Process
To burn an optical disc, one usually first creates an optical disc image with a full file system designed for the optical disc, and then copies the image to the disc. The disc image is a single file, built and stored on the hard drive, which contains all the information to be contained on the disc.
Most optical disc authoring utilities create a disc image and copy it to the disc in one bundled operation, so that end-users often do not know the distinction. However, a useful motivation for learning this distinction is that creating the disc image is an expensive (time-consuming) process, while copying the image takes relatively little time.
After copying a disc image, most disc burning applications silently delete the image from the Temporary folder in which it was built. Users can override this default, instructing the application to preserve the image. The existing image can then be used for creating further copies, rather than needing to be rebuilt each time.
There are also packet-writing applications that do not require writing the entire disc at once, but allow writing different parts at different times. This capability allows a disc to be constructed incrementally, as it could be on a rewritable medium like a floppy disk, subject to the limitation that a given bit on a non-rewritable disk can be written only once. Due to this limitation, a non-rewritable disc whose burn failed for any reason cannot be repaired. Such a disk is colloquially termed a "coaster".
There exist many optical disc authoring technologies for optimizing the authoring process and preventing errors. Some programs are able to mount a disc image as a file system type, so these images appear as actual mounted discs. This feature can be useful for testing a disc image after authoring but before writing to the disc media.
Read more about this topic: Optical Disc Authoring
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there’s a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry. ... poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.”
—Rita Dove (b. 1952)