[lug] Initial impressions of Kubuntu

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 04:28:45PM -0700, Daniel Webb wrote:
>(20 minutes or so).  So why would a newer drive work when the original didn't?
>Could it be an issue of on-board cache on the CD drive or something?

I'd bet it's an out of alignment or other mechanical problem with the
optical drive that's causing lots of read errors.  I know that when we were
burning a lot of CDs, we would occasionally get burns that would
successfully validate, but they took 2 to 100x longer to validate than
normal...  Optical drives will often keep trying and may eventually read it
successfully.

This is a problem with entertainment devices which have optical drives,
because there they have a hard real-time requirement.  They don't put much
cache in the device, to keep costs down, so the optical drive in your DVD
player or CD player has once chance to read the track and that's usually
it.

It would be nice to have at least some amount of buffer so that the drive
could read ahead a bit, and if it got to a particularly nasty location
could spend some time trying again.  But, then the entertainment companies
would want to get paid twice for their content, since you have one copy
that you're playing and one copy that's sitting in the buffer.  :-/

Sean
-- 
 You think your Commodore 64 is really neato.
 What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?  -- Weird Al
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability