Английский. английский для ИТ 1. Методическое пособие по совершенствованию навыков чтения и говорения на английском языке для студентов фксиС и фитиУ
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Digital Rights Management Suppose you purchase a music CD of your favorite recording group. Now you want to transfer the file to your computer, rip the best tracks, and transfer them to your portable audio player. But wait! That CD is copy protected and your computer CD drive won’t read it. You purchased the disk. Can’t you listen to the music on any device you choose? The answer is “yes” and “no”. Yes, copyright law gives you the right to make copies for your personal use and transfer works into a format that works on your equipment. However, the growing pervasiveness of digital rights management may curtail your ability to exercise these rights. It is easy to copy digital material. Before the dawn of the digital age, copies produced by analog equipment, such as photocopiers and audio tape dubbing machines, were of considerably poorer quality than the originals. Copies of digital materials, however, are indistinguishable from the originals, and that factor has encouraged an alarming increase in software, music, and movie piracy. The battle against piracy took shape as a concept called digital rights management (DRM), vigorously supported by Microsoft and backed by a host of industry leaders. Today, digital rights management encompasses a variety of technologies implemented by copyright holders, such as record companies and software publishers, which restrict the usage of digital material. DRM systems address piracy by using a variety of technologies for manipulating data, media, devices, and transactions. Software copy protection techniques include reading data written to places on a disk or CD-ROM that the drive cannot normally access, using hardware that must be plugged into the computer when the software is run, requiring a serial number during the installation process, and using Internet product activation that checks the validity of an installation. Most software copy protection schemes have proved to be costly for publishers or inconvenient for consumers. Many consumers are not aware that they pay a surcharge for every blank audio tape or CD they purchase. Collected revenues from this surcharge go to music publishers to compensate recording artists for the fact that many people duplicate works without authorization. Most of today’s music download sites encrypt music files and embed codes that limit the number of times they can be copied and the devices on which they can be played. Various formats used by different sites are not compatible with each other and require different players. Music from several different download sites cannot be compiled into a single playlist. It is becoming more common for music CDs to use play-protection technology designed to make the CD unusable in devices, such as computer CD-R drives, that can also be conveniently used for duplicating CDs. Consumers who purchase these protected CDs find that they cannot be copied to a computer hard disk, then ripped to produce an MP3 file for a portable audio player. Commercial movie DVDs use CSS (Content-Scrambling System) encryption to make DVDs playable only on authorized DVD players equipped with decryption key circuitry. Movies purchases in the United States and Canada cannot be played on devices manufactured for the European or Asian markets. Despite DRM technologies and the inconveniences imposed on consumers, digital piracy remains rampant. According to an article about digital rights management posted on Wikipedia, “To date, all DRM systems have failed to meet the challenge of protecting the rights of the rights holder while also allowing the use of the rights of the purchaser. None have succeeded in preventing criminal copyright infringement by organized, unlicensed, commercial pirates.” Current DRM technologies do not seem able to distinguish between pirates and legitimate consumers. As a result, DRM technologies essentially pose restrictions on consumers that go beyond the intended limitations of copyright law. The current status of DRM seems to conflict with the original intent of copyright law to allow consumers to manipulate and copy works for their own use. Can technology eventually offer a solution that prevents piracy, but allows individuals to exercise their rights to fair use of copyrighted materials? What do you think? Have you had trouble using software or music CDs because of copy protection? In your opinion, do sites like the iTunes Music Store provide consumers with enough flexibility for copying files and creating playlists? Are DRM technologies justified because of the high rate of piracy? Final Test. Do the tasks in the following test. 1. The process of transferring a file from a remote computer to your personal computer is called ___. 2. Personal computer systems typically include the following devices EXCEPT ___. a) a mouse b) a hard disk drive c) a CD-ROM d) a PDA 3. The stored program concept on a computer is the single most important characteristic that distinguishes a computer from other simpler devices such as a calculator. (True/False) 4. Which of the following tasks might you perform with application software? a) locating data b) starting programs c) both a) and b) d) creating and editing documents 5. Most computer systems use a(n) ___ as the primary input device. a) monitor b) keyboard c) mouse d) floppy disk drive 6. Computers can be categorized by type, such as personal computers, handhelds and supercomputers. (True/False) 7. The computer system unit is the case that holds the main circuit boards, microprocessor, power supply and ___ devices. 8. A floppy disk drive is not considered a storage device. (True/False) 9. The __ is often referred to as the “brain” of the computer. a) keyboard b) monitor c) central processing unit d) software 10. ___ refers to the symbols that represent facts, objects and ideas. Projects. Choose and perform one of the projects given. 1. Although the Internet provides a global communications network, communication between people still depends on finding a common language. For this project, explore the Web and experiment with ways in which technology is being used to close the language gap. You might start at Google or Wikipedia and look at the selection of languages they offer. Chronicle your exploration, making sure to document the sites you visited. Present your conclusions about Internet use by non-English speakers in writing. 2. Whether you’re taking this course to fulfill a graduation requirement or to improve your career options take a few minutes to evaluate what you expect to gain from this course. Look though the units of this textbook and select the section that you think will be the most useful, interesting and the section that seams to be the least relevant to you. Incorporate your thoughts in two or three paragraphs. Unit 2. COMPUTER HARDWARE Text A Pre-reading. Match the meaning of the following English words with their Russian equivalents.
