Computer: Command
Undo The Last 5 Minutes   (+7, -3)  [vote for, against]
Today's Session Time Machine

Rather than being application specific, the "undo" buffer could be user/activity specific.

Get me back to where I was 20 minutes ago, with perhaps a finite buffer size of 3 or 4 hours to limit memory demands.
-- theircompetitor, Feb 16 2005

It'd be especially good if you could undo the autoboner
-- theircompetitor, Feb 16 2005


I don't know about you, but my cumulative memory demands over the course of several hours are far more than what's currently in my system. But then again I deal with large 3D models...

I've found that a frequent autosave (every 15 minutes) seems to work well.
-- Freefall, Feb 16 2005


You mean literally all files, all windows, all applications, everything? That could lead to problems - e.g. Outlook has downloaded several important emails in the background from your pop3 server while you've been working. When you 'undo' the last five minutes you 'undo' the emails, but the pop3 server doesn't know that and has deleted it's copy of the emails when they were downloaded. It would be terribly nice if you could have the 'history' window in IE viewable as a timeline - much simpler. Could explain the idea in a little more detail? There is promise within.
-- wagster, Feb 16 2005


Freefal -- I'm talking about things that are not necessarily saveable -- windows positions, etc.

wagster -- there could definitely be issues with transactional items, they would probably have to be out of scope -- though of course databases do support rollback, even across 2-phase commits.
-- theircompetitor, Feb 16 2005


This would have been feasible before networks, but not at all nowadays.

If you try for just one networked application, there is "rollback" (but it doesn't work after transaction is committed). Networked apps with rollback capability are very expensive and complicated. Trying to get back every transaction on all applications you've touched in the last 5 minutes is about as tricky as actual time travel.
-- sophocles, Feb 16 2005


Multiply your indexing service's polling time by a terafactor.
-- reensure, Feb 17 2005


hippo, how is this magic? this has to do with a running archive in computer applications -- not beweitched funcionality
-- theircompetitor, Apr 25 2006


you're right - sorry about that
-- hippo, Apr 25 2006



random, halfbakery