Not to mention its as much vaporware as the 2002 DNF demo. What he is talking about is the Longhorn tech demo which showed off a metadata based file system called WinFS but we don't know how it actually ran because it was never released. Every. single. thing. we know about how WinFS supposedly "worked" is based on MSFT tech demos which frankly could have been pre-rendered BS for all we know and what they showed off in 2004 as WinFS never ended up in the hands of the public."

That's the only statement in your entire comment I take exception with. It wasn't pre-rendered demos, it wasn't BS, it was bits we acquired and worked with. Bits that actually did what was described. Bits that actually did what was in the *hardcopy* developer manuals I was given at WinHEC. ReFS is now, I believe, a beginning to re-implement WinFS in an achivable timeframe, without huge overhead, and without extolling insane goals beforehand without any idea of how the development process will go. While they may have scrapped the initial WinFS, the idea still lives on. Libraries live on in a basic form, ReFS is some core principals outlined in my WinFS dev guides (not the relational aspects, but some architecture sides that'll make the relational parts possible!)

So, yes, it was never "released", yet, it was in developer hands and was shown to work, even if horribly inefficiently, it /worked/.

Re:that would mean...

[hunterkll]

Re the others mentioning WinFS:

The tech demos were not "pre-rendered" -

You can find longhorn alphas floating around with WinFS implementations that perform as described (alibet slowly).

They will work as described in the docs.

Re:that would mean...

[hunterkll]

Never released, YES.

Never shown and proven to be working alibet slowly and inefficiently? FALSE.

WinHEC 2003 developers saw, recieved first hand, and got to work with longhorn alphas that showed WORKING WinFS (as slow and inefficient as it was, it did what was described). Not vaporware, they actually proved it. then realized that, at the time, with computer power and legacy trappings, at the time, they couldn't deliver. Along with a /ton/ of other issues, they decided to do a full code reset and start again from the 2k3 (not XP like they had started from on longhorn!) base.

Shit happens, but it wasn't vapor ware. it was delivered to developers, shown, proven, and canceled. That's a far sight different than vaporware (shown/faked, but never proven or letting developers have the bits.)

Re:that would mean...

[hairyfeet]

Well we just have different definitions of vaporware. To me if it is never sold? Its vaporware. DNF may be a POS game but its not vaporware because eventually they DID sell the game, whereas WinFS as you pointed out was only shown to a handful of devs that went to some trade show in who the fuck knows where on one occasion? Sorry but that is vaporware to me, especially when MSFT was hyping the shit out of it in press releases that general public sites like CNet was covering.

But in ANY case it doesn't change the fact that with consumer PCs being so insanely overpowered now, with even low end laptops having dual cores and most desktops being sold having triples or quads that something like WinFS would be VERY doable now and would be a game changer. We have too much data and not enough time and having the OS do all the grunt work so we could just "talk" to the PC and tell it what we want, say "Videos with my ex in it" and have it go "Oh here you go" would seriously change the way we interact with PCs for the better.

Re:that would mean...

[hairyfeet]

I think you are wrong and here is why: As a retailer I've found the VAST majority of PCs? Spend most of their lives in idle. I'm not shitting you, I have run performance logs on customers and found all those duals,triples, and especially quads and hexas spend most of their time in idle just waiting for something to do. There should be no reason why you couldn't use say 30% of that idle time to be processing this in the background. This would be one of those things like Windows caching where it takes awhile for the PC to "learn" and fill in the blanks (perhaps give the user the choice of how much idle time it uses) but with all those wasted cycles you could have this run in the background and the vast majority? wouldn't ever even notice it running....until they asked a question and had the PC just hand them the correct file.

As far as who could pull it off? as much as I hate them as a company Apple would be the only ones i could see pulling this off, NOT Linux or Windows. Not Linux because you are gonna need access to too many subsystems which frankly get fucked with too damned often to make this thing stable, you got everything from the kernel to the DEs constantly changing shit which just wouldn't work for this, as long as the Ballmernator is running MSFT they won't be doing shit that Apple doesn't do first and Google wants your ass on the web so sure as fuck isn't gonna do anything that would make the desktop nicer...so that just leaves Apple. If they could take the genesis of the Siri idea and merge that with the desktop FS? It would fucking be awesome. Imagine no more need for keyboards and mice, you'd just tell the machine what you wanted it to do or find you and it'd do it...THAT would be awesome.

But as much as I'd love to see a FOSS dev come up with this first frankly it would probably cost a good 50-75 million in R&D to get this thing capable of reading videos by facial recognition and pattern matching and lets face it the redistribution clause means most Linux devs are gonna be toiling away in grinding poverty, not the kind of conditions that are conductive to coming up with world changing software. This also doesn't fit into the "blessed three" way of making money with FOSS, 1.-Selling software/services, 2.-Selling hardware, 3.-Tin cup begging, so there wouldn't be any way to really raise the needed capital.

Re:that would mean...

[mcgrew]

I think you are wrong and here is why: As a retailer I've found the VAST majority of PCs? Spend most of their lives in idle.

That sounds accurate, but you're talking about searching hard drives, which are pretty slow. A database of pictures would speed it up and in fact be necessary, not just for speed but for a referent. Anything the program couldn't recognize, like your relatives' and friends' names, would have to be entered manually. Maybe PCs are up to snuff, but the user first setting up the system would have a lot of work and if he had a lot of pictures it would be pretty time-intensive because of the hard drive bottleneck. And look at how much antivirus slows a system down.

As far as who could pull it off? as much as I hate them as a company Apple would be the only ones i could see pulling this off

I agree, but for different reasons. The Linux systems would handle it easily; my Linux box is pretty old but it runs circles around my Windows 7 box. But I'm pretty sure it would need a large, coordinated team of people with differing skills so I'm not sure FOSS could pull it off. Not Windows for sure, their software makes me think they've gotten too dysfunctional to pull it off. Your guess as to what it would cost seems pretty accurate.

I think we'll see it sooner or later, but I'd bet on later.

Re:that would mean...

[hairyfeet]

But you are missing a couple of key points. For one like 'em or hate 'em (I thought Win 2K, XP X64, and Win 7 were brilliant, everything else? Flaming ass) MSFT has trained the users that videos go in the videos folder, pictures go in the pictures folder. I ask every user before I start working on a system if there is any files they want backed up and its always those two folders. So its not like you have to search the entire hard drive. Second you are forgetting that with modern systems? More RAM than the users know what to do with. Hell I've been selling 4GB as standard for a good 5 plus years now and while I still run into plenty of 2GB systems you could split off 25% of that RAM and the user would never notice. So as far as the PC goes it was not be hard to do, have it load the files into memory when the user isn't using the HDD and work on them from there, that way it would only have a single read and single write so it would even be SSD friendly.

Now I'm sure you'll disagree and probably give me a little shit for saying it, most advocates of FOSS do, but I'm sorry but Linux has gone off the rails the past couple of years. KDE 4, Gnomeshell and Pulse all suck balls, not as good as what they had before and sucks more resources for less features and stability. And don't get me started on the wireless sitch, that is a fucking mess. The problem with Linux is its too damned divided, its become a bunch of little fiefdoms that don't speak to each other. Linus don't care what the DEs do, the DEs don't care what the app devs do, app devs don't talk to the subsystem devs, and none of them seem to give a shit about what the users want. I fought with Linux in the consumer desktop space for 5 years before finally realizing what one of the guys here said was true...its NOT getting better, its JUST getting different. He said "Linux is always 3 years away from mainstream" and he was right, every God damned time they start getting rock solid stability and reliability the devs get fucking bored and start breaking shit or throwing it out, again KDE, Gnome and Pulse for examples.

Considering how tightly this would have to interact with all the various subsystems and the kernel? Sorry, not gonna happen. I mean there is a reason why you ONLY see Linux gaining numbers in embedded and server, they gain in server because most of the desktop shit isn't even included and because guys get paid 6 figures to deal with the breakage and with embedded you never really have to update and its also stripped down so you can just leave out the wonky bits. this product would be a smash hit on the consumer desktop which is one thing Linux does incredibly poorly so I just don't see it happening there, even if they could magically raise the money which of course they can't.

Sadly I think MSFT or Apple could whip this off in less than 2 years but since both care about mobile more than users it just won't happen, now its all about nickel and diming through appstores and Nazi-ish levels of control, things that would actually change computing for the better? Really not on the landscape.

Re:that would mean...

[mcgrew]

So its not like you have to search the entire hard drive.

No, but it has to load and process each picture on the drive, and unless you have a lot of pictures you wouldn't get much use out of this.

More RAM than the users know what to do with. Hell I've been selling 4GB as standard for a good 5 plus years now and while I still run into plenty of 2GB systems you could split off 25% of that RAM and the user would never notice.

True, but it seems that since it would be so computationally intensive, the app would probably eat all four gigs and completely overwhelm a twot gig machine.

I'm sorry but Linux has gone off the rails the past couple of years. KDE 4, Gnomeshell and Pulse all suck balls, not as good as what they had before and sucks more resources for less features and stability.

I've always hated Gmome and haven't used Pulse, but I've read it's crap. As to KDE, it runs rings around Windows in terms of speed, features, and useability. I don't know of a single feature Windows has that KDE lacks, could you enlighten me? I'm running W7 on this laptop right now, and my KDE box with less ram and a slower HD (old computer) boots faster, shuts down faster, displays things faster, has features Windows lacks and hasn't had a hiccup, but if I leave the notebook running too long it gets flaky without a reboot.

And don't get me started on the wireless sitch, that is a fucking mess.

I've never had that problem, it just works. I had kubuntu on the last laptop (it got stolen in a burglary) and its wifi was flawless. I got bluetooth dongles for the Linux tower and the notebook, and honestly doubted it would work on the Linux box because there was an install CD for Mac and Windows, but not Linux. Surprisingly, no installation was necessary except plugging in the dongle.

The problem with Linux is its too damned divided

I see choice as a benefit, not a detriment. If I had to use Gnome I wouldn't even use Linux, there are Gnome users who think the same about KDE.

and none of them seem to give a shit about what the users want.

Why should they? They write the programs they want and give them to the community. Plus, I don't see Microsoft giving users what they want, either -- W8, anyone? What they did to FoxPro after they bought it was a damned shame. They completely ruined a damned good DBMS, now Access has me SO looking forward to retirement!

Considering how tightly this would have to interact with all the various subsystems and the kernel?

Easier on Linux than Windows. As to the development cost, I agree. If anyone did it, it would be Apple.

Sounds alot like

[Anonymous Coward]

a diary.

Re:Sounds alot like

[martin-boundary]

"Oh, look, great grand papa's diary from the year 2013! Let's open it!"

Unrecognized file type .DOC

"D'Oh!"

Re:Sounds alot like

[Joce640k]

futurists are already imagining the day when people can have a virtual conversation with holograms of their ancestors that draw on digital legacies to reflect how the dead would have responded

"Like, whatever, dude".

Re: Sounds alot like

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow the future sucks if we can't open legacy file types.

Re: Sounds alot like

[Joce640k]

It's more likely than you think.

Microsoft formats are designed to be as hard to reverse engineer as possible and the way software licensing and forced upgrades is going nobody will be able to run today's Windows 100 years from now so it will be impossible to run today's Word on any combination of emulators.

This might be solved if we move everything to the cloud, but all those Word documents out there, 200 years from now? Not a chance.

Re: Sounds alot like

[Anonymous Coward]

the cloud

Those .doc files aren't going to become easier to read by being stored on another server somewhere. At most, they'll become easier to lose.

Re: Sounds alot like

[Gumpu]

Yes lets move it too the cloud! Your life's history data will be as eternally accessible as your google reader data :)

Re:Sounds alot like

[nukenerd]

"Oh, look, great grand papa's diary from the year 2013! Let's open it!"

Unrecognized file type .DOC

Exactly. And that is one of the things that makes me so angry with Microsoft - their attempt to scupper the non-proprietory Open Document format which stood a chance of becoming a standard for a long time to come. MS want to control any standard and keep changing it - so that people keep having to buy the latest version of Word to keep up.

But another problem is storage media. A few years ago I wrote some family history on an Amstrad PCW and saved it on 3" floppies. Now I cannot read them. Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more.

My advice :- print everything you wnat to be available for a long time. Not on a laser printer though, because I have found that fades too, as do photocopies.

Re: Sounds alot like

[robthebloke]

This might be solved if we move everything to the cloud

Just make sure Zynga isn't in charge of the servers.

Re: Sounds alot like

[gtirloni]

Perhaps instead of the cloud you meant something else.

No problem, we get it.

Re: Sounds alot like

[Runaway1956]

I dunno about that. How many file types from the 1970's are you unable to open today? We don't need to completely reverse engineer MS Office to get the data contained in the files, after all. Linux and Open Office manages to read them reasonably well.

I suspect that .doc files will be accessible for quite a long while, and that they can be converted to other formats before they are entirely obsoleted, and the emulators forgotten. Those that aren't converted probably have very little value to anyone.

Face it - if I sit down and make one of those silly things for posterity, my great-great-great grandchildren aren't going to bother with it more than once in their lives. Only when they are forced to by their mothers, I expect. Now, the Chinese, who have a greater respect for their ancestors might do so. Here in America? Phhhttt. (Yes, I am aware that ancestor worship has lost a lot of ground in much of Asia - still they have the heritage that we lack in that respect.)

Re:Sounds alot like

[Runaway1956]

"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."

That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."

The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer. Don't worry - if you run any operating system that either used floppies, or has been developed since floppies came into style, your operating system will read them.

Re:Sounds alot like

[nukenerd]

"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."

That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."

The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer.

I thought it would be obvious that I was making the point that media and its reader hardware are changing so fast that you cannot trust a "standard" to last a decade, let alone two or more generations. If our great-great-grand-children find a 3.5" floppy in a box in the attic with our life story on it they are most likely to throw it away without a glance, even if they knew what a 3.5" floppy was and they could possibly find a agent somewhere who could read it at some cost. OTOH, there is a chance they will stop and read printed papers since it would not cost them any money or much effort. Some chance, anyway.

Thanks for the offer of a floppy drive, but I have a 3.5" drive within reach right here. I keep an old PC on my network specially for it, until I get round to transferring all my data on floppies onto DVD's - hopefully before DVDs become old hat too.

Re:Sounds alot like

[FireFury03]

"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."

That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."

The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer. Don't worry - if you run any operating system that either used floppies, or has been developed since floppies came into style, your operating system will read them.

Hmm, I tried sticking a floppy disk into my Android phone and it couldn't read it...

Re:Sounds alot like

[fyngyrz]

if you run any operating system that either used floppies, or has been developed since floppies came into style, your operating system will read them.

Can you read Amiga format 3.5 floppies? They're not recorded the same as the ones used for Windows, you know. Can you read Burroughs 8" floppies? 6800 Flex 5" floppies? CP/m floppies?

I'm asking as the author of a Flex emulation that runs under Windows; my finding was that Windows could not, in fact, read Flex floppies. No comprehension of the filesystem, you see. And I've yet to run into anything but Amiga hardware that could read Amiga 3.5" floppies, that's more of a hardware issue at the first level.

Re: Sounds alot like

[loneDreamer]

Actually, I know from a very reliable source that data historians are looking to virtual machines to solve this specific issue. It is a viable way to store complete, working computing environments for the future including not only the files but the programs able to work with them.

