Text 9. HD-DVD VS. BLU-RAY: WHO CARES?

1. Discuss the following questions:

1. Some people are sure that if you put in a well-transferred DVD in a DVD-player and sit a little farther from your TV-set, it all looks like HD. Do you agree with this opinion?

2. Where do you prefer watching movies, at home or at theatres? Why?

3. Do you have a lot of DVDs at home?

4. What is your favourite movie? Why?

2. Read the definitions of the following words and translate them into Russian:

backed by – supported by smth or smb;

roster - a list of names;

upstart - a person, group, etc., that has risen suddenly to a position of power or wealth;

densely - in a concentrated manner, compact;

at launch – in the beginning of;

to have over – to leave behind, to be superior to smth;

to give a leg up - to give an advantage that someone else does not have;

costly - of high price or value; expensive;

spec (specification) - a detailed description of design criteria for a piece of work;

compression - the process by which data is compressed into a form that minimizes the space required to store or transmit it;

codec - a set of equipment that encodes an analogue speech or video signal into digital form for transmission purposes and at the receiving end decodes the digital signal into a form close to its original;

to be on even ground - to be equal in force;

to convert - to change (something) from one use, function, or purpose to another; adapt to a new or different purpose;

confusing – causing disorientation, puzzling;

downside - the disadvantageous aspect of a situation;

leap – a jump;

to take the bait - to accept something that was offered to make you do something.

3. Read the following text and answer what discs (Blu-rays or HD-DVDs) you would like to have at home and explain why:

Blu-ray and HD-DVD are two competing high-capacity disc technologies backed by various consumer electronics and computer manufacturers (yes, they are a computer storage media as well). On one side of the ring you have Blu-ray's captain, Sony, with a roster that includes Panasonic, Samsung, Dell, HP, Philips, and several other industry heavyweights, and on the other (HD-DVD), Toshiba, NEC, and a couple of other upstarts. Both formats use blue laser technology, which has a shorter wavelength than red, allowing it to read the smaller digital data "spots" packed a lot more densely onto a standard-size disc. HD-DVD is capable of holding 30GB or a full-length high-definition movie, plus extras, on a prerecorded double-layer disc. Blu-ray will go up to 50GB at launch, and Sony is reportedly working on a quad-layer 100GB disc.

Before you stop buying DVDs and before we decide which format will win, here's a brief description of each, with their potential advantages and disadvantages.

Camp Blu-ray

Fight song: "We're better, you know it."

Advantages: Technologically, the biggest edge Blu-ray appears to have over HD-DVD is that it offers 30 percent more capacity and is designed for recording high-def video. Rewritable BD-RW discs, with similar features to Panasonic's current DVD-RAM discs, can play back content while recording to the disc at the same time. Also, Sony owns Columbia Pictures and recently bought MGM, which gives it a leg up on releasing content.

Disadvantages: Real or not, the biggest knock against Blu-ray is that the discs are more costly to produce than HD-DVD media. Until recently, the other knock was that unlike DVD-HD, the Blu-ray spec did not include support for more advanced video compression codecs such as MPEG-4 AVC and Microsoft's VC-1, in addition to the MPEG-2 codec. But the Blu-ray Group recently announced support for those codecs, so they're now on even ground on that front.

HD-DVD team

Fight song: "We're evolutionary, not revolutionary."

Advantages: The name itself, HD-DVD, is far more consumer-friendly than Blu-ray. HD-DVDs carry the same basic structure as current DVDs, so converting existing DVD manufacturing lines into HD-DVD lines is supposedly simple and cost effective. Memory-Tech, a leading Japanese manufacturer of optical media, stated that producing HD-DVD discs would initially cost only 10 percent more than for existing DVDs and that it could quickly bring the cost down to match that of standard DVD.

Disadvantages: HD-DVD simply can't boast the same storage capacity as Blu-ray. It's confusing, but it appears that the rewritable HD-DVD-RW will go up 32GB, while the recordable HD DVD-R discs will only be 15GB. The other downside is that with Sony holding the rights to Columbia Pictures and MGM movie and television libraries, there will probably be a hole in HD-DVD's content offering--don't expect to see MGM's James Bond movies on HD-DVD, for example.

So, from a marketing standpoint, HD-DVD appears to be positioning itself as the more practical high-def DVD solution, an extension of the format rather than a leap beyond it. The Blu-ray group, for better or worse, is taking the bait and campaigning on technological superiority.

4. Arrange the following sentences as they appear in the text and translate them into Russian:

a. It's confusing, but it appears that the rewritable HD-DVD-RW will go up 32GB, while the recordable HD DVD-R discs will only be 15GB.

b. Real or not, the biggest knock against Blu-ray is that the discs—are more costly to produce than HD-DVD media.

c. Blu-ray will go up to 50GB at launch, and Sony is reportedly working on a quad-layer 100GB disc.

d. Technologically, the biggest edge Blu-ray appears to have over HD-DVD is that it offers 30 percent more capacity and is designed for recording high-def video.

e. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are two competing high-capacity disc technologies backed by various consumer electronics and computer manufacturers (yes, they are a computer storage media as well).

f. Both formats use blue laser technology, which has a shorter wavelength than red, allowing it to read the smaller digital data "spots" packed a lot more densely onto a standard-size disc.

g. So, from a marketing standpoint, HD-DVD appears to be positioning itself as the more practical high-def DVD solution, an extension of the format rather than a leap beyond it.

h.The Blu-ray group, for better or worse, is taking the bait and campaigning on technological superiority.

5. Mark the following statements as True or False:

1. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are two different high-capacity disc technologies backed by working together consumer electronics and computer manufacturers.

2. Both formats use blue laser technology, which has a shorter wavelength than red, allowing it to read the smaller digital data "spots" packed a lot more densely onto a standard-size disc.

3. Camp Blu-ray’s fight song is: "We're evolutionary, not revolutionary."

4. Technologically, the biggest edge Blu-ray appears to have over HD-DVD is that it offers 50 percent more capacity and is designed for recording high-def video.

5. The biggest knock against Blu-ray is that the discs are more costly to produce than HD-DVD media.

6. HD-DVD team’s fight song is: "We're better, you know it."

7. HD-DVD is far more consumer-friendly than Blu-ray as HD-DVDs carry the same basic structure as current DVDs.

8. The Blu-ray’s downside is that with Sony holding the rights to Columbia Pictures and MGM movie and television libraries, there will probably be a hole in Blu-ray’s content offering.

6. Choose one quotation you agree or disagree with. Use at least 10 sentences to prove your point of view:

· A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad. Samuel Goldwyn

· Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo. Mary Pickford

· Every great film should seem new every time you see it. Roger Ebert

· It's the movies that have really been running things on our planet ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Andy Warhol.

Text 10. LINUX

1. Translate these definitions:

kernel - the central component of most computer operating systems (OS). Its functions include managing the system’s resources (the communication between hardware and software components);

Linux kernel - Unix-like operating system kernel;

VFS(Virtual file system) - an abstraction layer on top of a more concrete file system;

GNU -a computer operating system composed entirely of free software, initiated in 1984 by Richard Stallman;

GPL -a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project;

Minix-free/open source, Unix-like operating system (OS) based on a microkernel architecture;

Unix-a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas Ilroy;

operating system - the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources.

buffer - a region of memory used to temporarily hold data while it is being moved from one place to another;

buffer cache-a collection of data duplicating original values stored elsewhere or computed earlier, where the original data is expensive to fetch (owing to longer access time) or to compute compared to the cost of reading the cache.

2. Before you read the text, try to answer the following questions:

1. What is an operating system and what is its purpose?

2. Where is an operating system stored and how is it transferred to internal memory?

3. Can you list any of the tasks typically performed by an operating system?

4. What operating systems do you know?

5. What operating systems have you worked with?

6. What is the world’s most spread operating system?

7. What is the world’s most reliable and secure operating system?

3. Read the text and check your answers:

Linux has its roots in a student project. In 1992, an undergraduate called Linus Torvalds was studying computer science in Helsinki, Finland. Like most computer science courses, a big component of it taught on (and about) Unix. Unix was the wonder operating system of 1970s and 1980s: both a textbook example of the principles of operating system design, and sufficiently robust to be the standard OS in engineering and scientific computing. Bur Unix was a commercial product (licensed by AT&T to a number of resellers), and cost more than a student could pay.

Annoyed by the shortcomings of Mnix (a compact Unix clone) Linus set out to write his own ‘kernel’ – the core of an operating system that handles memory allocation, talks to hardware devices, and makes everything running. He used GNU programming tools developed by Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, an organization of volunteers dedicated to fulfilling Stallman’s ideal of making good software that anyone could use without paying. When he’d written a basic kernel, he released the source code to the Linux kernel on the Internet.

