TEXT № 1. Palm One goes to hard drive

TASK: Read and translate the following text. Learn the vocabulary by heart. Do you know about other innovations in engineering?

PalmOne, formerly Palm Computing, has so far managed to keep one or two steps ahead of the cellphone. Its latest palmtops offer bigger, better screens, smooth music and video playback, wireless networking, Microsoft Office document editing and memory-card expansion slots. Furthermore, the Palm operating system can run a vast library of add-on programs – everything from databases to games and tip calculators. But recently, palmOne took the wraps off a new model with the cleverest enhancement yet: a hard drive. This device, called the LifeDrive, is the first hard-drive palmtop ever released outside of Japan; in retrospect, the idea seems obvious. After all, hard drives are already small enough to spin away inside iPods and camcorders. And Palm organizers can already open and edit Microsoft Office documents, show pictures and videos, and play music. Palmtops could be the new laptops, if it weren’t for their limited storage capacity.

Like many palms, this one has an SD memory-card slot. If you insert the card from a digital camera, the photos appear immediately on the screen; a new utility program offers to copy them onto the hard drive, freeing up the memory card for more shooting. Photographers have a new best friend. (1237)

 

Vocabulary:

рalmtop – карманный компьютер

smooth music – спокойная музыка

expansion - расширение

retrospect – взгляд в прошлое

enhancement – увеличение, улучшение

wrap – оболочка

wireless networking – беспроводная работа в сети

utility program – обслуживающая программа

to free up – освобождать

to shoot – делать снимок

 

TEXT № 2. MORE SHADES OF BLACK

TASK: Read and translate the following text. Learn the vocabulary by heart. What types of printers do you know?

Photography’s past has become Epson’s next target for digital printing. In addition to the usual array of color inks, the Epson Stylus Photo R2400 uses four kinds of black ink to improve the reproduction of black-and-white photos.

Like the printer it replaces, the R2200, the new printer has two basic black options: matte black for heavily textured paper and photo black for everything else. But R2400 adds two additional cartridges, light black and light, light black, to improve monochrome photo reproduction. All of the R2400 inks are based on pigments, which improves resistance to fading.

The software it is uses allows black-and-white prints to be made directly from color image files. It also gives users the option of making monochrome prints with a slightly warm or a brownish sepia tone.

The printer accepts paper up to 13 inches, or 33 centimetres, in width. Despite its emphasis on black and white, it could also reproduce subtle differences in full color prints. (971)

 

Vocabulary:

target – цель

digital printing – цифровая печать

array – набор

color inks – цветные чернила

to improve – улучшать

reproduction – воспроизведение

 

resistance – сопротивление, защита

fading – постепенное исчезновение изображения

sepia – сепия (ярко-коричневая краска)

black-and-white photo – черно-белая фотография

 

 

TEXT № 3. VIDEO TRENDS

TASK: Read and translate the following text. Learn the vocabulary by heart. Make up summary of the text or point out the main idea of the text. Name the advantages and disadvantages of the VHS and DVD.

After several years of uncertainty, digital technology is on the threshold of reinventing video, with new products and technologies on the horizon that will bear little relationship to what has gone before.

D-VHS is very important, as it mirrors the introduction of digital TV services. It offers enormous benefits over standard VHS: the ability to record in a wide-screen format; the extended recording time; backward compatibility with regular VHS; the ability to evolve into what we call a learning VCR – by that it means a machine which can learn yuor viewing preferances. All are highly significant.

Digital (D-VHS) video recorders are likely to be only the first stepin anexpanding galaxyof products that are use computing and video technology in entirely new ways.

Digital TV is an exciting new technology that is at a critical juncture in its development in regard to both technology and the marketplace. It says that it will be digital TV, not the PC, that will dominate tomorrow’s in-home entertainment universe. (1045)

 

Vocabulary:

threshold – порог

VHS (Video Home System) – кассетный видеомагнитофон

wide-screen format – широкоэкранный формат

backward compatibility – обратная совместимость

VCR(Video Cassette Recorder) - видеомагнитофон

entertainment -развлечение

critical juncture – критическая ситуация

 

TEXT № 4. UML and System Development

TASK: Read and translate the following text. Learn the vocabulary by heart. Do you know another types of the computer languages? What are they? What are the principles of their work?

Building systems or software isn’t that tough if you can communicate with your clients, co-workers, managers, and tools. Unfortunately, as your problems get harder and more complex, the risks that emerge from miscommunication become greater — and more severe when they do crop up.

Fortunately, there’s a straightforward, visual language that you can use that will help promote more precise and more efficient communication about the nature of your system in all its aspects — software, requirements, architectures, designs, design patterns, and implementations. This language is UML, the Unified Modeling Language. The newest version, UML 2, has become more powerful and more useful than ever.

Starting here, we cover the basics of UML. You find out how it may fit your situation, how and when you can use it, and what it’s good for. We give you just as much background in history, terminology, and basic principles as you’ll need to take advantage of UML’s highly productive features.

So you’ve been hearing a lot about UML, and your friends and colleagues are spending some of their time drawing pictures. And maybe you’re ready to start using UML but you want to know what it’s all about first. Well, it’s about a lot of things, such as better communication, higher productivity, and also about drawing pretty pictures.

The first thing you need to know is what the initials UML stand for. Don’t laugh—lots of people get it wrong, and nothing brands you as a neophyte faster. It’s not the Universal Modeling Language, as it doesn’t intend to model everything (for example, it’s not very good for modeling the stock market; otherwise we’d be rich by now). It’s also not the Unified Marxist-Leninists, a Nepalese Political party (though we hope you’ll never get that confused). It is the University of Massachusetts Lowell—but not in this context. UML really stands for the Unified Modeling Language.

Well, maybe that’s not the most important thing to know. Probably just as important is that UML is a standardized modeling language consisting of an integrated set of diagrams, developed to help system and software developers accomplish the following tasks: specification, visualization, architecture design, construction, simulation and testing, documentation.

UML was originally developed with the idea of promoting communication and productivity among the developers of object-oriented systems, but the readily apparent power of UML has caused it to make inroads into every type of system and software development. (2521)

 

Vocabulary:

miscommunication – непонимание

to crop up – нежиданно обнаруживаться, возникать

straightforward - простой

precise – точный

implementation – реализация, выполнение

to stand for – означать

to accomplish – выполнять

inroad – вторжение

to promote – вызывать, стимулировать

Unified Modeling Language – единый язык программирования

аpparent – видимый, очевидный