Google Wants a Place on Your DesktopWritten by John Calder
© 2004, John Calder http://www.TheEzine.netSome time ago, Microsoft announced that desktop based search was going to be integrated into future releases of their Windows operating system. Knowing this, search-engine mover & shaker Google has released a beta version of their Google Desktop Search software. It's available for download now, and with it, you will be able to search files on your computer, including your email, web pages viewed, saved chat sessions, Excel, Powerpoint, and Word documents, and text and HTML files. The application runs continuously in your computer's memory, scanning and indexing new documents as they arrive through email or as they are created or copied on to your system. It's available only for Windows 2000 SP 3 and Windows XP systems right now, and requires 500MB of disk space. There are some big limitations. Hopefully Google will improve in this area as they continue development of this software. For example, Desktop Search can only read email in Outlook or Outlook Express. Though Outlook does indeed have a large market share among email clients, surely Google realizes that a large number of people are moving towards other email clients that may not be as susceptible to email-borne security flaws. The same applies to cached web pages - right now, you can only search those viewed with Internet Explorer 5 or greater, while growing numbers of surfers are moving to maturing alternative browsers such as Mozilla and Opera.
| | Controls - The Building Blocks to AutomationWritten by Thomas Yoon
As man learns to make machines that no longer rely on animal or human power, he finds that he has to develop some means to manage and control them. Powerful machines let loosed by themselves will create havoc and destruction.Control systems have been developed for machines or processes so as to reduce chances of failure and to provide required results. Basically, there are open loop control systems and close loop control systems. Open loop systems are those where controller action is not related to final result. This means that there is no feedback to controller to adjust control action. A simple example is when you fill up a tank using a garden hose. As long as tap is opened, water will flow. The height of water in tank will not make tap close. However, when you see tank becoming full and decide to close tap, you are adding element of feedback to loop. It then becomes a closed loop. But it is a human controlled closed loop. Closed loop systems use feedback from final result to adjust control action accordingly. But how would you like to stand in one position, watch process going on and operate valves, or switches according to conditions you want? This is very tiring, isn't it? Moreover, human beings are prone to fatigue, boredom, and misjudgment. Manual control works very well only if speed of response is very slow, and result is not very critical or important. Human controlled systems can become very unreliable.
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