7th
June
2007
I decided a couple of years ago to scan all my paperwork. All my bills, and other such stuff. So far its mostly been handy when I need to find a record from away from home or something like that, but today another application turned up.
Part of the cool thing of the scanning software (I just use a Dell All-In-One 962 printer with a built-in scanner) is that it scans each document and OCRs it and puts it into a PDF which contains both the image as well as the text version of the document.
Today I needed to remember if I’d paid for Parallels (the Mac VM stuff) and I was surprised that I couldn’t find any record of having paid for it in my email. But with the scanned documents I was able to do a text-search on all my credit-card records and find the charge. Pretty cool! Now that is the kind of scenario that I want enabled by integrated storage…
posted in Technology |
7th
June
2007
Dare posted links to a Back to the Future Spoof that was used in Bob Muglia’s TechEd keynote. Great stuff. I’m touched that Bob managed to include “web store” in the great list of failed integrated storage attempts. Ahhh, good times.
I also love the “get me all the pictures of me with the CEO at the company picnic for the past 5 years”- a good semi-inside joke. I knew WinFS was in trouble when this was the most common example of why you really needed to be able to do joins on semi-structured data like documents, photos and contacts. It was a classic case of “so we have this great technology that does this thing X. Hmmm, why would anyone actually care about doing X. Lets construct a scenario that needs it!”
To be clear, its not that WinFS couldn’t do lots of more basic things that people cared about. However, other, less complex technologies could also do those other things so the team had to keep constructing odd scenarios that those alternative technologies couldn’t accomplish.
posted in Microsoft, Technology |