A few weeks ago I saw a demonstration of the first version of the mosaic web browser (the first that ever existed) and the first Macintosh. This last one by running it in a VM that run on a hardware emulator, that run in another VM that run in a VM. Don't ask me to remember the detailed chain of OS and such, but the point is that you are good as long as you can emulate a pretty recent version of something, and that version can emulate the previous one, and so on...

Related research about this is being done here: http://isr.cmu.edu/

Re: Sounds alot like

[Concerned Onlooker]

"Yes lets move it too the cloud!"

Why not? Grandpa moves to the clouds, his data moves to the cloud.

Re:Sounds alot like

[Immerman]

Certainly long-term digital data storage requires periodic storage updates - good luck getting your data off a floppy disk or DVD after even one generation, even if you have a perfectly functioning drive and can read all the data formats - the medium itself degrades much faster than the stone tablets or even papyrus scrolls of yore. Heck, in most cases it'll even be drastically outlasted by fast-degrading high-acid paper or crappy chemically unstable polaroid photographs. Unless you store your data on something like HD-rosetta that's designed for long-term storage you need to keep migrating old data to new media. Fortunately that's not actually a big deal if you're even a little conscientious - I have a folder on my hard drive called "Floppy disks", in it is the contents of every floppy disk I ever used whose data wasn't already hopelessly corrupted by the time I started migrating, and the whole thing takes less space than my web browser's cache.

And that's the real problem with the idea of "digital immortality" - all our popular storage media is designed for speed, price, and convenience, not longevity. When I die who's going to care about my data enough to keep migrating it to fresh media? Maybe for a generation or two it'll hang out in the corner of someone's data crystal, but eventually it's just random old crap that no one cares about and will be lost. Sure, you could store your digital memoirs on HD-rosetta, but while it would then be available for future historians nobody else would have the hardware to read it, so it's pretty much an act of pure egotism (then again I suppose that's the whole point of most memoirs)

Re:Sounds alot like

[Immerman]

Actually it's not the filesystem that's the issue - if it were you could simply feed the raw data into an emulator, which presumably *does* understand the filesystem. The problem is that even though the floppy disk itself was the same between many systems, the drives that used them were often physically different, using different physical layouts on the disk to store the data - the disk itself was after all just a big oxide-coated disk, things like tracks and sectors were imposed by the drive itself, so another drive that expects a different physical layout has no hope of accessing the data, it'll just get back gibberish since the physical location where it expects to find bit #47328 may in fact be straddling multiple bit boundaries in the recorded format.

Re:Sounds alot like

[Immerman]

Seriously dude. Like, I lived my life already, why do you keep waking me up and harshing my mellow?

Re:Sounds alot like

[mike.mondy]

Back in the day, there were programs for MS-DOS (and no doubt other OSes) that would use "low level" access to the floppy drive in an attempt to be able to read any known type of encoding (and filesystem too of course). I recall one that supported dozens or hundreds of formats from various types of PCs and OSes (CP/M boxes, Amigas, Apples, etc). This was a couple of decades ago, so I don't recall the names of the software. I imagine a search would turn some of these up. It'll likely be "shareware" or commercial rather than open source, so if you find one, it'll probably be useful only with a good emulator or real HW and not as a reference.

At any rate, I imagine the various computer history museums have specs, S/W, and H/W and that there are few formats that are truely orphaned.

Todays specs and formats are no doubt even less likely to be lost at it's more common to have computer copies of these and even to publish them than it was in 80's and earlier.

OTOH, as others have noted, the shelf life of some of the older media is getting long in the tooth. I've got a 9-track tape from college that's probably unreadable. (And probably of little interest anyway).

Re:Sounds alot like

[Bing Tsher E]

I have a 3.5" floppy drive with a USB interface. I got it in a junk auction lot with a bunch of other stuff for almost nothing.

It plugs in and reads 3.5" floppy disks with no difficulty.

Re:Sounds alot like

[Immerman]

I remember using some of those to read various disks. If I remember correctly though there were still some formats that were physically impossible to read. The problem is the hardware doesn't provide continuous control of the head positioning - for example if Computer A expects 400 tracks total you can tell it to read data from track 300, or track 301, but not track 300.23, the control bus provides no way to state such a request, and the head position is probably controlled by a stepper motor that couldn't stop at that position anyway. Meanwhile Computer B may treat the exact same physical disc as having 327 tracks, so each track is just under 1/3 wider than on A, and it's hardware and control bus is limited to positioning the head over those wider tracks. Clearly neither drive will be able to properly align its heads over the tracks written by the other, so when it tries to read a bit what it actually reads will be some combination of the data on two adjoining tracks and the gibberish in the "no mans land" between them.

Certainly it's possible to create a "universal drive" that could read any disk, but it would be a considerably more expensive piece of specialty hardware that couldn't be controlled exclusively via the normal drive control bus.

Re:Sounds alot like

[deimtee]

I can. I still have a working A500. :)
In fact, using messydos it can also read 720K DOS floppies as well as the 880K Amiga floppies.

Re: Sounds alot like

[LoztInSpace]

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Immaculate_Backup_.aspx
:)

Re: Sounds alot like

[tgeller]

"I suspect that .doc files will be accessible for quite a long while"

That's only half the problem. Can you read an 8" floppy from a TRS-80 Model 2? Do you know anyone who can? Do you know anyone who knows anyone who can?

Yes, there are services for such things (shout out to my friend Sellam Ismail at vintagetech.com!). But there aren't many. And it's hard work actually bringing things to a modern format in any case.

I suspect you're under the age of 40. Us older folks (who are packrats) have shoeboxes full of media we can't read anymore -- and that's probably half-erased and corrupt anyway.

I don't mean to rag on you... only to say that, like most problems, this one is a lot deeper than it appears.

Re: Sounds alot like

[Runaway1956]

8 inch floppy? All the Trash-80's that I ever messed with had 5 inch floppies. You lost me on that one . . .

Re: Sounds alot like

[david_thornley]

Hence the "Model 2". Most people are familiar with the original and its successors, the 3, 4, and 4P. Radio Shack also produced a larger model for business use, which was not nearly as popular. The Model 2 used 8" floppies, not in a well-designed way. The Model 16 included a 68000 processor in addition, and you could run a Unix version (Xenix) on it. It at least solved the Model 2 floppy problems, and some people bought it for that. The Model 12 was the 16 without the 68000 that almost nobody used.

500 years hence

[symbolset]

Folk will be foraging for themselves in a post-nuclear/bioweapon apocalyptic wasteland as the ice sets in for 100,000 years.

Maintaining family photos will not even enter their minds. Nor should it. They'll be about finding a way toward the equator if they're smart.

Re:500 years hence

[Opportunist]

Or towards the poles, depending on whether global warming or nuclear winter comes first.

Yes, it's wonderful!

[RocketRabbit]

Add a couple pedestals with appropriate video clips of the deceased appropriately cued, and you have the basic setting for the Max Headroom classic episode, "Religion."

My question is twofold - who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance, and who assumes that the massive amounts of this generated data will be taken care of indefinitely? Is this what a legacy amounts to these days and how much money can I charge for this service?

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[Anne Thwacks]

Thats OK - the records will be safely filed on DVDs long after they are as readable as 8" floppy disks are today! (Except mine of course - my pictures are archived on DDS2 tapes (except the older ones that are on 800bpi magtape) ;-)

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[TheRaven64]

who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance,

Spoken like someone who has never studied history. Detailed accounts of average people (or average members of a demographic) are immensely valuable in attempting to reconstruct an accurate picture of a particular time in the past. If anything, uninteresting people are more valuable: they provide a representative snapshot that can be used to extrapolate others. If you have a few hundred of them, you can do very detailed comparisons and discover the common details. The historian in me cringes whenever I see someone delete an email.

