科技英语阅读（李健版）

Unit 5 Computer

The Disappearing Computer 正在消失的计算机

“Will we be surrounded by computers by 2010? Yes, but we don’t know it,” says Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect.

到2010年，我们将被计算机包围吗？是的，但我们却觉察不出来。 —比尔?盖茨（微软公司总裁和首席软件设计师）

A few years from now, the average home entertainment system might not look much different than it does today. But it will probably have an Internet connection that enables it to download and play digital music and video, display album artwork and song title on the television, and even interrupt your listening if an important message arrives. It will have a central processor, disk storage, graphic hardware and some kind of intuitive user interface. Add a wireless mouse and a keyboard, and this home entertainment systems will start looking a lot like a personal computer. Will people buy and use these systems in large numbers? Absolutely. Will they think of them as computers? Probably not.

几年后，普通家庭娱乐系统可能与现在并没有太大的区别，但它很可能具有网络连接功能，用来下载和播放数字音乐和视频，在电视上显示艺术作品集和歌曲的名字，甚至收到重要邮件时打断正在播放的内容来提示你。它将拥有一个中央处理器、磁盘存储器、制图硬件和某种直观的计算机用户界面。如果再在加上一个无线鼠标和键盘，这个家庭娱乐系统看起来便很像是一台个人电脑。人们会大量购买和使用这些系统吗？当然会。他们会认为这种系统就是电脑吗？也许不会。

According to the Gartner Dataquest, an American research firm, the world computer industry shipped its one billionth PC in 2002, and another billion more are expected to be built in the next six years. Almost all of the first billion were traditional desktop and laptop PCs, but the second billion will be very different. They will be optimized for the things that people actually want to do with them—we will have tablet-sized PCs for taking notes at meetings or reading e-mail on the couch, entertainment PCs that play music and movies on the living-room television, and pocket-sized PCs that keep people connected and informed wherever they are.

根据格特纳信息咨询公司（一家美国研究公司）的统计，世界计算机业在2002年销售了第10亿台个人电脑，而还有10亿台电脑预计在此后的6年中生产出来。第一批的10亿台电脑几乎都是传统的台式机和笔记本电脑，但第二批的10亿台电脑将会明显不同，人们对它们进行了尽可能的完善，使它们能更好的按照人们的期望运作，例如微型电脑，开会时我们可以用它来做笔记，或是躺在床上阅读电子邮件；娱乐型电脑，用来在客厅电视上播放音乐和电影；袖珍型电脑，用来与他人保持联系，无论你身处何处。

Add to this the exploding number of embedded computers—the kind found in mobile phones, gas pumps and retail point-of-sale systems—which are fast approaching the power and complexity of desktop PCs. On one estimate, people in the United States already interact with about 150 embedded systems every day, whether they know it or not. These systems—which use up to 90% of the microprocessors produced today—will inevitably take on more PC-like characteristic, and will be able to communicate seamlessly with their traditional PC counterparts. They will also become amazingly ubiquitous. In 2001, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, the world microchip industry produced around 60m transistors for every man, woman and child on earth. That number will rise to one billion by 2010.

除此之外，还有各种数量庞大的嵌入式计算机（如在手机、加油站和零售终端设备中使用的计算机），在功能和复杂性方面正迅速赶上台式电脑。据估计，在有意无意之中，美国人每天会接触到大约150个嵌入式计算机系统。这些系统使用了现在生产的90% 的微处理器，它们将不可避免地呈现出更多个人电脑的特点，而且能够与传统PC机进行无缝对接。这一系统将无处不在。根据半导体工业协会的调查，在2001年，世界芯片业为地球上的每位男士，女士和儿童生产了大约6千万个晶体管，这一数字到2010年将上升为10亿。

At the same time, the general-purpose PC as we know it today will continue to play an important—and increasingly central—role in most people’s lives, but it will be at the centre of a wide range of intelligent devices that most people wouldn’t think of as “computers” today.

与此同时，今天的多功能PC机将继续在大多数人的生活中发挥重要（而且是越来越重要）的作用，但其中心地位将体现在今天大部分人不认为是“电脑”的各类智能设备中。

This scenario is in sharp contrast to the computers of just a few years ago—back in the pre-Internet age—which were still mostly passive appliance that sat in the corner of the den or living room. Back then, people used their PCs for little more than writing letters and documents, playing games of managing their family finances. As a communications tool, they were largely ineffective, except for a few primitive e-mail networks and bulletin-board systems. The PC had not yet become essential to most people’s lives—not in the sense that the television, telephone or automobile now are.

