Sometimes registers don't cut it. For example, you cannot pass a pointer to a register. If you have a finction with several disparate return parameters, you might well pass pointers to the places to put the returns. And they, obviously, you are going to use the returned data straight away - else why did you ask for it. So you group the ints into which the values will be returned in order to take advantage of the cache if you can.
... providing you knew that it was private. There was no "confidential" mark on it. It appeared in the place where the published results were expected to appear. How were Reuters to guess that it wan't released for publication yet?
> Reuters knew that it wasn't Intentia's intent to release that information (yet) but still persisted in obtaining and releasing it to the general public.
Unproven assumption. Reuters knew the URL it would be posted at, and kept looking at that URL until it appeared. Pecause it appeared on a public web server, they assumed it was published. Wrong, but how were they to know that?
> First, the Reuters reporter was probably looking for the data that wasn't released yet. > He had intent to get something he wasn't supposed to have and get a story out of it.
How the hell do you deduce that? He was looking for information he knew was due to be published some time that day in the place where he knew it was going to be published. When he found it, he probably didn't even *know* it wasn't published yet. But he did want to claim "First Post" for Reuters because that is their job. So he hacked out his report withing minutes, shoved it up, and went on to the next job.
Always prefer the cockup theory to the conspiracy theory. This is a classic cockup, by the publishing webmaster. There is no evidence whatsoever of intent to hack by Reuters.
I went to their site, and I looked for the (now visible) results. The URL looked like this:
http://www.intentia.com/w2000.nsf/(files)/Intent ia _02_Q3_us.pdf/$FILE/Intentia_02_Q3_us.pdf
The previous quarters reports are also available under...02_Q2_us.pdf and so on. This URL is a lot more than 40 characters, but it hardly takes a rocket scintist to guess where Q3 is going to be when you know where Q1 and Q2 are. You really cannot call such guesswork "hacking".
But did Reuters even know that there was no link to the page? The probably realised that the results were due to be published that day, and on past practice would be put at a standard URL called..../results.html.
The "proper" way to access it would be to wait until the there was a link from the corporate front page. But that means, probably, that he has to keep going to the front page, re-reading the standard corporate boilerplate saying what a great company they are, until he finds the freshly created link to the published results. And, because of the job he does, he is doing this for perhaps twenty companies due to publish their results today - and he is bored with re-reading each of their paeans of self-praise.
Being a clever fellow, he can see that the old results are under.../results2000.html,.../results2001.html. So, just to save himself time, he types in the.../results2002.html URL. Instead of going in through the corporate page, he just keeps trying this until the 404 goes away, whereupon he can write his story.
So not only did he not intentionally bypass any security or hiding features, he didn't actually know he had done so.
The lawyers can always make simple things complex, but I cannot see how it can be wrong to publish something put in a place made for public information when you had no way of knowing that information was not intended to be public.
I don't think this is necessarily true, but it is the way a lot of asynch designs are going. GALS - Globally Asynchronous, Locally Synchronous. Several reasons for this that I can think of. Firstly, asynch is much less well understood, so that by having a design that is 90% synchronous you can limit the unknown risk to the last 10%. Secondly, I think the technology of asynch interconnect is better understood that the sort of deep computation which in a syncronous design would be pipelined. Thirdly, some of the synchronous sub-units are probably availabl off the shelf (even if only from the designers memory). Fourthly, GALS diliver well on some of the advantages of full asynch e.g. spreading the clock noise, allowing different parts to run on clocks of their own speed, avoiding global clock distribution.
However, it is possible to have truly globally asynchronous designs. I could imagin that simulating and testing such a thing could be difficult.
I have been shown by the engineer for one of the major disk manufacures graph of failure against disk case temperature. It was a deep U with a minimum at 20C, but a "sweet area" from about 15C to 30C. Outside this range, the failure rate rose fast in both directions. Bear in mind that is disk case temperature. - the disk will probably be inside some form of an enclosure and generates quite a lot of heat itself, so will be well above ambient. So if I was thinking only of the welfare of the disk, I would chioll the room to 15C, with the idea that this leaves the disk casing at 200-25C, the optimum temperature.