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[jamesh]

My question is twofold - who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance

The answer to the first part of your question is anyone with a twitter account...

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[timeOday]

Accounts of average people throughout history were valuable because they were rare. Now they are billions of times less rare.

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[Immerman]

Valuable to historians perhaps, not really anyone else. And if a modern historian volunteers to go to the effort and expense of maintaining my digital archive I'll consider letting them. The thing is though that historians are typically interested in, you know, *historical* stuff, not building and maintaining archives of modern data for the convenience of their future counterparts. And without archivists taking active steps to maintain digital data it will vanish far faster than even crappy photographs and high-acid paper, much less papyrus scrolls or stone tablets.

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[Opportunist]

Yes, yes, we're incredibly interested in the average life of a medieval peasant. But one is enough, thank you. When we have Joe Shmoe, we don't need Bill Blah anymore.

Historians are interested in average data. So don't worry, having a few emails of you left will do. They'll get thrown in with Joe's blog, Bill's Facebook account, Jacky's browser history and my porn collection and historians of the future will distill the average Joe of the 21st century out of it.

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[Opportunist]

The joke about it is that those stone tablets and papyrus scrolls are way more durable than 18th century paper written on with acid containing ink.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if we found out the reason why we have so few records of the "dark times" between 6th and 10th century is that they invented that quick rotting crap back then, too?

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[RocketRabbit]

I'm aware of the use of mundane everyday materials for historical research. The problem is that there will be so much data that signals will be lost in the noise, if the data remains accessible at all. For everything significant said or seen, you'll have many hours of snoring, pooping, commuting, and so forth.

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[Kittenman]

My question is twofold - who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance, and who assumes that the massive amounts of this generated data will be taken care of indefinitely? Is this what a legacy amounts to these days and how much money can I charge for this service?

Hear hear. This is a next-step of 'Would you want to document your entire life" thread that we had last week.

When I hit my dotage (if...) I expect to bore my grandchildren with a couple of stories from when I was a lad (Star Wars first time 'round, 9-11 attacks, Princess Di's death, the moon landings, etc) and if they remember it or not, that's up to them. The thing is that we talk to each other. And spend time together. Grandchildren can't do that with a DVD recording or diary (digital or whatever).

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[tehcyder]

I expect to bore my grandchildren with a couple of stories from when I was a lad (Star Wars first time 'round, 9-11 attacks, Princess Di's death, the moon landings, etc)

Unless you were a direct witness to 9/11, the death of Di or the moon landings, your stories will be irrelevant, as there will be plenty of archived footage of those events that your grandkids can look up.

Nobody will care

[Kjella]

I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, all of which are less than 1% me. Even if I had the complete records of what their lives and ambitions were in the 1750s or so, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care what my mother's father's mother's mother's father's father's father was doing, I doubt I'd even get around to checking out 128 people before I was bored stiff. At best I'd print out a nice family tree where you could have about three bullet points to describe yourself and that is it. Maybe some historians want to dig through it, but I wouldn't.

Re:Nobody will care

[AmiMoJo]

People seem to feel that they have to have some kind of lasting impact on the world of their lives to matter. Actually what matters is the affect you have on your contemporaries, those whose lives you come into contact with directly. That stuff may seem small but it's what's important.

Re:Nobody will care

[Alicat1194]

As someone with even only a passing interest in genealogy, I have the exact opposite reaction - I would find this fascinating, especially if it included things like medical records etc. The possibility of "conversing " with dead ancestors is also interesting. My maternal grandfather died before I was born, but by my Mother's description and stories of him I would love the opportunity to chat.

Re:Nobody will care

[gajop]

On the other hand I'd probably at least check those who have achieved things of worth.
I'd also probably check on them based on context: imagine if you would have a full picture of what your ancestors were doing in WW2, WW1, or whatever other local event that's interesting to you that happened in the 20th, 19th, and even 18th century.

It would also be interesting to see where your ancestors are from, how they moved in the world, etc.

Re:Nobody will care

[Sooner Boomer]

People seem to feel that they have to have some kind of lasting impact on the world of their lives to matter.

And this sums up the philosophy behind twitter users completely...

Re:Nobody will care

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Actually what matters is the affect you have on your contemporaries, those whose lives you come into contact with directly

I'm guessing that most grandparents would prefer to spend time talking to their living descendents now, instead of lecturing to unknowns of the future. A two way conversation is much more natural than a recorded monologue or rant.

Actually, what I really believe, is that older folks should do whatever they damn well please. They are old, time is short, and they don't need anyone to tell them how to spend that time.

Let 'em spend their days telling me to get off their lawn, if that what brings some minor joy and amusement into their lives.

Re:Nobody will care

[zAPPzAPP]

If you are old right now and do this thing, you might be one of the few out of your generation who has made these records available.
That should set you apart from the other 127 not so tech savvy grandpas and grandmas.

Being the most ancient entry in the digital family tree will surely draw you some attention. So grab the chance.

Us younger people will just be another record in between.

Re:Nobody will care

[alexkaskasoli]

I hear you but I'm sure if you go far back enough, everyone has at least one person of interest in their distant ancestry. I seem to have a Greek Slaver as an ancestor and I would love to hear what he has to say about his life, even though I would probably find him morally repulsing and not have much in common with the guy. Also, maybe one day we could have people conversing with ancient "wise ones". If we had a holographic projection of Einstein that could simulate what Einstein would (maybe) answer to a question it could be an interesting curiosity. Of course this would create a problem. Imagine if American politicians could use holographic projections with programmable answers of the Founding Fathers...

Re:Nobody will care

[zAPPzAPP]

I thought we were going for the 'put their talking heads in a jar' solution.

Re:Nobody will care

[JustOK]

RT

And this sums up the philosophy behind twitter users completely...

Re:Nobody will care

[SwedishPenguin]

Of course this would create a problem. Imagine if American politicians could use holographic projections with programmable answers of the Founding Fathers...

That would be pretty crazy. Actually I find this persona cult built up around the "founding fathers" in the US quite fascinating, even though these are people who lived in a time that is very different from ours and during very different conditions, some Americans still seem to have this obsession about what this founding father or that other one would have thought about a present-day issue, one they could likely not even comprehend. We have no equivalent in Sweden, I guess the closest to a "founding father" would be Gustaf Wasa who liberated Sweden from the Danish king in the 16th century, but noone in their right mind would, if given the chance, ask him for input on a present-day political issue or obsess about the religion he did or did not practice. Nor would they ask those who wrote any of the revisions of our constitution.

Re:Nobody will care

[FireFury03]

I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents

Possibly not - as you go further up the tree the chances of you finding some inbreeding increases. These days people move around a lot, so aren't so likely to inbreed, but previously that hasn't been the case, and with a relatively small population of partners to choose from, inevitably you'll get inbreeding (even more so for people who lived in small villages).

Re:Nobody will care

[SpzToid]

640 relatives should be enough for anyone.

Re:Nobody will care

[vlad30]

Some people would be interesting to listen to for all society e.g. Leonardo Davinci, Einstein, Steve Jobs for the impact they have on society as a whole.

Most people however are like ants one, ten or hundred get stepped on and nobody even notices as what they churn out still gets done by the thousands of other ants.

Re:Nobody will care

[baegucb]

I knew there was a reason for having a low UID here! (Pity my kid isn't tech savvy despite using Apple laptops).

Re:Nobody will care

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

Never has a truism been more applicable.

Re:Nobody will care

[Cornwallis]

The irony of your name is not lost.

This will appeal most to the boomers who refuse to get old or die. The current crop is so self-absorbed...

