<wob_jonas> slashlearn b_jonas can\'t spell//b_jonas can\'t spell these words: weird, hygiene, etymology, myopia, hibernate, carbohydrate, appearance, maintenance, appropriate, privilege, obsolete, heard, homogeneous, jealous; and confuses these sets of words: drought, draught/draft; couch, coach; depreciate, deprecate; dilate, dilute; contiguous, continuous; d

Block devices are a concession made in Unix to make raw hard disks and magnetic tape have a similar interface to regular files and terminals. Since magnetic tapes can't write individual bytes, only entire blocks, the interface isn't exactly the same, thus the dreaded dd obs= option was born.