However, you should be asking why you have to work, sitting, in the server room for periods of an hour or so. Of course you have to go in to rack and wire, restart etc. But surely any system system should be arranged so it can be accessed from outside the server room. There are so many different ways of remote accessing a computer, I cannot believe tha an enlightened employer cannot implement one or another.
> SCSI drives are built almost identically to IDE hard drives.
Not according to the presentations I have had from the manufacturers. And, puttint their money where their mouth is, compare warranties (5 yrs vs 1 year), seek times (4 msc vs 9). They put better bearings in - one mfr claimes that bearings in their scsi drives cost him twice what the bearings in teh IDE drive cost.
The cost difference between a Scsi interface and a Parallell ATA interface is negligible. At the worst it was only ever about $10, ten years ago, and now it is probably about $0.01. Manufacturers just use the Scsi interface as a way of separating "professional" grade drives from "consumer" grade drives. Scsi drives go up to 15,000 rpm, seek times of 4.5msec, five year warranty. IDE drives go to 7200rpm, 9 msec seek times, one year warranty. Scsi is not intended to be a consumer standard, it is intended to be a "hot rod".
On a single user computer, you will be unusual if you need the performance of a scsi disk. You may like the reliability (but there is always IDE based raid). For a central server, however, the scsi difference matters.
So now I have got a name for the way I have been programming all my life - use the best tool that comes to hand without argueing whether it is theoretically perfect. Use mixed tools if that is what the problem at hand demands. Don't reinvent if you can possibly beg/borrow/steal.
The paper strikes me as completey tautologous anywhere outside a Computer Science department (and probably to the more practical half of those inside). If you're involved in shipping code, either for money or for the good of the community, you are interested in what works, not what is theoretically best. Of course, if a nice theoretically clean tool does the job - use it. But if a steaming heap of old code does the job (where reliability and efficiency may for part of the spec), use that.
Because you can't predict the negligent person in advance. Fools will be fools - but you cannot predict in advance who will be a fool.
I wasn't saying that you should go after anyone - I am sure the idiot who left his loaded gun around has been punished enough by the death of his child. I wan't even saying you *should* give up your right to guns. I was pointing out that, in a world populated by real human beings not perfect theoretical people, your right to guns is bought at a cost to your (collective) children. And this will be true until we get bug-free people - and we can't get bug-free software yet. The more guns, the more accidents. But they are your children, not mine; if you feel that is a price worth paying, that is your democratic right. I am not standing on the opposite side of the Atlantic telling you how to run your country. I am, however, saying that I am glad that we have chosen to run our country differently.
Obviously, you cannot read their minds, but the article stated that the govennment had failed to make their case that it would actually contribute to the fight agaisnt terrorism. All the example cases the government were police wanting records more than 15 months old (i.e. longer than the proposed retention) for non-terrorist cases. I think we have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
One of the common factors of all the shootings - one of the few common factors - is that they all took place very close to major highways and intersections with large amounts of traffic, whcih would make the volume of data much larger. The guy is probably clever and has learned from the Soho bombing etc. He is probably deeply obsessive and has planned this for months. Maybe, knowing the police are looking for white vans, he has nipped out and bought a red convertible? Which would explain why he hasn't been seen. Twisted he may be, but stupid he doesn't look.
Disagree. If the law is a bad law, repeal the law. What you are saying is either that your democracy isn't working (you can't get a bad law repealed) or you don't believe in democracy (you don't want to obey a law which has been democratically passed by your neighbours). I don't think you meant to sayeither, but that is what comes out from your post.
I don't believe you should pick and choose laws. You should either obey the law, or say that the law is so bad that you are going to brazenly and intentionally break it and take the consequences (like laws sending Jews to the gas chambers). Sly lawbreaking is morally wrong, even if you do not feel morally wrong to break that particular law, because it is refusing to live by the standards of your community.
Could work too. If *everybody* who likes the occasional quiet reefer went to smoke one outside their locak polices station, the system would break down at once, because they couldn't possible arrest 10%-25% of the population. But of course, if only one in ten did, tehy could arrest those.
On staistic to bear in mind is that more children are killed with guns in bona-fide accidents (children thought it was a toy, didn't know it was loaded...) in the US than were killed with guns from all causes from accidents to police marksmen in the UK. (The Economist, a few months ago).