(I'm a boomer as well but I desperately try not to be one.)

Re:Nobody will care

[Chonnawonga]

Maybe some historians want to dig through it, but I wouldn't.

As a historian, let me just say this: no, I really wouldn't want to dig through that crap. What people WANT to say about themselves--their pre-packaged, self-conceived advertising--is rarely the most interesting, reliable, or relevant material.

Re:Nobody will care

[mcgrew]

This will appeal most to the boomers who refuse to get old or die.

Anyone wanting to get old and/or die is insane.

Re:Nobody will care

[mcgrew]

If you are old right now and do this thing, you might be one of the few out of your generation who has made these records available.
That should set you apart from the other 127 not so tech savvy grandpas and grandmas.

My grandmother was born in 1903, and I found her baby pictures on the internet. The difference today is we take a lot more pictures and movies because now we all have movie cameras all the time.

Re:Nobody will care

[Bing Tsher E]

By definition, anybody who strives hard enough to not get old is insane. But after the suicide nobody cares much after a little while.

Youth is something to get past. Sure, you're physically more vital when young, but the young are mostly ignorant fools. 'Youth culture' is shortsighted and ill informed.

Re:Nobody will care

[Bing Tsher E]

You grouped DaVinci and Einstein with Steve Jobs?

Did Apple Marketing do that good a job at the hype?

Re:Nobody will care

[Bing Tsher E]

And because there are so many more movies, they have all, each, become less significant.

Welcome to the noise floor.

Re:Nobody will care

[Bing Tsher E]

Sweden is to America with reference to the 1700s as Idaho is to Silicon Valley in the 1970's. The duds and fuckups stayed in Idaho.

Re:Nobody will care

[ArsonSmith]

You're ignoring the people in the American south. They typically only have 4-6 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents

Re:Nobody will care

[ArsonSmith]

Interestingly, when my father past we found a journal, or at least a life review, that he had been writing. His writing was very detailed and not some kind of self promoting but very factual in both the good and bad of his life. I've felt the need to do a similar review, with the idea of it not being read until after I am gone and I would like to have an accurate account of my life, warts and all.

Re:Nobody will care

[Immerman]

Should that be "despite" or "because of"? Apple makes very nice computers, but they specifically do everything in their power to maximize ease of use = minimize the incremental benefit of tech-savyness.

Re:Nobody will care

[Opportunist]

Supply and demand at work! After all, given all those wrinkles, there's gotta be plenty more old skin, so younger skin is in shorter supply.

Re:Nobody will care

[Opportunist]

A two way conversation is much more natural than a recorded monologue or rant.

True in theory, but the way my grandpa talked to me usually it wouldn't have made much of a difference...

Re:Nobody will care

[Opportunist]

Well, I've taken some time to trace back my family history. My grand aunt (unwittingly) helped a lot, but then, she needed to, it was "that time" when tracing your family line was in style for some lines of work (hint: the year was 1938).

Judging from the people I found that way, I'm pretty confident that talking with them wouldn't have been a lot more interesting than the average pub "discussion". And I guess that would hold true for most people. Remember that before 1900 or at least 1800, nearly all people were some kind of farmer peasant, and depending on where you live they may even have been little more than serfs. Add now that traveling 10 miles would have constituted a journey that better had some very good reason for them and that newspapers were a wet dream (provided you could read at all), and you might get an idea what topics you could possibly discuss with them at all.

Re:Nobody will care

[Opportunist]

Well, I had a grandpa that was in WW2. He didn't really spend a lot of time talking about it. In a nutshell, his main comment about it was "Son, if you notice a draft, start running so you don't get in the same shit I was in". Grandma wasn't much more talkative about it either, it wasn't really a "glorious" time. Mostly it was a couple wasted, horrible years for both of them.

And before that, chances are that your ancestors didn't even notice that it happened, unless they had been in the area where it happened. Remember that news traveled a lot slower back then and chances are that some revolution has been long over before you even knew about it unless you ended up in the middle of it. Reading wasn't an omnipresent skill, especially in the peasant population, and unless you are "lucky" that your ancestors were amongst the few educated people living in a city and not one of the 90% living a peasant life in some village, chances are that they won't be able to tell you a lot of interesting stories.

Traveling is also not really an issue, at least if you're from Europe. It may be quite different if you're in the US and your ancestors being immigrants who slowly pushed the frontier westwards. As a European who knows most of his lineage, I can tell you that I alone probably traveled more than all of my ancestors put together.

Re:Nobody will care

[Opportunist]

Taking a picture was a huge event back in the last century, shortly after it was invented. I have a photography of my great-great-grandfather (who happened to be the local forester for the local royalty back then) and my great-grandmother who was a child when the picture was taken was able to tell me the story behind it a few years before she died, or else it would just be a "storyless" picture for me. She remembered the day because it WAS such a huge deal that they now could also get their likeness immortalized and they prepped for it for nearly a week, her mom spent a huge deal of effort to make sure her dad's best hunting suit was in perfect shape to make sure everything was as good as it could possibly get. He spent hours to style his beard and everyone in the village knew that today is the big day where his picture would be taken, it was the talk of the town.

Also gives you an idea how many exciting things went on back then...

Of course, it's nice to know such "side stories" to pictures, too. Else, it's just lifeless pictures that will of course show you how your relatives looked when they were younger, but IMO the stories are what gives them life. All I have from one of my grandfathers are a few pictures that I found after my grandmother died. They don't really tell me a lot about him. I know what he looks like, I know what he did from his attire and the surroundings, but I would give a lot for the chance to sit down with him and have him tell me the story behind those pictures.

Re:Nobody will care

[Opportunist]

My fear would be that the really wise and smart people would opt to forgo that chance while self absorbed airheads would jump on it.

Re:Nobody will care

[mcgrew]

Usually, yeah. However, I have a photo of my grandpa in 1917 on a horse, and there's another horse pulling a wagon (the two most used forms of transportation then), and a 1915 automobile. It's an interesting photo even if you didn't know him.

Re:Nobody will care

[mcgrew]

Yes, I agree, age does have its benefits... my 81 year old dad doesn't agree, though.

I had a drinking buddy a few years back, a WWII vet. He often asked "how in the hell did I get to be so old?" I'd tell hum "You didn't die!" He was 86 when his appendix burst and the ornery old fool didn't go to the hospital for two days, when his whores talked him into it. By then it was too late, he lived another two months.

I miss Ralph and his war stories.

Re:Nobody will care

[Kittenman]

Some people would be interesting to listen to for all society e.g. Leonardo Davinci, Einstein, Steve Jobs for the impact they have on society as a whole.

Most people however are like ants one, ten or hundred get stepped on and nobody even notices as what they churn out still gets done by the thousands of other ants.

Us ants resent that, you inconsiderate clod!

Re:Nobody will care

[tehcyder]

This will appeal most to the boomers who refuse to get old or die.

Anyone wanting to get old and/or die is insane.

Refusing to accept the inevitable is also insane. We are all going to die, hopefully we'll have the chance to grow old first.

I know people like Ray Kurzweil like to think that in twenty years time we'll have cracked immortality but that's just magical thinking.

Re:Nobody will care

[mcgrew]

Refusing to accept the inevitable is also insane.

Yes, it is. Kurtzweil and that other guy, the hippie-looking one with a beard are nuts, if you ask me. It's a fantasy, wishful thinking. Dying is as much a part of life as birth and old age. That's why I don't worry about my diet, or drinking, or exercise. I'm not wasting my time and money at the gym, I'll waste it in a bar or restaurant. You have to die from something, it might as well be from eating and drinking and rocking and rolling.

When my grandmother was 95 after outliving 3 of her 4 sons, two husbands, and several doctors who told her if she didn't get her cholesterol down she'd die, she told me "I don't know why anybody wants to live to be a hundred, it ain't no fun bein' old."

