科技英文_1_Ford_摩尔定律的扩展

<a href="http://www.jianshu.com/p/54870e9541fc">总目录</a>

---

写在第一篇科技英文笔记前：

翻前辈们经验贴的时候发现，很多国内的码农都抱怨自己英文挺一般，而大牛通常的告诫都是：要学计算机，先学英文！毕竟如今的行业最新资料，大多还都是英文版。

从前觉得我的英文水平应该还可以，但是毕竟隔行如隔山，真正看起来科技英文，也是感觉有些专有名词和背后的概念理解起来比较吃力。

不过好在，新行业业界的英文大多不会像文科写手笔下的文字一样爱掉书袋——拉丁文、法文都是常事，没什么逻辑乱扯一气也是常事。新行业的行文与之行成鲜明对比，大多逻辑清晰、用词简练。

所以在一步一步练习技术的同时，也打算记录一下我期间阅读的科技英文书籍中一些英文说法。

当然，思想最重要，语言相比只算得上锦上添花。挑出的选段是因为思想有意思，而非文笔多华丽。

---

Imagine depositing a penny in a bank account. Now, double the account balance every day. On day three you would go from 2 cents to 4 cents. The fifth day would take your balance from 8 to 16 cents. After less than a month, you would have more than a million dollars. If we had deposited that initial penny in 1949, just as Norbert Wiener was writing his essay about the future of computing, and then let Moore’s Law run its course—doubling the amount roughly every two years—by 2015, our technological account would contain nearly $86 million. And as things move forward from this point, that balance will continue to double. Future innovations will be able to leverage that enormous accumulated balance, and as a result the rate of progress in the coming years and decades is likely to far exceed what we have become accustomed to in the past.

Moore’s Law is the best-known measure of advancing computer power, but information technology is, in fact, accelerating on many different fronts. For example, computer memory capacity and the amount of digital information that can be carried on fiber-optic lines have both experienced consistent exponential increases. Nor is the acceleration confined to computer hardware; the efficiency of some software algorithms has soared at a rate far in excess of what Moore’s Law alone would predict.

Excerpt from: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
作者: Martin Ford
出版时间：2015
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Unemployment-ebook/dp/B01DRYIS4K/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">Amazon</a>

笔记：

• 摩尔定律：两年翻一倍。"doubling the amount roughtly every two years"
• 摩尔定律不仅限于电脑性能的提升（即最初所针对的集成电路/integrated circuit），更适用于其他IT领域。譬如：
  • 电脑内存容量：computer memory capacity
  • 光纤性能：the amount of digital information that can be carried on fiber-optic lines
• 除去硬件，软件性能也是适用于摩尔定律。并且会超越摩尔定律的估计，比如算法的成长。"the efficiency of some software algorithms has soared at a rate far in excess of what Moore’s Law alone would predict"