Of course there is a *4 in population to account for here, but it is still a heck of a lot of accidents
So regardless of the rights and wrong, the morality or immorality, the criminals or the innocent hobbyists, the Constitution and all, the US is paying for its freedom with its childrens lives.
Is this right? Is this a Bad Thing for the long run? Quite possibly. You also have no "long run" if you get blown up in a terrorist attack or murdered by someone who couldn't be caught because their ISP refused to cooperate.
But "quite possibly" has not previously been a valid excuse for reducing civil liberties. The article qute clearly stated that, in the ISP's opinion, the govenment had failed to make the case that they data they wanted held would help in the fight against terrorism.
If it would genuinely, provably, help in the fight against terrorism, I would be happy for this sort of thing to go through. But what is happening is that the government is finding things that, in their opinion, might help in the fight against something - social security fraud, for example - and trying to bring that in under the umbrella of the "war against terrorism". And that random extension of police powers on only a vague suspicion that it might help is somethign we must fight against.
As a Brit, I am cheering this report. I don'tr want to be blown up, nor do I want anybody else blown up. But the government has to make a good case that these records will give a better chance of catching terrorists to justify both the infringement of liberties and the costs to the ISPs (which I, the ISP's customer, will pay).
As I understand it, it is not in *exactly* the same orbit, but sometimes inside it and sonetimes outside it.
Say at some moment it is *just* outside the Earth's orbit. It is therefore travelling just slower than the earth, and falling very slowly behind - so slowly that it takes 95 years for the earth to lap it. However, when the earth does lap it, as it comes up behind, the earth attracts the asteroid which, for a period, circles the earth. After whizzing aroind the earth for a while, it gets flung out of earth orbit (conservation of energy says that it has too much energy to remain in earth orbit forever). However, it gets flung out just *inside* the earths orbit - a little closer to the sun and travelling a bit faster than the earth. So this time it creeps ahead of the earth, taking another 95 years to catch up. When it creeps up on the inside track, it gets another whirl around and comes out again back where we started, on the slow track, falling behind the earth again.
From a geocentric point of view, it appears from the other side of the sun, whirls round the erarth a few times, then disappears back where it came from, reappearing some years later from the opposite direction, having another whirl, and dissappearing back where it came from again. Hence the "horseshoe shaped" orbit - funny looking horseshoe if you ask me.
I am not absolutely sure I agree with you. Obviously, it would be totally unethical to delete a third parties email. But you were being asked to delete an email by its originator - someone who could be regarded as its owner. Obviously (IMO), once the recipient has read and taken in the content of that email, s/he has the right to keep it, if only to produce it as evidence of harrassment. But while they are still unaware of the emails existence, I think that ownership of the email remains with the author. So, if the author is requesting that you delete it and you can do so without (as other people have pointed out) infringing the recipients privacy, it seems to me quite ethical to do so.
As for the "it'll teach him to think before he posts" - I think that lesson has been learned, as far as it can be. You don't thunk an executive *likes* having to plead with a sysadm for a favour?
The antenne *is* the drill bit - and the quarter wave rule is to stop it acting as a real antenna and broadcasting microwaves all round the room. Below 1/4 wavelength, some undecribed mechanism creates intense heating just below the drill bit, which is where you want to drill. They can't move the drill forward without moving the (presumably non-conducting) chuck, or all their micropwave energy will radiate sideways, gently heating that which they do not want to heat and failing to heat that which they want to drill.
As I read the article, below 1/4 wave, the drill bit behaved more like a hosepipe - microwave frequency oscillations in the conducting drill bit produce an intense microwave field just beyoind the point of the bit - probably using the Near Field bits of Maxwell's equations, which I never did understand. Above 1/4 wavelength, the drill bit functions as a tradition aeriel, radiating the energy sideways from the drill bit. It is not that some sort of effect doesn't exist at the end of the bit, it is that far to much energy escapes sideways to make it worthwhile.
Except that the leatest, greatest armour is ceramic, not steel. But, according to the article, it limited to the 1/4 wave of the microwaves - an inch or so. And it only makes tiny holes. Somehow I doubt that making pinholes in the armour of a tank is going to slow it down much.
