Рецензенты старший преподаватель кафедры английской филологии факультета ргф ивГУ, к ф. н
 Скачать 0.51 Mb.
|
|
Related Reading VIRUSES AND VACCINES The terms viruses and vaccines have entered the jargon of the com puter industry to describe some of the bad things that can happen to computer systems and programs. Unpleasant occurrences like the March 6, 1991, attack of the Michelangelo virus will be with us for years to come. In fact, from now on you need to check your IBM or IBM- compatible personal computer for the presence of Michelangelo be fore March 6 every year — or risk losing all the data on your hard disk when you turn on your machine that day. And Macintosh users need to do the same for another intruder, the Jerusalem virus, before each Friday the 13th, or risk a similar fate for their data. A virus, as its name suggests, is contagious. It is a set of illicit in structions that infects other programs and may spread rapidly. The Mich elangelo virus went worldwide within a year. Some types of viruses in clude the worm, a program that spreads by replicating itself; the bomb, a program intended to sabotage a computer by triggering damage based on certain conditions — usually at a later date; and the Trojan horse, a program that covertly places illegal, destructive instructions in the middle of an otherwise legitimate program. A virus may be dealt with by means of a vaccine, or antivirus, program, a computer program that stops the spread of and often eradicates the virus. Transmitting a Virus. Consider this typical example. A programmer secretly inserts a few unauthorized instructions in a personal computer operating system program. The illicit instructions lie dormant until three events occur together: I. the disk with the infected operating system is in use; 2. a disk in another drive contains another copy of the operating system and some data files; and 3. a command, such as COPY or DIR, from the infected operating system references a data file. Under these circumstances, the virus instructions are now inserted into the other operating system. Thus the virus has spread to another disk, and the process can be repeated again and again. In fact, each newly infected disk becomes a virus carrier. Damage from Viruses. We have explained how the virus is transmit ted; now we come to the interesting part — the consequences. In this example, the virus instructions add 1 to a counter each time the virus is copied to another disk. When the counter reaches 4, the virus erases all data files. But this is not the end of the destruction, of course; three other disks have also been infected. Although viruses can be destruc tive, some are quite benign; one simply displays a peace message on the screen on a given date. Others may merely be a nuisance, like the Ping- Pong virus that bounces a “Ping-Pong ball” around your screen while you are working. But a few could result in disaster for your disk, as in the case of Michelangelo. Prevention. A word about prevention is in order. Although there are programs called vaccines that can prevent virus activity, protecting your computer from viruses depends more on common sense than on building a “fortress” around the machine. Although there have been occasions where commercial software was released with a virus, these situations are rare. Viruses tend to show up most often on free software acquired from friends. Even commercial bulletin board systems, once considered the most likely suspects in transferring viruses, have cleaned up their act and now assure their users of virus-free environments. But not all bulletin board systems are run professionally. So you should always test diskettes you share with others by putting their write-pro- tection tabs in place. If an attempt is made to write to such a protected diskette, a warning message appears on the screen. It is not easy to protect hard disks, so. many people use antivirus programs. Before any diskette can be used with a computer system, the antivirus program scans the diskette for infection. The drawback is that once you buy this type of software, you must continuously pay the price for upgrades as new viruses are discovered. Topics for Essays, Oral or Written Reports:
Essay Selection for Reading as a Stimulus for Writing WHOM TO BLAME AND WHAT TO DO? As computing and communications become irreplaceable tools of mod em society, one fundamental principle emerges: the greater the benefits these systems bring to our well-being and quality of life, the greater the potential for harm when they fail to perform their functions or perform them incorrectly. Consider air, rail, and automobile traffic control; emer gency response systems, and, most of all, our rapidly growing dependence on health care delivery via high-performance computing and communica tions. When these systems fail, lives and fortunes may be lost. At the same time, threats to dependable operations are growing in scope and severity. Leftover design faults (bugs and glitches) cause system crashes during peak demands, resulting in service disruptions and financial losses. Computer