这种情景与仅仅几年前的计算机形成了鲜明的对比（回溯到网络时代之前），那时的计算机多是被动的设备，被安置在书房或客厅的角落里。那时，计算机的使用仅限于书写信函、文件，玩游戏或处理家庭财务。作为通讯工具，其效率很低，仅能应用于少数简单的电子邮件网络和电子布告栏系统。个人电脑尚未成为大多数人生活的必需品（不像现在的电视、电话或汽车那样）。

But today we are in the early years of a truly digital decade, in which the intelligence of the PC is finding its way into all kinds of devices, transforming them from passive appliance into far more significant and indispensable tools for everyday life. Many of the core technologies of computing—processing power, storage capacity, graphics capabilities and network connectivity—are all continuing to advance at a pace that matches or even exceeds Moore’s Law (which famously, and correctly, predicted that the number of transistor on a computer chip would double every two years).

但是我们今天已经处在真正数字化时代的初期，在这一时期，个人计算机的智能化正应用于各种设备，使它们从被动的设备转化为日常生活中重要得多的不可或缺的工具。许多计算机的核心技术（如处理能力、存储量、制图能力和网络连接）将继续以莫尔法则（该法则因正确预测了用于计算机芯片上的半导体将以每两年增加一倍的速度增长而闻名）、甚至超过莫尔法则的速度发展。

Computers are becoming smaller, more powerful, less power-hungry and far less expensive, making it easier to build computing power and connectivity into everyday devices. And user interfaces—including speech and handwriting recognition—are growing more efficient and easier to use.

计算机体积正变得越来越小，功能越来越强大，能耗更低，价格也越来越便宜，因而使其更容易与日常设备连接，并发挥其计算功能。此外，计算机用户界面（包括语音和文字识别）正变得越来越有效，越来越易于应用。 有趣的未来

正当人们寻找更多的方式把这些价廉、灵活、可以各种各样的方式满足用户需要的设备

引入自己的生活时，计算机本身却逐步在我们的生活中“消失”。虽然我们距离那个充满虚拟智能机器的世界还很遥远，但正在发展的计算机技术将变得如此完善、自然，我们将越来越注意不到它的存在。与此同时，计算机技术的普及程度将会达到我们视而不见的地步，正如当今发达国家中大多数人信赖的电话服务。

众多新技术（如价格低廉、柔性灵活的显示器，指甲盖大小的、能够存储兆兆字节数据的微电子机械系统芯片，以及依靠周围热能和机械运动来运转的大功率感应式无电池计算机）使计算机技术一方面无处不在，而另一方面又几乎淡出了人们的视线。

计算机技术也将从经济学的角度给人们带来变化。通过降低成本，电子产品制造商能更容易地在即使是最普通的设备中装入类似于个人电脑的智能和装置，最后，计算机技术本身也会变得十分经济实惠。

所有这一切都将从根本上改变了我们对计算机的看法。使用计算机将会变得像开灯时使用电源一样简单。计算机将会像电力一样，在几乎你所做的一切事情中发挥作用，但计算机技术的使用本身将不再是孤立的。我们将集中精力研究用计算机能做些什么，而不是研究这一设备本身。计算机无处不在，几乎成为我们生活中每一个部分的必需品，但它们最终将真正地从我们的生活中“消失”。

Unit 6 Robot

For Simpler Robots, a Step Forward 简单—机器人的进步

The moment of truth had come for the knee-high robot standing on its improvised runway at a hotel news conference.

在酒店新闻发布会上，一个只有人们膝盖高的机器人站在为它临时准备的通道上。揭开秘密的时刻到了。

Reporters circled it, their microphones and cameras trained on the machine as it tried to start up. Then a curious 13-year-old boy who had joined the throng reached out, poked his fingers between the robot’s metal legs and gave them an exploratory push.