I would guess that temperature is probably a big factor - one of the manufacturers once showed me a graph of failures vs. case temp, and failures basically rose exponetially with case temp above 20C. But it isn't only overclockers who run hot - it is cheap PC builders who save a few dollars relative to the big boys by fitting small fans, or cheap fans which fail silently, leaving the disk to roast itself. Particularly the faster drives generate a lot of heat, and need help to get that out.
If you value your data, it is *much* more important to cool your disks than your CPU. If your CPU kills itself with overheat (and one thing you can say about the Pentiums is that they seem to slow themselves down nicely, unlike Athlons), it is a few tens of dollars, or the low hundreds if you went for the best, to replace. If you cook your drive, not only are you down roughly the same number of dollars to replace the drive, but you have the major hassle of recovering from backups - if you have backups.
I bet few people take image backups of a 40+ Gb drive every day or two: they only back up their crucial data regularly. So you are going to have to go back to your OS masters, clean install the OS. Then recover all the site-based configuration files which you backed up after you set up the system (you did, didn't you?). Then you are going to have to go to last night's backup of hot files and retrieve them. And I bet that, in between times, you installed something else which didn't get backed up, so you are going to have to dig out the install for that (if you remember where you put it). Thhe cost in hassle etc. and time is going to dwarf the cost of a new drive.
OK as long as they don't talk to each other to paln it. At least 1 millisecond must elape between MfrA reading a press release that MfrB has dropped its warranty and doing the same thing itself. I shouldn't think it was simultaneous, but I bet it was not many days between.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the website, they carefully alter the wing so it won't produce any lift - remove leading edge slats etc.
Sometimes registers don't cut it. For example, you cannot pass a pointer to a register. If you have a finction with several disparate return parameters, you might well pass pointers to the places to put the returns. And they, obviously, you are going to use the returned data straight away - else why did you ask for it. So you group the ints into which the values will be returned in order to take advantage of the cache if you can.
... providing you knew that it was private. There was no "confidential" mark on it. It appeared in the place where the published results were expected to appear. How were Reuters to guess that it wan't released for publication yet?
> Reuters knew that it wasn't Intentia's intent to release that information (yet) but still persisted in obtaining and releasing it to the general public.
Unproven assumption. Reuters knew the URL it would be posted at, and kept looking at that URL until it appeared. Pecause it appeared on a public web server, they assumed it was published. Wrong, but how were they to know that?
> First, the Reuters reporter was probably looking for the data that wasn't released yet.
> He had intent to get something he wasn't supposed to have and get a story out of it.
How the hell do you deduce that? He was looking for information he knew was due to be published some time that day in the place where he knew it was going to be published. When he found it, he probably didn't even *know* it wasn't published yet. But he did want to claim "First Post" for Reuters because that is their job. So he hacked out his report withing minutes, shoved it up, and went on to the next job.
Always prefer the cockup theory to the conspiracy theory. This is a classic cockup, by the publishing webmaster. There is no evidence whatsoever of intent to hack by Reuters.
I went to their site, and I looked for the (now visible) results. The URL looked like this:
t ia _02_Q3_us.pdf/$FILE/Intentia_02_Q3_us.pdf
...02_Q2_us.pdf and so on. This URL is a lot more than 40 characters, but it hardly takes a rocket scintist to guess where Q3 is going to be when you know where Q1 and Q2 are. You really cannot call such guesswork "hacking".
http://www.intentia.com/w2000.nsf/(files)/Inten
The previous quarters reports are also available under
But did Reuters even know that there was no link to the page? The probably realised that the results were due to be published that day, and on past practice would be put at a standard URL called ..../results.html.
.../results2000.html, .../results2001.html. So, just to save himself time, he types in the .../results2002.html URL. Instead of going in through the corporate page, he just keeps trying this until the 404 goes away, whereupon he can write his story.
The "proper" way to access it would be to wait until the there was a link from the corporate front page. But that means, probably, that he has to keep going to the front page, re-reading the standard corporate boilerplate saying what a great company they are, until he finds the freshly created link to the published results. And, because of the job he does, he is doing this for perhaps twenty companies due to publish their results today - and he is bored with re-reading each of their paeans of self-praise.
Being a clever fellow, he can see that the old results are under
So not only did he not intentionally bypass any security or hiding features, he didn't actually know he had done so.
The lawyers can always make simple things complex, but I cannot see how it can be wrong to publish something put in a place made for public information when you had no way of knowing that information was not intended to be public.
