WHO WRITES COMPUTER VIRUSES?

In spite of the fact that a lot of people think, that to write a computer virus is a hardship, it is not exactly so. Using special programs called “Virus creators” even beginners in computer world can build their own viruses which will be a strain of certain major virus. The aim of creation of viruses is to become well known all over the world and to show the power.

Somehow the results of the attempt can be very sad, only real professionals can go famous and stay uncaught.

To write something really new and remarkable programmer should have some extra knowledge and skills, for example:

- good strategic thinking and intuition – releasing a virus and its descendants live their own independent life in nearly unpredictable conditions. Therefore the author must anticipate a lot of things;

- splendid knowledge of language of the Assembler and the operating systems he writes for – the more there are mistakes in the virus the quicker its will be caught;

- attention to details and a skill to solve the most varied tactical questions –one won’t write a compact, satisfactory working program without these abilities;

- a high professional discipline in order to join preceding points together.

A computer virus group is an informal non-profit organization, uniting programmers authors of viruses regardless of their qualifications. Everyone can become a member of the club, if he creates viruses, studies them for the reason of creation and spreading.

One can’t say that all of the group members write viruses in Assembler. Actually you don’t have to know any computer language or write any program code to become a member or a friend of the group. But programming in Assembler is preferred, Pascal, C++ and other high level languages are considered to be humiliating.

Sometimes, however, creating viruses can become a respectable occupation, bringing constant income. After all, no one but the author of the virus can bring valuable information on the way it should be treated and cured.

V. Say if the following statements are true or false.

VI. Divide the text into logical parts and find the topical sentences in each part.

VII. Give a short summary of text B.

Part C

I. Read the following text and entitle it.

1. Most Internet VR (virtual reality) projects don’t support immersion (погружение), where you wear a helmet and gloves and are immersed in a simulated environment. But researchers at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinoise at Chicago have developed a new model for networked VR, called a Cave.

2. A Cave is a 3-D environment that consists of a 10- by 10- by 9-foot room with three rear-projection (заднее проектирование) screens for the walls and a down projection screens for the floor. Instead of wearing a helmet, viewers wear LCD stereo shutter glasses that separate the alternate fields going to the eyes. Images on the screen “move” with the viewers and surround them. An image’s direction and positioning are determined by a person wearing a magnetic tracking device from Polhemus. The computers supplying the power behind a Cave are from the Silicon Graphics Supercomputing Systems Division. They can handle the billions of FLOPS required when interacting with complex representations of weather patterns, seismic activity or industrial CAD/CAM designs.

3. Tom DeFanti, the director of EVL, says that so far, researchers exploring networked Cave-to-Cave simulations have proven the concept of remote person-to-person immersive reality by performing basic actions (e.g. one person “touches” another person’s head) over the Internet, using a T1 line.

4. A Cave represents the high end of networked VR. De Fanti notes that solutions like VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) can’t address the needs of these high-end VR applications. If you need to sit in a simulation of a car, you want to reach out and see that everything is in right place and you can’t do that in a workstation. The price of a Cave is high but several of clients are building Caves.

II. Read the text and answer the questions.

III. Find the place in paragraph 2 containing the information about the scheme of a new model for networked VR, called a Cave.

IV. Give the main points of the text in 5-6 sentences.

UNIT 6

Part A