Source code is important. It’s the original from which compiled programs are generated. If you don’t have the source code to a program, you can’t modify it to fix the bugs or add new features. Most software companies won’t sell you their source code or will only do so for an eye-watering price, because they believe that if they make it available it will destroy their revenue stream.

What happened next was astounding from the conventional, commercial software industry point of view – and absolutely predictable to anyone who knew about the Free Software Foundation. Programmers (mostly students) began using Linux. They found that it didn’t do things they wanted it to do – so they fixed it. And where they improved it, they sent the improvements to Linus, who rolled them into the kernel. And Linux began to grow.

There is a term for this model of software development; it is called Open Source. Anyone can have the source code – it is free. Anyone can contribute to it. If you use it heavily you may want to extend or develop or fix bugs in it – and it is easy to give your fixes back to the community that most people do so.

An operating system kernel on its own isn’t a lot of use; but Linux was purposefully designed as a near-clone of Unix, and there is a lot of software out there that is free and was designed to compile on Linux. By about 1992, the first ‘distributions’ appeared.

A distribution is the Linux-user term for a complete operating system kit, complete with the utilities and applications you need to make it do useful things – command interpreters, programming tools, text editors, typesetting tools, and graphical user interfaces based on the X windowing system. X is a standard in academic and scientific computing, but not hitherto common on PC’s; it’s a complex distributed windowing system on which people implement graphical interfaces like KDE and Gnome.

As more and more people got to know about Linux, some of them began to port the Linux kernel to run on non-standard computers. Because it’s free, Linux is now the most widely-ported operating system there is.

4. Complete the sentences and translate them into Russian:

1. Linux ____ in a student project. (начинаться)

2. Unix was the wonder operating system of 1970s and 1980s: both a ______ _____ (хрестоматийный пример) of the principles of operating system design, and sufficiently ______ (устойчивый к сбоям) to be the standard OS in engineering and scientific computing.

3. Annoyed by the _________ (недостатки) of Mnix (a compact Unix clone) Linus set out to write his own ‘____’ (ядро) – the core of an operating system that handles_________ ________ (распределение памяти), talks to hardware devices, and makes everything running.

4. When he’d written a basic kernel, he released the ____ ____ (исходный код) to the Linux kernel on the Internet.

5. Most software companies won’t sell you their source code or will only do so for an ____-_______ (невероятно огромный) price, because they believe that if they make it available it will destroy their _____ ____(поступление дохода).

6. There is a term for this model of software development; it is called _____ _____ (программное обеспечение с открытым исходным кодом).

7. If you use it _____ (интенсивно) you may want to extend or _____ (разрабатывать) or ___ ____ (устранять ошибки) in it – and it is easy to give your fixes back to the community that most people do so.

8. An operating system kernel on its own isn’t a lot of use; but Linux was ________ (намеренно) designed as a near-clone of Unix, and there is a lot of software out there that is free and was designed to compile on Linux.

9. A distribution is the Linux-user term for a ______(функционально полный) operating system ____ (комплект, набор инструментальных средств), complete with the utilities and applications you need to make it do useful things – command interpreters, programming tools, text editors, typesetting tools, and graphical user interfaces based on the X windowing system.

10. X is a standard in academic and scientific computing, but not _____ (до этого времени) common on PC’s; it’s a complex distributed windowing system on which people _______ (вводить в эксплуатацию)graphical interfaces like KDE and Gnome.

5. Answer the questions to the text:

1. What did Linus Torvalds use to write the Linux kernel?

2. How was the Linux kernel first made available to the general public?

3. What is a programmer likely to do with the source code?

4. Why will most software companies not sell you their source code?

5. What type of utilities and applications are provided in a Linux distribution?

6. What is X?

7.What graphical user interfaces are mentioned in the text?

Task 6. Match the term in Table A with the statements in Table B:

Table A	Table B
a. Kernel	1. A type of software development where any programmer can develop or fix bugs in the software
b. Free Software Foundation	2. The original systems program from which compiled programs are generated
c. Source code	3. A complete operating system kit with the utilities and applications you need to make it do useful things
d. Open Source	4. A standard distributed windowing system on which people implement graphical interfaces
e. A distribution	5. An organization of volunteers dedicated to making good software that anyone could use without paying
f. X	6. The core of an operating system that handles memory allocation, talks to hardware devices, and makes everything running