Reading. Read the text and try to guess the meaning of the words in bold face. Check your variants in the dictionary. DATA REPRESENTATION AND DIGITAL ELECTRONICS Data representation People use computers to work with many kinds of data, including numbers, text, music, photos, and videos. Data representation is the process of transforming this diverse data into form (today digital) that computers can use for processing. Most computers are digital devices which work with discrete – distinct and separate – data, such as the digits 1 and 0. In contrast, an analog device works with continuous data. As an analogy, a traditional light switch has two discrete states – “on” and “off” – so it is a digital device. A dimmer switch, on the other hand, has a rotating dial that controls a continuous range of brightness. It is, therefore, an analog device. Most computers use the simplest type of digital technology – their circuits have only two possible states. For convenience, let’s say that one of those states is “on” and the other state is “off”. When discussing these states, we usually indicate the “on” state with 1 and the “off” state with 0. These 1s and 0s are referred to as binary digits. It is from this term that we get the word “bit” – binary digit. Computers use sequences of bits to digitally represent numbers, letters, punctuation marks, music, picture, and videos. Numeric data consists of numbers that might be used in arithmetic operations. Computers represent numeric data using the binary number system, also called “base 2”. The binary number system has only two digits: “0” and “1”. No numeral like “2” exists in this system, so the number “two” is represented in binary as “10” (pronounced “ one zero“). In binary you count 0 (”zero”), 1 (“one”), 10 (“one zero”), instead of counting 0, 1, 2 in decimal. The important point to understand is that the binary number system allowscomputers to represent virtually any number simply by using 0s and 1s, which conveniently translate into electrical “on” and “off” signals. Character data is composed of letters, symbols, and numerals that are not used in arithmetic operations. A digital computer uses a series of bits to represent letters, characters, and numerals. Computers employ several types of codes to represent character data, including ASCII, EBCDIC, and Unicode. ASCII (pronounced “ASK ee”, American Standard Code for Information Interchange,) requires only seven bits for each character. ASCII requires codes for 128 characters. A superset of ASCII, called Extended ASCII, uses eight bits to represent each character. Using eight bits instead of seven bits allowsExtended ASCII to provide codes for 256 characters. Unicode (pronounced ‘YOU ni code’) uses sixteen bits and provides codes for 65,000 characters. To work with music and pictures, they must be digitized. The term to digitize means to convert raw, analog data into digital format represented by 0s and 1s. A photograph or drawing can be digitized by treating it as a series of colored dots. Each dot is assigned a binary number according to its color. A digital image is simply a list of color numbers for all the dots it contains. In a similar way, music can be digitized by assigning binary codes to notes. All the “stuff” that your computer works with is stored in files as a long series of 1s and 0s. Your computer needs to know whether to interpret those 1s and 0s as ASCII code, binary numbers, or the code for a picture or sound. To avoid confusion, most computer files contain a file header with information about the code used to represent the file data. A file header can be read by the computer, but never appears on the screen. By reading the header information, a computer can tell how a file’s contents were coded. Quantifying Bits and Bytes Even though the word “bit” is an abbreviation for “binary digit”, it can be further abbreviated, usually as a lowercase “b”. A byte is composed of eight bits and usually abbreviated as an uppercase “B”. Transmission speeds are typically expressed in bits, whereas storage space is typically expressed in bytes. When working with computers, you’ll frequently encounter references such as “50 kilobits per second”. In common usage, “kilo”, abbreviated as “K”, means a thousand. In the decimal number system we use on a daily basis, the number 1,000 is 10 to the 3rd power, or 10³. In the world of computers where base 2 is the norm, a “kilo” is precisely 1,024, or 2¹º. A kilobit (Kb or Kbit) is 1,024 bits, a megabit is 1,048,576 or 2²º bits, a gigabit is 1,073,741,824 bits or 2³º bits. Digital Electronics Because most computers are electronic devices, bits take the form of electrical pulses that can travel over circuits, in much the same way that electricity flows over a wire when you turn on a light switch. All the circuits, chips, and mechanical components that form a computer are designed to work with bits. Most of these essential components are