1. What is gained by increasing the rotation speed of a disk or a CD?
2. When recording data on a multiple disk storage system, should we fill a complete disk surface before starting on another surface, or should we first fill an entirely cylinder before starting on another cylinder?
3. Why should the data in a reservation system that is constantly being updated be stored on a magnetic disk instead of a CD or DVD?
4. Sometimes, when modifying a document with a word processor, adding text does not increase the apparent size of the file in mass storage, but at other times the addition of a single symbol can increase the apparent size of the file by several hundred bytes. Why?
5. What advantages do flash drives have over other mass storage systems introduced in the lectures?
6. What is a buffer?
7. In the ASCII code, what is the relationship between the codes for an uppercase letter and the same letter in lower case?
8. What is the largest numeric value that could be represented with three bytes if each digit was encoded using one ASCII pattern per byte? What if binary notation were used?
9. What is an advantage of representing images via geometric structures as opposed to bitmaps? What about bit map techniques as opposed to geometric techniques?
10. Suppose a stereo recording of one hour of music is encoded using a sample rate of 44,100 samples per second as discussed in the lecture. How does the size of the encoded version compare to the storage capacity of a CD?
Outcome
Fill in the tutorial summary sheet as best you can
Reflection
It has been said that computers could run more efficiently if they were based on hexadecimal numbers, rather than binary ones. Why would this be? What would be necessary to make this idea work?