Public Service Announcement

I'm sure you've read how blogging is becoming more and more popular. What you might not have heard about is that the FCC is now requiring bloggers with a certain level of readership to provide a monthly Public Service Announcement.

August is the first month I have to do this. I'm going to cheat a bit, and borrow one that was already run on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Discs and Disks. Did you know that there is a difference between these two similarly pronounced words? There is. Read below to learn more.

Discs

A disc refers to optical media, such as an audio CD, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, or DVD-Video disc. Some discs are read-only (ROM), others allow you to burn content (write files) to the disc once (such as a CD-R or DVD-R, unless you do a multisession burn), and some can be erased and rewritten over many times (such as CD-RW, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM discs).

All discs are removable, meaning when you unmount or eject the disc from your desktop or Finder, it physically comes out of your computer.

Disks

A disk refers to magnetic media, such as a floppy disk or the disk in your computer's hard drive, an external hard drive, and even iPod. Disks are always rewritable unless intentionally locked or write-protected. You can easily partition a disk into several smaller volumes, too.

Although both discs and disks are circular, disks are usually sealed inside a metal or plastic casing (often, a disk and its enclosing mechanism are collectively known as a "hard drive").

And now you know.