Services and Resources of the Internet

Task  1. Read and translate the text:

Задание 1. Прочитайте и переведите текст:

A common resource provided by the Internet is a worldwide system for sending and receiving electronic mail, known as e-mail. In fact, e-mail represents a large portion of all Internet traffic and is for many the only Internet resource they use. How does it work? To answer that question, let's review the ordinary mail system first. Imagine that you live in Canada and wish to send a letter to your daughter living in Moscow. After properly addressing the envelope, you mail it, starting the letter's journey. At a postal facility, the letter is routed to the next location, perhaps a regional or national distribution center, and then to a local post office nears your daughter. A similar process occurs with e-mail. After your letter is composed on your computer, you must specify an e-mail address that identifies your daughter. Once you send this electronic letter, it travels from your computer, often through a device called a modem, which connects your computer to the Internet via the telephone network. Off it goes, bound for various computers that act like local and national postal routing facilities. They have enough information to get the letter to a destination computer, where your daughter can retrieve it. Unlike the regular mail, e-mail often reaches its destination, even on other continents, in minutes or less unless some part of the network is heavily congested or temporarily out of order. When your daughter inspects her electronic mailbox, she will discover your e-mail. The speed of e-mail and the ease with which it can be sent even to multiple recipients all over the world make it a popular form of communication.

Task  2. Answer the following questions:

Задание 2. Ответьте на следующие вопросы:

1. Can you name common resource which is provided by Internet?

2. Do you have your own e-mail address?

3. Do you think that e-mail is better than ordinary post service procedure?

Task 3. Read the text and find the answers to these questions:

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 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?

LINUX

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 s big component of it was taught on (and about) Unix. Unix was the wonder operating system of the 1970s and 1980s: both a textbook example of the principles of operating system design, and sufficiently robust to be the standard OS in ioengineering and scientific computing. But Unix was a commercial product, and cost more than a student could pay.

Annoyed by the shortcomings of Minix (a iscompact Unix clone written as a teaching aid by Professor Andy Tannenbaum) Linus set out to write his own ‘kernel’ — the core of an operating system that handles memory allocation, talks to hardware devices, and makes 20 sure everything keeps running. He used the GNU programming tools developed by Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, an organisation of volunteers dedicated to fulfilling Stallman’s ideal of making good software that 25 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 30 don’t have the source code to a program, you can’t modify it to fix 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 35 make it available it will destroy their revenue stream.

What happened next was astounding, from the conventional, commercial software industry point of view - and utterly predictable to 40 anyone who knew about the Free Software Foundation. Programmers (mostly academics and 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, 45 they sent the improvements to Linus, who rolled them into the kernel.

And Linux began to grow.

There’s a term for this model of software development; it’s called Open Source, so Anyone can have the source code - it’s free (in the sense of free speech, not free beer). 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 so easy to give your fixes back to 55 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 65 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 70 hitherto common on PCs; 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 75 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.

Task  4. Match the terms in Table A with the statements in Table B.

LESSON 15

Newsgroups

Task  1. Read and translate the text:

Задание 1.  Прочитайте и переведите текст:

Another popular service is called Usenet. Usenet offers access to newsgroups for group discussions on specific topics. Some newsgroups focus on buying or selling various consumer items. There are thousands of newsgroups, and once a user has gained access to Usenet, there is no cost to subscribe to them. Let's imagine that someone has joined a newsgroup involved in stamp collecting. As new messages about this hobby are sent by others subscribing to this group, the messages become available to this newcomer. This person reviews not only what someone has sent to the newsgroup but also what others have written in response. If, for example, someone requests information about a particular stamp series, shortly afterward there may be many responses from around the world, offering information that would be immediately available to all who subscribe to this newsgroup. A variation of this idea is the Bulletin Board System (BBS).

BBS is similar to Usenet, except that all files are located on a single computer, usually maintained by one person or group. The content of news-groups reflects the varied interests, viewpoints, and moral values of those who use them, so discretion is needed.

Task  2. Answer the following questions:

Задание 2. Ответьте на следующие вопросы:

1. What kind of service is called Usenet?

2. What does Usenet offer?

Task  3. Find the answers to these questions in the following text

LESSON 16