Technology to Change Our life

Speech, being a means of communication people feel comfortable with, has great potential as a way to direct our computers. People are quite eager to talk to their machines. Any number of science fiction movies testify to the perception that, inevitably, we will talk to our machines...

Yet speech recognition is one of those technologies that seems perpetually around the comer. It is easy to simulate in science fiction movies, but a live, useful, and broad implementation has been elusive. The main problem is not getting the computer to speak up. Even a crude system like the early Macin Talk allowed a human listener to understand a line of text. The real problem is figuring out what we say. Leave aside the question of what we mean - there are enough problems in making computers smart enough to take dictation. When humans speak, they use complex languages, loaded with ambiguities, colored by inflection and tone. And each human speaks differently - there are accents, street dialects, slang. What's machine going to do?

Yet the field abounds with optimists who think that automatic speech recognition is a beast to be broken. John Oberteuffer, the president of Voice Information Associates, a firm that follows the technology, informs me that, indeed, computers will soon be able to interpret speech at laest as well as humans. We won't type into our computers, but talk to them. «In ten years, people will look at a computer key-board the way they now look at a slide rule, » Oberteuffer predicts. «Anything you do on a keyboard, you will do by speaking. You will have a mouse and a microphone».

 

Ever Tried Talking to a Computer?

Technology has changed people and their lives. No pe­riod in history has had as many significant changes as the past century. Improvements of all kinds, such as those in communication and transportation have seriously changed many people's lives - not all positively. Many people are conservative. They do not like and cannot accept the new results of technology. Conservative people often resist the new. They might prefer to take trains instead of airplanes and to receive letters instead of phone calls. They might like soft, gentle music rather than fast, noisy modern music. Above all, many conservative people find the in­creasing use of computers confusing, annoying and im­personal.

Computers are an obvious part of technology that reaches into most people's lives. Computers answer telephones, retrieve information instantly, read and answer letters, and make mathematical computations in much less time than a person can. However, how do people react as the use of the computer increases in their daily lives? There is a big difference between talking to a human being about a mis­take on a bill and trying to tell a computer. A computer does not treat people in a human way. After all, it is only a machine. A person who learns to use any machine can benefit from its services. The same is true for the com­puter. The investment of time and patience that a person makes in learning how to use a computer pays off many times. What can a computer do? A computer can easily perform simple and complex calculations. It can record all kinds of information. It can sort material either alpha­betically or in number sequence. It can classify, report, and edit data, information that is put in. The only require­ment is that the computer must be correctly programmed to perform these functions, or jobs. Once a program is set, many people can use it to make it work for them. A computer programmer is a person who is trained to pro­gram or communicate with computers. In a sense, he teaches the computer to do the work by writing a pro­gram. He uses special computer languages to control and instruct the different parts of the computer. He writes a program, the detailed set of instructions for the comput­er, in a computer language.

Computers have so many everyday uses that the busi­ness world would stop without them. They can reserve airplane tickets, keep bank accounts, rent cars, control prices, order goods and supplies, process registration cards, keep inventories, record grocery items, and list houses for sale. All of these jobs can be done, and many more, in a fraction of the time that a person would need. By using computers, people in business save large amounts of time. Whether people realize it or not, computers con­trol so many parts of society that, without them, people's lives would be much more difficult. For every mistake on a bill, the computer does a million others right. Comput­ers save great amounts of time by doing uninteresting jobs that take people a long time. Computers are designed for repetitive projects, for processing and storing a large amount of data, and for accuracy and speed. By using computers, human beings can free themselves to do more human projects.

 

 

Содержание

 

What Is a Computer?. 1

The First Calculating Devices. 4

Four Generations of Computers. 6

Data Processing and Data Processing Systems. 7

Computer System Architecture. 8

Hardware, Software, and Firmware. 10

From the History of Computer Development In Russia. 11

Central Processing Unit 12

The CPU Main Components. 13

Input Output Environment 15

Input Devices. 16

Output Devices. Printers. 18

Keyboard Devices. 19

Scanners. 21

Personal Computers. 22

Microcomputer System Organization. 23

Computer Programming. 25

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Living in the Twentieth Century 26

Alfred Nobel – a Man of Contrast 28

Computer Uses from A to Z.. 30

Computer Viruses. 33

DNA Computers. 36

Internet: How It Affects US. 37

Internet in Business. 39

Programming Languages. 41

Today We Are in the Twenty-First Century. 42

Virtual Reality Applications, Today and Tomorrow. 44

Technology to Change Our life. 48

Ever Tried Talking to a Computer?. 49

 

 

АНГЛИЙСКИЙ ЯЗЫК

 

СБОРНИК ТЕСТОВ ДЛЯ ЧТЕНИЯ И ПЕРЕВОДА

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