Age brings wisdom. Usually, although I know quite a few old fools.

Re:Nobody will care

[painandgreed]

Maybe some historians want to dig through it, but I wouldn't.

Maybe your children of their grandchildren might. They might even be historians. That information will be much easier to gather now than after your parents and you are dead. A few minutes typing could preserve information that otherwise would be lost forever for later generations as well as historians. It's essentially the electronic version of the 'the family bible' with everything written in the front and back covers.

Tombstones

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the tombstone is a fine way to record the character and personality of the person being remembered.

    GET
    OFF
    MY
  LAWN

Revelation space

[j1976]

This theme has been investigated extensively in the revelation space books by Alastair Reynolds, if anyone is curious about reading fiction about how it could look. Here, a full dump of a person is called an alpha-level simulation and is essential a living digital copy of a person, capable of continuing to "live", learn and having conversations with their descendants.

Re:Revelation space

[Shadow of Eternity]

Even a relatively static personality/experience dump seems pretty interesting to me. Imagine having the collective wisdom of the past to draw on.

Re:Revelation space

[causality]

Even a relatively static personality/experience dump seems pretty interesting to me. Imagine having the collective wisdom of the past to draw on.

If we still keep failing to learn from history (continue using fiat currencies for one example*) then it really would make you feel hopeless.


* All of them, without exception, have ended with hyperinflation. Perhaps we think we're special?

Re:Revelation space

[Time_Ngler]

If a fiat currency ends, then it has become worthless. How else would that occur except through hyperinflation?

Re:Revelation space

[hardie]

Also try Dark as Day by Charles Sheffield. He has a somewhat different take on personality simulations. Excellent book.

Re:Revelation space

[Opportunist]

That has been invented already. It's called an encyclopedia. I've heard a rumor that someone put something like that online, too.

Oh great.

[ignavus]

Imagine the future - trying to read 21st century data storage.

Can you imagine trying to read beta videos, cassette tapes, Zip drives, etc even now - let alone in 100 years?

They will be using totally different data storage technology - imagine trying to watch a VCR in a house that only has Blu-ray?

Immortality?

[roman_mir]

I don't think immortality means that. Virtual memory, OK.

Is memory really alive if nobody is looking at it? Also, it's a self selected memory, it's not real, hubris. People want to live forever (for some limited values of 'ever'), some probably will one day. Will they even care about their own memory at that point, never mind memory of their predecessors?

Eternal Porn Habits

[Catmeat]

See Schneier: The Internet is a Surveillance State

So, not only is every action, every message, every visited website recorded. But it's also going to persist forever and will, ultimately, be probably be the most concrete mark made by your existence on this planet.

Though I'm not sure it'll be much use to future historians; I'm sure the information will be heavily paywalled as some deranged capitalist is bound to think the porn habits of people who've been dead 200 years still has commercial value.

Unhealthy and egotistical

[bradley13]

A lot of people have some minor interest in their ancestry. However, with few exceptions, our ancestors were people just like any other, with lives interesting only to themselves. Those few exceptions are people who will be in the historical record, and have no need of this kind of service.

And that's the point: my life is interesting to me, but I am not egotistical enough to suppose that - in a hundred year - anyone will care how I looked, moved, and spoke. Anyone who thinks that their distant descendents will care about such a "life review" is, imho, pathetically full of themselves.

The other point to take issue with is the idea that this is "healthy". As one gets older, there is a danger of living more and more in the past. The happiest and healthiest elderly people I have known are the ones who avoid this: they live in the present and have plans for the future. Spending your time producing a "life review" would seem to be exactly the opposite of a healthy activity!

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really about your ego. Historians would be interested in you precisely because you're average and unexceptional. We have pretty incomplete pictures of the day to day life of the past and the ordinary, mundane things, and that's what you'd be giving to the future.

It might not seem interesting *now* to have a record of what your diet might be and what you considered to be a fancy meal, but add you experiences to hundreds of thousands of contemporaries and it becomes interesting.

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[Livius]

An individual ordinary life is not interesting in terms of the big picture, but ordinary life itself is of great interest to historians, since it's not the same as ordinary life in another period or another place, and it's the context in which extraordinary lives were lived.

We don't need *everyone's* lives, just a representative sample, but, given that technology makes this easy, it doesn't take a great deal of interest to justify it for the people doing it Compared to 'reality' TV the life of an ancestor five or six generations back might be an hour or so of worthwhile entertainment to a future descendant.

Of course, it's still mostly about ego...

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[CaptainLard]

I am not egotistical enough to suppose that - in a hundred year - anyone will care how I looked, moved, and spoke. Anyone who thinks that their distant descendents will care about such a "life review" is, imho, pathetically full of themselves.

I know right? The market for this "virtual immortality" is HUGE! It can't miss....as long as the business plan involves collecting money from those who want to be preserved (content providers) rather than billing the eventual consumer.

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[drinkypoo]

I think you're totally wrong. I think it would be fascinating to be able to find out what my forebears thought. I hardly know what my parents think, because we have differences that prevent us from engaging in meaningful conversation.

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[Jiro]

Historians would be interested in you precisely because you're average and unexceptional.

Historians would be interested in having information about a few average and unexceptional people from an era. That's because they want to know how people lived in some era; they don't want to know about a particular unexceptional person. Once they have a couple from each different social group, more will not provide more information.

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[Opportunist]

What makes the deal even sweeter is that there's a lot of old people who have money and who know that they can't take their money with them when they die, so they don't give a shit what it costs. Whether it costs 10% of my fortune or 50% is moot, when I die I'll have to leave 100% of what's left behind.

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[Opportunist]

Having a similar father and having had a grandfather who was also not much different (I wonder if it's genetic that my family doesn't like talking with each other... ohwell), I don't know whether my great-grandfather would be much more willing to inform me of his thoughts.

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[Opportunist]

...but today you can milk money from it, that's all that matters today.

It is a vain age. Take art, or what passes as art today. I HIGHLY doubt that anyone will view the music of today with the same reverence that is paid to Mozart or Beethoven. It sure rakes in a lot more dough, though.

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[dasunt]

A lot of people have some minor interest in their ancestry. However, with few exceptions, our ancestors were people just like any other, with lives interesting only to themselves. Those few exceptions are people who will be in the historical record, and have no need of this kind of service.

So I'm a bit of a geography and history geek, as well as an amateur genealogist. Obviously this reply is going to be a tad biased.

I find lists of ancestors going back centuries to be quite boring (as well as frequently genealogically questionable). But when placed into the larger historical context, I find it far more fascinating.

To use the mandatory car analogy, would you rather read just a list of models Ford has produced, and the years of their manufacture, or would you find it far more interesting to read a history of the models and the technological, social and even political changes that drove design decisions?

The other point to take issue with is the idea that this is "healthy". As one gets older, there is a danger of living more and more in the past. The happiest and healthiest elderly people I have known are the ones who avoid this

While "living in the past" may be unhealthy, I don't think an obsession with the past necessarily is. The trick is not to stagnate. That tends to involve learning new things and having new experiences, but neither requires that the "things" nor "experiences" need to be new. Someone in their fifties starting out the first time on their garden may be doing an activity that is quite "old", but they are enjoying an experience that's new to them.

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[Anonymous Coward]

What a simple and lopsided opinion. People who can't take continued pleasure in the past cannot fully appreciate the value of the present or the future. If they are both destined to be used-up and unimportant, after all, their value is greatly diminished. A wise person realizes that the past is not used up. It is not even really in the past. It affects us greatly whether we realize it or not, and the more we realize it the more we care about it and learn from it. Older people today have options available to them that few in the past have had - options to ensure that the past remains accessible to future generations so that its impact, in addition to being felt, is also seen and understood. The only one in this equation that comes across as unhealthy and egotistical is you. You don't appear to value anyone's experience but your own and those of a few close people around you, and you think that's okay as long as you don't expect any better of others in turn.