housed within the computer’s system unit. A computer’s system unit typically contains circuit boards, storage devices, and a power supply that converts current from an AC wall outlet into the DC current used by computer circuitry. The terms “computer chip”, “microchip” and “chip” originated as technical jargon for “integrated circuit”. An integrated circuit (IC) is a super-thin slice of semiconducting material packed with microscopic circuit elements, such as wires, transistors, capacitors, logic gates, and resistors. Semiconducting materials are substances with properties between those of a conductor and an insulator. The assortment of chips inside a computer includes the microprocessor, memory modules, and support circuitry. The computer’s main board, called a system board, “motherboard”, or ”main board”, houses all essential chips and provides connecting circuitry between them. Comprehension сheck. Mark the following statements as True or False. 1. Both analog and digital devices work with continuous data. 2. The binary system allows computers to represent any number or symbol. 3. The more bits are used for representing a character data – the more is the number of characters provided by a certain code. 4. To know the code used to represent data a computer has to read the file header. 5. The process of digitizing is used to transform digital data into analog ones. 6. The DC is transformed into the AC for the computer to be able to work. 7. An integrated circuit is often referred to as Unicode. Vocabulary practice 1. Match up the words that are similar in meaning.
2. Fill in the blanks choosing from the variants given. 1. Main memory … only a small amount of storage area for the data and instructions required by the CPU. a) allows b) transforms c) provides d) rotate 2. To fabricate a chip, the conductive properties of selective parts of the … can be enhanced. a) electrical pulses b) semiconducting mater c) digital devices d) binary numbers 3. Some chips on the motherboard are plugged into special sockets and connectors that … chips to be removed for repairs. a) allow b) assign c) avoid d) include 4. Even embedded computers … maintenance by people. a) transform b) range c) employ d) require 5. The most powerful computer systems with the fastest processing speed … supercomputers. a) rotate b) are referred to as c) avoid d) include 6. Every key stroke on a keyboard … a letter symbol into a digital code that the machine can understand. a) converts b) requires c) allows d) provides 7. Most computers … the simplest type of digital technology – their circuits have only two possible states. a) assign b) employ c) require d) range 3. Make two-word expressions combining words from two lists. Then fill in the gaps in the following sentences. Some words can be used more than once. A: data B: data diverse digit integrated header binary circuit file representation character numeric 1. The binary number system represents … as a series of 1s and 0s. 2. An … contains microscopic elements such as wires, transistors, and capacitors, that are packed onto a very small square of semiconducting material. 3. The process of transforming data into form that computers can use for processing is referred to as … . 4. Today computers typically represent … digitally. 5. A computer treats the letters and symbols in a word as … which can be represented by a string of 0s and 1s. 6. All the material your computer works with is stored in files as long strings of … . 7. A … is stored along with the file and contains information about the code used to represent the file data. 4. Fill in the gaps in the text. Most of today’s computers are electronic, digital devices that work with data coded as binary digits, also known as ___. To represent numeric data, a computer can use the ___ number system. To represent character data, a computer uses Extended ___, EBCDIC, or Unicode. These codes also provide digital representations for the numerals 0 through 9 that are distinguished from numbers by the fact that they are not typically used in mathematical operations. Computers also ___sounds, pictures, and videos into 1s and 0s. A ___ is a single 1 or 0, whereas a ___ is a sequence of eight 1s and 0s. Transmission speeds are usually measured in ___, but storage space is usually measured in ___ or gigabytes. Speaking. Discuss the following questions. 1. What is data representation? 2. How do computers represent data digitally? 3. How can a computer represent words and letters using bits? 4. How does a computer convert music and pictures into codes? 5. When a computer works with a series of 1s and 0s, how does it know which code to use? 6. How can you tell the difference between bits and bytes? 7. What do the prefixes kilo-, mega- and giga- mean? 8. How does a computer store and transport all those bits? 9. What’s a computer chip? 10. What provides connectivity between all the constituent parts of the computer? |