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.

Already done in a way...

[LoRdTAW]

Wasn't there a lame movie about this starring Robin Williams... oh yea it was called The Final Cut [imdb.com]

Not really ...

[tomhudson]

FTFA:

Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage."

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.

The communists did it first

[stevejsmith]

Old news. The Romanian secret service was performing this service for free for most people with a university education. Now, you can apply to see the old secret service files of yourself and any of your close dead family members. Complete with transcripts of every word you utter in your own home (courtesy of bugged telephones), your radio and preferences (to make sure you weren't listening to Western subversive material), and transcripts of the twice in your life that you went out to a restaurant. And there was the added bonus of testimonials from your friends, with a special emphasis on the things that could later be used against you (extramarital affairs, unhealthy sexual preferences, subversive rhetoric, etc.).

Re:The communists did it first

[stevejsmith]

...oh, not to mention records of your prostitute visits. (Prostitutes were subsidized by the government, as they were useful for gathering information.)