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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (21640)	5/26/2007 7:15:53 PM
From: Elsewhere	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

REMEMBER THIS? Thanks, yet another great New Yorker article. I am eccentric enough to be fascinated by Gordon Bell's project (in a positive way). At the same time I am sure many people would be frightened about leaving such an extensive data track of their lives and about the "inhumaneness" of pursuing such a project. But I don't think there's a reason to be afraid. First of all the expectations how quickly computing devices will be available to implement Bell's vision are too optimistic. For instance, Jim Gemmell, a senior researcher at Microsoft, claims that "by 2010, a typical life ... will fit on a cell phone." No particular data amount is specified but let's just note that one hour of HD video requires about 20 GB. Secondly I don't think that that much is gained by having a "Bell record" of one's life. It can be interesting, it can be fun, it can be dangerous - but even tera- oder petabytes of permanent video recording don't tell the whole story: emotions, moods, parallel thoughts are not stored. A quote: Bell has tried several times to make movies from material he’s stored - he showed me one of a two-hour lunch he'd had in Australia, where he still teaches - but he hasn't felt satisfied with the results. This is the real challenge: trying to transfer one's inner reality of experiencing a scene to a clip. On a smaller scale I have started some activities similar to Bell's - and I am trying to work on this particular challenge. Example: in an industrial nation people spend a lot of time in their cars, commuting to work, driving to a holiday destination. Yet this seemingly "boring" time is not adequately represented in art or literature. Even in road movies the driving is just a background for some criminal or other not driving-related plot. So I recently tried to record a short part of a trip and add a music related my mood in the scene. metacafe.com I am aware that the clip has lots of shortcomings. The original was not on HD level as I used my always-available video recording device Nokia N93 which "only" has a resolution of 640x480. The N93 output is degraded by the video hosting service (which is still better than YouTube). The recording is shaky because I don't have a Steadicam. I did not compose the music but added somebody else's work. But I suggest to anybody who thinks it is easy to produce such a clip to create it and post it here. It means starting at a point where Bell has given up. At one stage Bell wonders about the longevity of his data. "Will Word 6 be readable?" Too bad that he is a Microsoft researcher. If he used TeX he would have plain text files. The format has remained constant for two decades, is frozen and readable across dozens of operating systems. And TeX 1990 will be more powerful in certain ways than Word will ever become ;-)