April 2006 – Erklären mir

I remember a fascinating (and fun) section in one of my Psychology courses in University. It was about language, specifically reading (that’s why I’m certain it was in my Psychology of Language course) where we learned about errors in word recognition. Some of the errors we learned included the alteration of the first letter of a word. For example reading Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos as Tales of the Mthulhu Cythos. I remember there being about four different ways that such a thing can occur, including moving a letter forward to another word, moving a letter backward, and switching a word. I strongly remember one of these using the term perseveration although the term perseveration clearly is incorrect since it means something completely different. I am fairly certain that it started with a “P” and had something like “serv” in it.

Does anyone know what I am thinking of?

Can someone please explain something to me? When did optical drives become faster than hard drives? When you burn a CD or a DVD, the hard drive is apparently the bottleneck. That is, success depends on whether or not the data can be pulled off of the hard drive fast enough. Of course these days, they have underrun prevention technologies to avoid a failed burn if the hard drive cannot spit out the data in time, but those are not the magic bullet cure that they would appear at first glance.

My point is that hard drives are clearly faster than optical drives and any test will show that. You can do performance tests and they all show that hard disk drives have lower latency, lower seek times, higher data rates, and faster throughput than optical drives.

Yet, when you watch a disc being burned, the hard drive light is pretty much solid on, while the optical drive light blinks slowly.

These points are contradictory. Hard drives are faster than optical drives in both reading and writing and yet optical drives can seem to burn faster than hard drives can seek.

What’s going on? Can somebody explain this paradox to me?