There are many people in my family whose thoughts and life experiences I would pay dearly to have access to. The first immigrants to the New World, the first or last generations to adopt religions, the war and parenting experiences. Some of them would have thought that their lives were fleeting and uninteresting, but have been proven very wrong since. Like you.

Re:Unhealthy and egotistical

[tehcyder]

An individual ordinary life is not interesting in terms of the big picture,

Who cares about the big picture or The Few Great Men version of history? This is all about old people feeling better and young people having access to the records of loved ones.

For instance, I don't think my pet cat is ever going to amount to anything on the world historical scene, but I would love to have a living record of him so that I could access it when he's dead in twenty years time.

Revisionism

[macraig]

None of this will necessarily mean history gets told any more accurately. It will just get revised differently. Since people are eager to "embellish" their resumes, these "life review" autobiographies will be chock full of all sorts of tall tales to make even Mark Twain grimace. What makes us think that behavior starts and stops with former Presidents? Facts have always been as malleable as Silly Putty in the hands of people with motives that make the raw facts inconvenient. That class of people just happens to include nearly every person that has ever lived.

Only good old "peer review" will straighten these Life Reviews out and make them truly worth preserving.

Re:Revisionism

[garutnivore]

I was going to make a comment like the one you made. The stakes for historians is not overcoming a lack of information, tout court, but to overcome a lack of reliable information. Life reviews are not it.

Another problem is that, even assuming perfect reliability (which we both agree is unlikely), additional documents may have a very low signal to noise ratio. In know from experience that an overabundance of data is not a blessing when combing through it for relevant information has to be done by hand. Something like a full-text search helps but is not nearly enough to solve the problem.

Re:Revisionism

[Opportunist]

Yes, but if everyone does it we'd get to hear all sides of the stories for a change. Not, like we do now in history books, only the story of the one who won.

Wars never decided who was right. Only who was left. He was only right because, well, if the other side doesn't show up to the trial, you win by default. And dead guys cannot testify.

Yet.

Re:Revisionism

[macraig]

Maybe, but as someone else said, *somebody* would have to be willing and able to sift through all of this deafening noise to ween out the tiny nuggets of actual truth. There aren't many somebodies like that. Then, even assuming the nuggets are retrieved, who is actually going to listen? The dogma in people's heads is even more deafening.

I'm being pessimistic again, aren't I?

Re: I can see the headlines already.

[Arancaytar]

As opposed to now.

Tell feelings, not just facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course I want the facts recorded accurately, but what I find most interesting is people's feelings about events.

I live in California. After an earthquake, we like to tell each other what we were doing during the earthquake. "I thought the rumbling was a train." "I thought the house would come down on me!"

My brother was in London on the 50th anniversary of V-E day. He went to a museum that showed you what it was like to be in London during an air raid. As part of the presentation, an air raid siren sounded. A lady who was old enough to have lived during the blitz gasped in fright. That air raid siren sound brought back memories from over 50 years ago, and for a second, she thought she was under attack again.

To my brother, seeing her emotional reaction to the siren was the most striking thing of his trip.

So if I left a diary like that for people in the future to read, I wouldn't just tell the facts. I'd also tell my reaction to events. Where was I, and what was I doing, when I heard of a certain big event? Did I understand what happened? Was I glad that the event happened?

Re:Tell feelings, not just facts

[Opportunist]

Why does all the crap get an "insightful" but this didn't? Because this is pretty much exactly what is interesting about people's life.

If you happen to live in the US and have a grandparent (or great-grandparent) who still lives and was born before, say, 1930, I'm pretty sure they know EXACTLY what they did on Dec 7th 1941. They know where they were and they know how they reacted when they heard it. And that's what is interesting, not the facts, the emotions that were caused by it. If they were young, they will surely remember how their parents reacted, kids have a very keen sense when it comes to parents really worrying.

I'm pretty sure everyone here still knows where he was on Sept 11th 2001. What he did. How he felt. Well, especially if you happen to live in New York, but it's hardly been a local event. You will remember this. And when the time comes that someone in your family wants to know something about it, I'm pretty sure they're most interested in those things they won't find in any history book out there.

Personality upload?

[lolococo]

How about uploading one's personality into some kind of artificial neural structure, as in Peter Hamilton's Edenism? Now that would be much closer to 'virtual immortality'. Just sayin' ...

Re:Personality upload?

[gweihir]

No problem, give it a few hundred years before that becomes available though. If ever. Computing and storage technology is currently exploring the limits of physics. We may be pretty close to what is feasible in this universe.

Re:Personality upload?

[Opportunist]

I'm pretty sure we're far from what's feasible in the universe. Unless I can put the information, knowledge and logic I have in my brain into a storage container that takes up no more space than my brain, I'd say that there is room for improvement.

Re:Personality upload?

[gweihir]

You forget that your brain is a biological mechanism and does not have I/O that permits download or upload of all its data and business logic. It is quite possible that something with the information processing capability of the human brain can only exist biologically in this universe and that said I/O is impossible.

So, no, not an indicator. Apples and oranges.

Re:Personality upload?

[tehcyder]

You forget that your brain is a biological mechanism and does not have I/O that permits download or upload of all its data and business logic. It is quite possible that something with the information processing capability of the human brain can only exist biologically in this universe and that said I/O is impossible.

So, no, not an indicator. Apples and oranges.

People on slashdot, a large proportion of whom are computer scientists/software programmers of some kind, start with the assumption that ANYTHING is reproducible in software.

It's an amusing variation on the "when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail" meme.

Re:Personality upload?

[gweihir]

People on slashdot, a large proportion of whom are computer scientists/software programmers of some kind, start with the assumption that ANYTHING is reproducible in software.

It's an amusing variation on the "when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail" meme.

Very true! The fascinating thing is that at least I was taught things like undecidability and NP completeness early in my CS studies. Once you have understood them, you begin to see other, more practical limits. For example, many things parallelize badly and we seem to have hit a wall in single core speeds a few years back.

The only problem: Nobody will care

[gweihir]

I found some 120 year old newspapers a while ago. What was fascinating was the style, what people found important and that there was a Usenet-precursor (a column labeled "From anybody to everybody"). The people themselves were completely immaterial to me, as I had no previous personal connection. Looking at videos from a granny you actually knew as a child may be something people can understand, but personal stuff from 100 or 500 years ago is not going to engage anybody.

Side note: Storing data reliable even for 10 years is tricky today because of some industrial mis-development, in particular MOD going out of fashion (or never really being in fashion). Of all the other storage media, only archival-grade tape has the potential to survive and that is really expensive. Forget about all these "archival" CD/DVD/[wonder-storage-technology] media, that is just gold-plated consumer trash that may become unreadable after just a few years and will never survive 50 in typical consumer environments. The best bet an ordinary consumer has is to print on high-quality paper with a laser-printer.

Re:The only problem: Nobody will care

[Bing Tsher E]

Storing data reliable even for 10 years is tricky today

I have everything that I ever downloaded going back to when I used a 300 baud modem to connect to BBSes. That's right, I still have a certain number of of Windows 2 binaries. It was on tape, then CD and now on DVD media. And I am pretty certain (haven't checked that recently) that the first CD-R disks that I wrote are still readable.

Sure, Jonny Jerkthumbs who archived every Playboy centerfold off USENET and crammed everything onto cakeboxes (or worse- those big bulk spindles of CDR media sold shrinkwrapped with no cakebox) of the cheapest CD-R media available at the time probably has lost a lot of his hoard.

no lack of self-serving BS in the past ..

