Taking Сomputer for Granted. Учебное пособие

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UNIT 3

6. A bit of humor

DVD for dummies

–Hello, tech support.

–Hi. I bought one of those new computers from you and it is not working the way it’s supposed to.

–What seems to be the problem, sir?

–Your sales guy told me it has this DVD in it that plays movies.

–And it is not working?

–Nope. I click on the thing on the screen that says DVD and don’t get a thing.

–The movies should actually start automatically when you insert a DVD disc.

–Well, I didn’t try that. You have to insert some kind of disc?

Build a system that even a fool can use and only a fool will want to use it.

Banking

After reading the extremely complicated instruction for the automatic teller, the confused customer asked a bank officer:

– Excuse me, be so kind as to help me out. Officer:

– Certainly, go out through this door.

The phrasal verb «to help out» has two meanings:

to help to get out of something,

to help someone with a need or difficulty.

Hence, you see that the kernel of this anecdote is based on a pun. Many American and English anecdotes are made up the same way.

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Taking Computer for Granted

Here is another one of this kind. Try to understand it. You can check the result of your efforts looking up the dictionary of expressions at the end of this book.

Go ahead!

Good news and bad news

The accountant said to his client: There is good news, and there is

Diving

Longing to lean to scuba dive, Mr. Cousteau spent a vast amount of dollars for lessons, then for suit, tanks, mask and so on. Buying a boat and sailing to the Bahamas, he was full of pride as he went down for the first time.

Photographing the coral and fish, and using his waterproof pen and notebook to make notes, he was extremely astonished to find a man swimming below him without a scrap of equipment. Tapping the man on the shoulder, he wrote, «I spent a lot of money to learn to scuba dive, and you are here in just a bathing suit. How did you come to it?» Grasping the notebook and the pencil the stranger wrote hurriedly, «You, blockhead, I’m drowning».

Clothes and clothing

Watching her mother as she tried on her new fur coat young Becky said unhappily, «Mom, do you realize some poor defenseless dumb beast suffered so you could have that». Mother shot her daughter an angry look, «Becky, how dare you talk about your father that way»?!

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Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.

W. Hazlit

It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.

Aesop

In every hierarchy, each employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence; every post tends to be filled by an employee incompetent to execute its duties.

Incompetence knows no barriers of time or place.

When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer.

Life’s laws:

1.If you explain so clearly that no one can misunderstand, somebody will.

2.If you do something which you are sure will meet with everyone’s approval, somebody won’t like it.

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UNIT 4

UNIT 4

1. Information for study

Brief history of computer technology (2)

History, an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant.

Ambrose Bierce

History books, which contain no lies, are extremely dull.

Fifth generation (1984-1990)

The development of the next generation of computer systems is characterized mainly by the acceptance of parallel processing. The fifth generation saw the introduction of machines with hundreds of processors that could all be working on different parts of single program. The scale of integration in semiconductors continued at an incredible pace – by 1990 it was possible to build chips with a million components – and semiconductor memories became standard on all computers.

Other new developments were widespread use of computer networks and the increasing use of single-user workstations. Prior to 1985 large scale parallel processing was viewed as a research goal. For example, a machine was designed in which 20 processors were connected up to a single memory module. Each processor had its own local cache memory, a special memory subsystem that temporarily holds data or program instructions to improve overall computer performance. Most caches copy data from a standard

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Taking Computer for Granted

computer memory, RAM, to a type of memory that allows faster data access by the CPU.

Disk Caches are designed to compensate for the speed discrepancy between the very fast CPU and the much slower disc drives. Internal and external memory caches are designed to compensate for the discrepancy between the CPU and the slower RAM chips. All Caching Systems are designed to prevent main memory, RAM, from being an information bottleneck between the CPU and the much slower hard disc drives.

On the other hand, Intel instead of using one memory module connected each processor to its own memory and used a network interface to connect processors. This distributed memory architecture meant that large systems, using more processors, could be built. The largest machine had 128 processors.

Toward the end of this period a third type of parallel processor was introduced to the market. In this style of machine, known as dataparallel or SIMD, there were several thousand very simple processors. All processors worked under the direction of a single control unit.

Scientific computing in this period was still dominated by vector processing. The term «vector» has two common meanings. The first is in the geometric sense: a vector defines a direction and magnitude. The second concerns the formatting of fonts. If a font is a vector font, it is defined as a line of relative size and direction rather than as a collection of pixels. This makes it easier to change the size of the font, but puts a bigger load on the device that has to display the fonts.

Most manufacturers of vector processors introduced parallel models, but there were very few processors in these parallel machines. In the area of computer networking, both wide area network (WAN) and local area network (LAN) technology developed at a rapid pace, stimulating a transition from the traditional mainframe computing environment toward a distributed computing environment in which each user has his own workstation for rela-

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tively simple task (editing and compiling programs, reading mail) but sharing large, expensive resources such as file servers and supercomputers. RISC technology (a style of internal organization of the CPU) and plummeting costs for RAM brought tremendous gain in computational power of relatively low cost workstations and servers. This period also saw a marked increase in both the quality and quantity of scientific visualization.

Sixth generation (1990 – …)

Transitions between generations in computer technology are hard to define, especially as they are taking place. Some changes, such as the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors, are immediately apparent as fundamental changes, but others are clearly only in retrospect. Many of the developments in computer systems since 1990 reflect gradual improvements over established systems, and thus it is hard to claim they represent a transition to a new «generation», but other developments will prove to be significant changes.

This generation is beginning in parallel computing, both in the hardware area and in improved understanding of how to develop algorithms to exploit diverse, massively parallel architectures. Parallel systems now compete with vector processors in terms of total computing power and most expect parallel systems to dominate the future.

Combinations of parallel / vector architectures are well established, and one corporation (Fujitsu) has announced plans to build a system with over two hundred of vector processors. Manufacturers have set themselves the goal of achieving teraflops (1012 arithmetic operations per second) performance by the middle of the decade, and it’s clear only a system with a thousand processors or more will obtain this. Workstation technology has continued to improve, with processors designs now using a combination of RISC, pipelining, and parallel processing. This development has sparked an interest in heterogeneous computing: a program

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Taking Computer for Granted

started on one workstation can find idle workstations elsewhere in the local network to run parallel subtasks.

One of the most dramatic changes in the sixth generation will be the explosive growth of wide area networking. Network bandwidth has expanded tremendously in the last few years and will continue to improve for the next several years. Network technology is becoming more widespread than its original strong base in universities and government laboratories as it is rapidly finding application in education, community networks and private industry.

Swiftly changing situation in computer progress is tightly connected with the impressive permanent improvement of microprocessors, which are known as central processing units (CPUs). A microprocessor, which includes a huge amount of transistors, is fabricated on a surface of a thin silicon layer with the help of a very complicated and precise semiconductor technology. Such electronic elements are usually called integrated circuits or chips. Engineers’ striving for a multifunctional processor with high speed of operations performance forces them to increase the number of transistors and, as a consequence, to lessen their size. This dynamic of the INTEL CPU development is shown in the table below: