IBM Patents Idea of Making Your Data Crappier Over Time

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you know, if i worked at ibm, i would have noticed that for a while, people pick patents apart, i would have went to my boss, and asked him if i could spend a few hours with coworkers coming up with retarded patents, just to screw with people, and the plus for ibm is, news... no publicity is bad publicity... almost always at least.

i mean, how long are people going to wonder wtf this is for? that more time that ibm is on your mind.
 
On another note...

IBM will now patent the idea for de-optimizing program code so that older software requires more processing power to run. If applied today, "Can it play Crysis?" comments will become "It used to play Crysis" in a few years. 10 years from now we'll all be saying "Can it play Duke 3D" and "It used to play Quake."
 
[citation][nom]PrvtChurch[/nom]this is the STUPIDEST IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF EVER![/citation]

Chill out. I think invading Poland in 39 was a lot worse idea than this one.
 
Ummm one of the points of having digital documents is to solve the aging physical documents problem.. Right? But it may have specific implementations though. Not for everyone certainly.
 
I wonder if this "need" they're talking about couldn't have been solved with a software layer on the OS side or HDD firmware add-on/upgrade. Because even file systems can impact performance.

If the resources of converting photos and videos (in the background) is a concern for them, I'm thinking then maybe this is geared toward servers or file hosting services or something. Not for the general public.
 
Well the idea is smart, considering that we may have a "visual" view on the list of our files that by itself shows the aged files, so no need to sort by date or use heavy indexing service to find my old old files from 10 computer systems past and that i still carry on to backups...

If it is fullproof it might be even a guarantee that this file is really old, cutting out forged files? :)
It still annoys me when i copy files and they have their creation date altered, don't you guys? It happens at full system backups and restore on new system..
 
I wonder, could it be a part of their A.I. project? Maybe they'll use it for say, Watson you know the computer that was on Jeopardy. If you look at the human mind and how memories are sorted in there, a system that mimics "forgetting" irrelevant information and keeping what is relevant could be quite complex. Maybe that's where the "aging" process comes in.
 
Another use for a synthetic aging process could be if you want to model something real and simulate it. Perhaps one could let some reference file in a hard disk age and let that be an indicator of a hard drive's health kind of like S.M.A.R.T. is trying to predict that a hard drive is going to fail and we all know how bad it is at doing that.
 
Cumi2k4: I love your post!
Others: This is not an April fool's joke!
With due regards to people with a brain consider this: IBM is American? Right? It's no wonder some morons hate Americans! Because if they didn't, this would work for them! Wait a minute! The morons thought this up! Oh hell, I don't know!
 
Great way to provide On demand sites powers to rent games and movies. think about it. you download a game from netflix with say a 1 month "rental" after a month it decays and becomes unplayable. even if you pirate the game; the copy will decay also. Movie rentals; the same. Encode into movies A decay bug; and peer to peer copies become non existent as they destroy themselves. etc.

Yep I can see a use for this.
 
Genius! IBM has made a brilliant observation of a few things and applied a thoughtful technology to solve it. The article talks about photos, but the headline is about DOCUMENTS. It seems to me that this is another provocative article with no real aim except to gain readers and produce revenue for Best of Media.

Not all data needs to be kept forever. With storage becoming cheaper, many companies are simply collecting files.

Let's say you submit your resume to company X, who never deletes it. Now, 10 years from now you may not want them to have that information laying around. If a "natural aging process" is built into Microsoft Word, 10 years from now it may be that their computer automatically deletes it, because the file has degraded to the point of illegibility. This saves them space, and it keeps you from having a huge paper trail of everything you do. Why do we want a Hitler-esque tracking system? IBM is finally making up for their jew-tracking mistake of selling counting machines to Hitler!
 
[citation][nom]BeetlejuiceGr[/nom]Well the idea is smart, considering that we may have a "visual" view on the list of our files that by itself shows the aged files, so no need to sort by date or use heavy indexing service to find my old old files from 10 computer systems past and that i still carry on to backups...If it is fullproof it might be even a guarantee that this file is really old, cutting out forged files? It still annoys me when i copy files and they have their creation date altered, don't you guys? It happens at full system backups and restore on new system..[/citation]

Did you really just say "fullproof"? Where the heck are you people getting your English from?!!
 
It sounds very useful for systems with large data through put which require to be updated on a daily basis. Think search index for the web. Entries which are not updated correspond to stale websites, which in our age indicates a "dead" website. Here you either control deleting those via software which you need to keep up to date or you migrate this functionality to the file system.

The advantage of decomposing instead of deleting:
Over time "old" files will use less space but can be recovered to some extend if enough information is available. Once they contain less data than the useful recovery threshold (depends on data type) they can be trashed, making space for more "useful" data.
 
[citation][nom]stalker7d7[/nom]The only thing I can get out of this is to reduce the hard drive space being used by older files... But still, wtf? There is no way this can have any benefit.[/citation]

Yeah, kind of like going to the moon. We should just stop innovation right now and live in our own filth.
 
It's November right? It's nor April 1st is it? Have I slept for months in a coma? The ONLY good thing I can see coming out of this are those pictures of young women who let explicit pictures of them on the web and later regret it.
 
[citation][nom]ltdementhial[/nom]comon guys who do you preffer to pantet this IBM or apple...[/citation]

Apple, without the shadow of a doubt.

If the hipsters want their iFiles to rot, I couldn't care less. I don't want MY files to rot...
 
Could this not be some kind of forensic archival system? If someone wants to prove that their data was created earlier they could use the "digital wear and tear" aspect to help prove it. The "unique certificate" that the patent refers to that is associated with each aged file would provide a second layer of authentication. Obviously, files are already time-stamped when they are created and modified but that would presumably be much easier to fraudulently alter than the file system envisioned in the patent.
 
Having owned an IBM Deskstart 75GXP hard drive, Im wondering why bother patenting it now? They have had it since 2001..
 
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