Assignment: Read the text and retell it.

VIRUSES AND VACCINES

The terms viruses and vaccines have entered the jargon of the computer 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 before 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 instructions that infects other programs and may spread rapidly. The Michelangelo virus went worldwide within a year. Some types of viruses include 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: 1. 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 transmitted; 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 destructive, 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-protection 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.

 

TEXT 6

Assignment: Read the text and write an essay “The Perspectives of the Virtual Reality Development”.

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 imperfection. 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 no!?

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 programming 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 rendering, quark mechanics and so on. But has anybody thought of connecting a computer to human's brain and clipping the images you and your ancestors 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 decisions, some crazy projects like the Head Of Professor Dowel. Will there be the final step to create perfect virtual reality? Let's see.

 

 

TEXT 7

Assignment: Read the text, give the main idea and the summary of it.

 

SURFING THE NET

 

What is more impressive than the pyramids, more beautiful than Michelangelo's David and more important to mankind than the wondrous inventions of the Industrial Revolution? To the converted, there can be only one answer: the Internet that undisciplined radical electronic communications network that is shaping our universe. Multimedia, the electronic publishing revolution, is entering every area of our lives — college, work and home. This new digital technology combines texts, video, sound and graphics to produce interactive language learning, football, music, movies, cookery and anything else you might be interested in.

The industrial age has matured into the information age; wherein the means to access, manipulate, and use information has become crucial to success and power. The electronic superhighway provides an entry to libraries, research institutions, databases, art galleries, census bureaus, etc. For those of us interested in intercultural communications Cyberspace is a universal community, with instant access not only to information anywhere, but also to friends old and new around the globe.

The Internet is an amorphous global network of thousands of linked computers that pass information back and forth. While the Internet has no government, no owners, no time, no place, no country, it definitely has a culture, which frequently approaches anarchy; and it has a language, which is more or less English. People who interact in an Internet environment know how addresses are formed, how to use e-mail, ftp, Usenet News, Telnet, and other software tools.

Like all new worlds, Cyberspace has its own lingo, for example:

e-bahn, i-way, online, freenet, web page, freeware, browser, gopher, archie, gateway. There are words to describe people who roam the

net: netters, e-surfers, internet surfers, netizens, spiders, geeks... The Internet has its own prerogatives: for example, the dismissive term lurker for the person who hangs around the net, reading what is there but not contributing anything. The term flaming refers to the public humiliation of another netter as punishment for a real or imagined transgression against net culture.

Large-scale use of computer-to-computer transfer of information was implemented by the US military in the late 60s and early 70s — part of the superpower competition of the cold war and the arms race. The US military created an electronic network (Arpa­net) to use computers for handling the transfer of large amounts of sensitive data over long distances at incredible speed. Computer-to-computer virtual connections, using satellites and fiber optics, have distinct advantages over telephone or radio communications in the event of a nuclear attack. Mathematicians and scientists (and their universities) have been linked and electronically exchanging information over the Internet since the mid-70s.

Now the Internet has become commercialized with private and public companies offering access to it. (CompuServe — is the best-known international commercial electronic access provider). The Internet is being expanded and improved so that every home, every school, every institution can be linked to share data, information, music, video and other resources. If you have a computer or a computer terminal, some kind of connection (probably, modem and telephone line) to the Internet, and some kind of Internet service provider, you can participate in electronic communication and become a citizen of the global village.

Information technology is a good vehicle for the argument. Some scientists remind us that voluminous information does not necessarily lead to sound thinking. There are many genuine dangers that computers bring to modem society: efficient invasion of privacy, overreliance on polling in politics, even abdication of control over military decision-making. Data glut obscures basic questions of jus­tice and purpose and may even hinder rather than enhance our productivity. Edutainment software and computer games degrade the literacy of children. On the other hand, only a few use PCs on network to share information and ideas. In most cases IT is used to speed routine tasks, to automate manual processes rather than to change work patterns and business practices. Most managers use their PCs to edit documents — not a good use of their time when they could be dreaming up creative applications. It is time to evaluate anew the role of science and technology in the affairs of the human species.

So, if you are riding on the information highway, you should take steps to cope with information overload. The gift of boundless information is causing a new kind of stress known alternately as technostress, information overload or Information Fatigue Syndrome. Some experts say that we don't get anywhere near the data it takes to overload our neurons. According to some estimates, our mind is capable of processing and analyzing many gigabytes of data per second — a lot more data than any of today's supercomputers can process and act on in real time. We feel overloaded by the quantity of information because we are getting it unfiltered. We should filter out the junk and turn data into shapes that make sense to us. Stress in moderation is good: it drives us to achieve, stimulates our creativity and is the force behind social and technological breakthroughs. Stress is revealing how humans are in some ways more primitive than the technology they have created. Meditation, muscular relaxation, aerobics, jogging, yoga can be effective stress relievers, but no technique is universal: experiment and find the one that best works for you.

The cornerstone of an economy are land, labor, capital and entrepreneurial spirit. That traditional definition is now being challenged. Today you find a fifth key economic element: information dominant. As we evolve from an industrial to an information society, our jobs are changing from physical to mental labor. Just as people moved physically from farms to factories in the Industrial age, so today people are shifting muscle power to brain power in a new, computer-based, globally linked by the Internet society.