当这台机器启动时，众多记者围了上来，把麦克风和摄像机都对准了它。人群中一个13岁的男孩好奇的用手指在机器人的金属腿上戳戳这儿，戳戳那儿，又试着推了推。

With that, the robot, built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, live up to its nickname, the Toddler. It rocked gently until the poking stopped, steadied itself and marched firmly across the level surface, a tabletop propped up on cinderblocks.

这时人们可以看到，这台由麻省理工学院制造的机器人的确像它的昵称：“学步的小孩”(Toddler)。它轻轻地晃动了一会儿，直到那个小孩不再动它，接着它平稳地迈着步子从台子（一个由煤砖支起的桌面）的一端走到另一端。

If two-legged robots are ever going to walk among people, they may look a lot like this sturdy machine and two others, introduced Feb. 17 on the makeshift catwalk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

如果未来装有双腿的机器人真的行走于人群中，它们也许看起来和这个敦实的机器人以及另外两个机器人没有什么不同。在2月17日美国科学促进会召开的年会上，这三个机器人都出现在了那个临时通道上，与公众见面。

The robots—the others were built at Cornell and at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands—are designed in a way that differs significantly from standard creations. One of the robots moves so efficiently that in the future it may be able to amble along for a day, not the 20 or 30 minutes most robots now manage without recharging or refueling.

这些机器人（其它两个由康奈尔大学和荷兰的代尔夫特理工大学制造）在设计方式上明显不同于常规。其中一个机器人的移动效率如此之高，也许将来它可以连续行走一天，而不像大多数的机器人每隔二、三十分钟就得充电或添加燃料。

“And our robots walk far more naturally,” said Andy Ruina, a professor at Cornell who took one of the robots to the meeting and whose nephew Josh Bennett, of Chevy Chase, Md., did the unscripted poking.

康奈尔大学教授安迪?瑞纳说：“我们的机器人行走起来更为自然。”他将其中的一个机器人带到了那天的会议上，他的侄子乔希?贝内特（来自马里兰州的查维蔡斯市）就是当时用手指戳机器人的那个男孩。

The design may be important not only for future energy-saving robots, but also for intelligent prostheses—leg and foot replacements for amputees.

这种设计不仅对将来节能型机器人很重要，同时对智能修复（即为截肢者置换腿或脚）也十分重要。

Dr. Ruina’s robot and its companions from Delft and M.I.T. are descendants of some early ramp-walking machines, mechanical devices that have been around for a century. These contraptions—toys like wadding penguins and later two-legged robots—were not powered in any way. Instead, they relied on gravity and the mechanics of objects in motion to walk stably down sloping surfaces.

瑞纳博士的机器人和另外那几个机器人的前生是某些早期开发的能够在斜坡上行走的机器人，这些机械设备已有近一个世纪历史了。这些奇妙的装置（像步履蹒跚的企鹅玩具，后来发展为两足机器人）没有任何动力，而是依靠重力和物体机械学运动原理，可平稳的走下斜坡。

Modern versions of the machines, called passive-dynamic walkers, have been built for decades and have long been thought useful models of human locomotion, Dr. Ruina said. But in the past the machines were not able to walk on level ground.

瑞那博士说，现代模式的机器人（即被动动力式两足机器人）已有几十年的历史，长期以来一直被认为是反映人类运动方式的可以利用的模式。但在过去，这种机器人无法在水平面上行走。

Now the researchers from the three universities have shown that the classic passive-dynamic walking machines need not depend on gravitational power. Instead, they have put small motor on their robots and shown that they can walk on level ground. The robots’ walkings are described in detail in the journal Science.

现在，来自这三所大学的研究人员指出，传统的被动动力式两足机器人不需要依赖重力。他们把小型马达安装在机器人身上，这样机器人就可以在水平面上行走了。这种机器人的运转原理在《科学》杂志中有详细的描述。

“Our machines show that there is nothing special about gravity,” said Russ Tedrake, a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T.’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and one of the Toddler’s creators.

麻省理工学院大脑与认知科学部的博士后研究员、Toddler的设计者之一鲁斯?泰德雷克说：“我们的机器人表明重力并不是什么特殊现象”。

Unlike famous state-of-the-art walking robots like Honda’s Asimo, which typically have complex control algorithms that demand extensive, real-time computation, the Cornell biped, as well as the Delft one, walk with simple control algorithms, Dr. Ruina said. “Our sensors detect ground contacts, and our only motor commands are on-off signals issued once per step,” he