Photos that look just as good after 10 years as they did on the day
they were taken is a circumstance we are used to in times of digital
photography. However, historically, it is questionable at best and plain
incorrect in most cases. Environmental influences degrade the quality
of your printed picture over time. IBM believes that digital images
should follow suit and has filed a patent for an automatically aging file system.
Let’s be honest: Searching through shoeboxes filled with old family
pictures can be a much more enjoyable activity than sitting in front of a
screen and searching through file folders of potentially tens of
thousands of pictures. Even worse, the emotional connection to pictures
when they gracefully age, especially noticeable via discolored content,
can be much greater in printed picture than it is the case with digital
counterparts. Someone at IBM felt that the boring never changing status
of content in digital images, at least until there is corrupt data, is
something that needs to be changed.
The resulting idea was submitted as a patent application in May of
2010: A file system that would, for example, work with doc, jpg and gif
files and dynamically change the content of the picture or document over
time to simulate the environmental effects on a real printed picture.
According to the inventors, there “is a need for a new kind of filing
system that automatically and selectively ages files contained therein
such that the files themselves are caused to age with time and are not
maintained in their originally stored state.” And: “There is a need to
provide such an aging function to apply automatically to all files
stored on the filing system without requiring a continuing user
monitoring effort.”
Makes sense to me. Would you deliberately destroy your own files and
complain if the degradation has not progressed enough in a certain time
frame? Of course not. An aging feature should do that for you –
conveniently, swiftly and without silly questions. Who would want to
maintain the same quality of the original digital picture over an
extended period of time? Taken to the extreme, imagine the ginormous
dilemma we’d be in had we been able to preserve all those fragile
documents in the library of Alexandria in their original quality. The
inventors claim that the visual effect seen in an aging file system
would be immediately indicative of the age of the photograph, which
would probably support those of us who are too lazy to check the
properties of the image file and discover the year, day, hour, minute
and second a picture was taken – and when it was transferred to its
permanent storage graveyard.
I am actually wondering why no one else had this idea before. There
could be a solution for the huge pile of information we are creating
every day. Natural decomposition can only help to reduce the burden we
are placing on succeeding generations. Is this patent application really
a thought that is complete? Why stop at digital aging? What about
accidental loss of images in, say, statistical fires, floods or any
other unfortunate event that can cause property loss?
In all seriousness, I am not quite sure how the average user would,
in fact, react were a digital file system to automatically age a digital
image or any other document. Of course, I am loosely understanding what
the inventors are trying to do with this technology, but then we know
that the basic thought already exists and is called sepia filter in your
favorite image editing software. Even better, these filters they leave
users a choice how much a picture should be aged and don’t force them
into accepting the fact that a picture just gets old and degrades over
time. Sorry, IBM this patent is a pure waste of energy and space.
Perhaps this aging file system could be demonstrated on its patent
application page?
Kurt Bakke in Business on November 22
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