systems suffer stability problems due to unforeseen interactions of overlapping fault events and mismatched defense mechanisms. Hackers and criminally minded individuals invade systems, causing disruptions, misuse, and damage accidents that result in breaking several communications links, affecting entire regions. Finally, we face the possi bility of systems damage by “info terrorists ”. Fault tolerance is our best guarantee that high confidence systems will not betray the intentions of their builders and the trust of their users by succumbing to physical, design or human-machine interaction faults, or by 'allowing viruses and malicious acts to disrupt essential services. As the computing sciences move rapidly toward “professionalization ”, the new topic must be incorporated into the curriculum — ethics, i.e. professional ethical behavior. Computer professionals are experts in their field with up-to-date knowledge that they can effectively and consequently apply in product development. They are also responsible to the product’s users and must understand the effects of their decisions and actions on the public at large. Professionals are responsible for designing and developing products, which avoid failures that might lead to losses, cause physical harm, or compromise national or company security. With so much info flowing across the Internet and because of the rising popularity of applets and similar modular applications, it is vital for the professionals to take responsibility in maintaining high standards for the products they develop. Unit VII. Virtual Reality Prereading Discussion
Reading Analysis VOCABULARY LIST Nouns: sitcom, voyage, goggles, gear, content, combat, oblivion. Verbs: slip on (off), feature, strap, blast, bind, dutch, swoop. Adjectives: incredible, appropriate, ambitious, exciting, paraple gic. Word combinations: to take a ride, to go astray, the age of dino saurs, to jight monsters, to don (strap on/into) cyberspace gear, a military point of view, a fiber optic glove, a computer-enhanced fantasy world. TEXT I. STRAP ON SOME EYEPHONES AND YOU ARE VIRTUALLY THERE
EXERCISES
to come up with your own definition:
Virtual reality — Three-dimensional (3D) — Cyberspace — Gear — Disabled — To go astray —
Trainees fighting in virtual battles often cannot ... a man from a machine.
Who uses virtual reality?
VII. Translate into English:
Topics for Essays, Oral or Written Reports
Essay Selection for Reading as a Stimulus for Writing IS IT POSSIBLE TO CREATE PERFECT VIRTUAL REALITY? Human beings have always been seeking for a better place to live, better food to eat, better people to meet. The wise have concluded that there’s no perfection itself. Human’s brain identifies reality by its imper fection. And thus, the attempts to create ideal world turned to creating the world alike reality — virtual reality. On the first stage, when technology wasn't so developed, virtual reality models just presented the essence of the current processes. But along with the development of technology and science a real world model is quite similar to our life. It’s still something alike, a copy but not perfect. Copying itself isn’t an example to follow, but this way we may explore the universe more carefully. So what are the problems of creating perfect virtual reality — cyberspace where you can’t say whether it's cyberspace or not? One of the difficulties is that it doesn't look like reality. We can’t present the needed number of colors, the full palette our eye can catch. We can’t introduce shades that really look like shades because the rendering algorithms we have are huge and approximate. And it’s still not possible to show such a movie in real time. If we ‘d like just to imitate the movements of molecules, which are easy to be programmed, and this way to model the reality, again, we have a great wall to be stepped over. Our knowledge of micro world is poor and even though Einstein himself worked at the Uniform Field Theory, it is still uncompleted. On the other hand, the molecules are so many that program ming a single cell, let alone even an insect, is the work of life for hundreds of programmers. Nobody can imagine the difficulty of virtualization of a human being. To model the universe we should create another one. There are tasks to be solved before we can create 99% acceptable virtual reality: e.g. the speed of processing, fractal algorithms for render ing, quark mechanics and so on. But has anybody thought of connecting a computer to human’s brain and clipping the images you and your ances tors have seen to present for someone else, or maybe using the calculating and data processing capabilities of the cortex? By the way, the process of seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling the world is just a bunch of electric signals entering the brain. May be, the answer is here, and the distance is not the unaccomplished technical achievements, but ideas, strategic deci sions, some crazy projects like the Head Of Professor Dowel. Will there be the final step to create perfect virtual reality? Let’s see. |