[LINK] Some scary stuff

[David Lochrin]

At 09:40 25-11-2002 +1100, Dr. Bob Jansen wrote:
>MyLifeBits Project
>Microsoft Bay Area Research Centre Media Presence Group
>http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.asp
>[...]

   One wonders at the mentality of the geeks, nerds, and marketing clowns who dream up this stuff.  Are they so out of touch with the rest of the human race, not to mention themselves, they think it's a good idea?  Or is it just todays act of business-development desperation?

   To quote from  http://research.microsoft.com/users/gbell/storeall.htm

>Gordon it (sic) getting a start on capture and encoding legacy physical material.  He is trying to get every piece of paper he has or has ever produced into his hard drive.  This includes what he’s written -- books, articles, emails, notebooks and drawings.  It also includes bills, legal documents and any other paper he has filed.  Photos and slides are being scanned.  All his public lectures e.g. a videotaped lecture at MIT in 1972 About the Futue, will be encoded on video (www.research.microsoft.com/users/gbell).  The space requirements are manageable, but nothing else is.  Email is about 100 megabytes per year… or for someone with a 40 year professional life, 40 GB.
>
>After the information is put into the computer.  The next big problem is getting it back.  Indexing and retrieval are the big problem. [...]

   This seems to me to confuse data with information, and information with knowledge - let alone wisdom.  "Gordon" may spend decades slaving over a hot scanner in order to preserve irrelevant trivia of the past, but to what purpose?  I'd prefer to move on intellectually, and to keep my keepsakes in their original physical form.

David Lochrin

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