[dltaylor]

Having some individual/organization concoct a flattering bio' is hardly a new thing. None of the "data" provided by these "services" is particularly useful to a historian, except as yet another example of vanity press, and, perhaps, as a record of what the "biographed" considered flattering.

Re:Get over it

[gweihir]

Indeed. The only chance you currently have is some sort of partial re-incarnation, but probably not even in this universe.

Death will be vanquished within the next couple of centuries, I'm sure, but that won't necessarily be a blessing.

I really hope not. Now, you can at least toast the cretins when they die (well, those that die before you) and be sure that at some time you will be rid of them or they of you. With immortality suicides would skyrocket because people cannot take it anymore...

I don't want virtual immortallity

[rssrss]

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment."
Woddy Allen

Re:I don't want virtual immortallity

[painandgreed]

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment." Woddy Allen

Yes, but eventually, people have to settle for what they can get, not what they want.

Re: I can see the headlines already.

[Anne Thwacks]

Lets hope Youtube is on Windows servers - then the data will gracefully (disgracefully?) degrade without user intervention.

Challenge

[GerryHattrick]

Interesting to specify a system which relied on multiple targetted questionnaires, textual analysis of e-mail, docfiles etc for style and keywords, tagged pictures, family tree, DNA results even. Usecase being for posterity to interrogate the deceased 'as if' they were still there. Analysis fundamental enough to be extensible as technology evolves. But hear this - it must be open source, because it can only be microseconds before some megacorp or startupgeek patents every obvious feature and makes all posterity proprietary. Could still be a profit-zone, if ingenious questionnaires inputting to the Standard (please) parameters could be placed on sale, and of course the software for Gedcom and DNA export can be as commercial as you like.

Feasibility

[fyngyrz]

We may be pretty close to what is feasible in this universe.

Not even close to likely. :) Where did you get that idea?

We don't know what our own genetics mean; we can't manipulate them hardly at all. Or those of anything else, other than in the most crude, ham-handed ways. Our medical knowledge is at the scratch-the-surface level. We can't control aging yet. Chip tech is still at the 2D level... when it goes 3D, which will require lower power tech or some new means of heat transfer, chip complexity will leap from AxB to AxBxC. We don't have AI yet, but we will, and when we do, we'll also have a host of lesser technologies that will completely change the day to day workloads of every person living in a developed country. We're not yet off the planet except in the most baby-stepwise manner imaginable. Our crowd everything off the surface living habits could be revised to live well above the surface, turning the world back into jungle and productive farmland, no roads on the surface, no buildings, no transport. Just Lions and Tigers and Bears (and perhaps things thought long lost.) Our energy supplies are far more harmful than they eventually will become; our economic systems are based on scarcity, and scarcity is very likely to become a lost characteristic over time.

There's more change coming than any of us can reasonably anticipate, some of it purely social, but a lot of it based on technologies we don't have yet, because the underlying science isn't there yet.

Re:Feasibility

[gweihir]

My "idea" comes from close understanding of the technologies involved. From your comments, I gather that you barely scratch the surface but have listened to a lot of BS. For example, chip technology will not go 3D for a number of reasons, each of them prohibitive and fundamental.

the door of death

[johnrpenner]

but you have to die — its the only way to live again!! :-)

safe passage — our cat, 'puck' goes today.. :-(

My choice: Aubrey de Grey

[dragisha]

I will trade longer life for longer remembrance every day :).

I'm not that sure...

[Lord Lode]

Future archeolisits will be able to see the text on stone tablets, but memory chips? All gone.

Re: I can see the headlines already.

[Opportunist]

If the copyright craze continues, it's pretty much certain that YouTube in 10 years will contain very little content, since everything will be copyrighted. I'm pretty sure someone will copyright "showing a black screen in utter silence for 10 minutes" too.

Re:No one cares about your stories now gramps...

[Opportunist]

Not really true. I'd love to hear my grandpa's story. He died before I had a chance to listen to it.

Problem is, I'd like to listen to it ONCE. The main problem people have with old farts' stories is the same they have with other sitcoms: the reruns and clipshows are so fuckin' boring.

Re:Get over it

[Opportunist]

Hmm... I'd rather think homicides would skyrocket. I mean, today, if you're fed up with your parents, you can think "one day, you'll be dead", but what can you do when they achieved immortality?

Re:!immorality

[Opportunist]

Do as you want, but why does the rest of the world have to suffer from it?

For the love of $deity, at least close the blinds!

Death industry vultures take 10

[__aaltlg1547]

Sounds like just another way of preying on our fear of mortality to make a buck. What would your survivors rather have? A disk full of labeled and indexed photos or unlabeled photos and a stack of cash?

Virtual Immorality

[Canjo]

I read the title as Seniors Search for Virtual Immorality and it sounded like a fun read. Then I realized it was actually something pretty boring.

Social Semantic Desktop

[Paul Fernhout]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop

I've been working on some related stuff myself (the Pointrel system) -- but is is all free and open source, so no Bill Gates lifestyle. :-)

A plug for Omeka which I'm evaluating

[Paul Fernhout]

as a trustee for my local historical society: http://omeka.org/
"Create complex narratives and share rich collections, adhering to Dublin Core standards with Omeka on your server, designed for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and enthusiasts."

It was good enough for the Grateful Dead:
http://www.gdao.org/
http://omeka.org/forums/topic/looking-for-digital-project-mgr-grateful-dead-archive
http://www.cni.org/topics/digital-curation/building-the-grateful-dead-archive-online-the-golden-road-to-unlimited-devotion/
http://library.ucsc.edu/grateful-dead-archive

Although I have my own stuff I'm working on too (the Pointrel system) but that is more about federating social semantic desktops and supporting sensemaking than specifically for museums doing interpretive presentations about selections from their archives etc...

A case for big data?

[Tagged_84]

I think posters are completely ignoring the potential this would have on understand humanity more. Once we have a million detailed lives we could run it through software AI to come up with unique connections and insights we would never have picked up on before?

Re:A case for big data?

[baubo]

I just looked at the sample "life review" in TFA, TL;DR

Re:Get over it

[tehcyder]

Death will be vanquished within the next couple of centuries, I'm sure, but that won't necessarily be a blessing.

Yeah sure, and we'll have Artificial Intelligence, FTL/time travel and limitless energy by then too.

Re:Get over it

[tehcyder]

Hmm... I'd rather think homicides would skyrocket. I mean, today, if you're fed up with your parents, you can think "one day, you'll be dead", but what can you do when they achieved immortality?

But you've got a lot more to lose if you're caught and face the death penalty or even worse a life sentence

Re:Masturbation

[tehcyder]

Everyone's life is important to them, fuckbag. There is no such thing as an unimportant life.

Re:Get over it

[Opportunist]

You have a lot more time to ponder the perfect murder, too. And don't tell me such a thing doesn't exist, the reason you don't know it exists is that it was perfect.

Geanology is cool!

[CHIT2ME]

I've traced my paternal family name to before the battle of hastings in 1066. Later on, one of my great xxxxxxxxxxx aunts married King Edward III of England. In the 1400s, some how I became related to George Bush (Would rather erase that relation!). Later, my sixth great grandmother was the great aunt of Francis Scott Key the writer of the national anthem. They both were the 4th great grandparents of Ty Cobb! Geanology is cool! Everyone should look into their family tree. They may just be supprised. Unfortunately, most to these "negative posters" on /. probably don't even know who their fathers were. Sad!!!!

Unfortunately...

[JBaustian]

The people who will document their lives most completely will be the ones with lives so boring that no one will care.

The fascinating ones will leave behind endless mysteries for speculation.

Life Review

[Dabido]

Life sucks! Nothing to see here, move along.