I don't think this is necessarily true, but it is the way a lot of asynch designs are going. GALS - Globally Asynchronous, Locally Synchronous. Several reasons for this that I can think of. Firstly, asynch is much less well understood, so that by having a design that is 90% synchronous you can limit the unknown risk to the last 10%. Secondly, I think the technology of asynch interconnect is better understood that the sort of deep computation which in a syncronous design would be pipelined. Thirdly, some of the synchronous sub-units are probably availabl off the shelf (even if only from the designers memory). Fourthly, GALS diliver well on some of the advantages of full asynch e.g. spreading the clock noise, allowing different parts to run on clocks of their own speed, avoiding global clock distribution.
However, it is possible to have truly globally asynchronous designs. I could imagin that simulating and testing such a thing could be difficult.
Two points.
I have been shown by the engineer for one of the major disk manufacures graph of failure against disk case temperature. It was a deep U with a minimum at 20C, but a "sweet area" from about 15C to 30C. Outside this range, the failure rate rose fast in both directions. Bear in mind that is disk case temperature. - the disk will probably be inside some form of an enclosure and generates quite a lot of heat itself, so will be well above ambient. So if I was thinking only of the welfare of the disk, I would chioll the room to 15C, with the idea that this leaves the disk casing at 200-25C, the optimum temperature.
However, you should be asking why you have to work, sitting, in the server room for periods of an hour or so. Of course you have to go in to rack and wire, restart etc. But surely any system system should be arranged so it can be accessed from outside the server room. There are so many different ways of remote accessing a computer, I cannot believe tha an enlightened employer cannot implement one or another.
> SCSI drives are built almost identically to IDE hard drives.
Not according to the presentations I have had from the manufacturers. And, puttint their money where their mouth is, compare warranties (5 yrs vs 1 year), seek times (4 msc vs 9). They put better bearings in - one mfr claimes that bearings in their scsi drives cost him twice what the bearings in teh IDE drive cost.
The cost difference between a Scsi interface and a Parallell ATA interface is negligible. At the worst it was only ever about $10, ten years ago, and now it is probably about $0.01. Manufacturers just use the Scsi interface as a way of separating "professional" grade drives from "consumer" grade drives. Scsi drives go up to 15,000 rpm, seek times of 4.5msec, five year warranty. IDE drives go to 7200rpm, 9 msec seek times, one year warranty. Scsi is not intended to be a consumer standard, it is intended to be a "hot rod".
On a single user computer, you will be unusual if you need the performance of a scsi disk. You may like the reliability (but there is always IDE based raid). For a central server, however, the scsi difference matters.
So now I have got a name for the way I have been programming all my life - use the best tool that comes to hand without argueing whether it is theoretically perfect. Use mixed tools if that is what the problem at hand demands. Don't reinvent if you can possibly beg/borrow/steal.
The paper strikes me as completey tautologous anywhere outside a Computer Science department (and probably to the more practical half of those inside). If you're involved in shipping code, either for money or for the good of the community, you are interested in what works, not what is theoretically best. Of course, if a nice theoretically clean tool does the job - use it. But if a steaming heap of old code does the job (where reliability and efficiency may for part of the spec), use that.
Welcome to the real world, guys.
Because you can't predict the negligent person in advance. Fools will be fools - but you cannot predict in advance who will be a fool.
I wasn't saying that you should go after anyone - I am sure the idiot who left his loaded gun around has been punished enough by the death of his child. I wan't even saying you *should* give up your right to guns. I was pointing out that, in a world populated by real human beings not perfect theoretical people, your right to guns is bought at a cost to your (collective) children. And this will be true until we get bug-free people - and we can't get bug-free software yet. The more guns, the more accidents. But they are your children, not mine; if you feel that is a price worth paying, that is your democratic right. I am not standing on the opposite side of the Atlantic telling you how to run your country. I am, however, saying that I am glad that we have chosen to run our country differently.
Obviously, you cannot read their minds, but the article stated that the govennment had failed to make their case that it would actually contribute to the fight agaisnt terrorism. All the example cases the government were police wanting records more than 15 months old (i.e. longer than the proposed retention) for non-terrorist cases. I think we have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
One of the common factors of all the shootings - one of the few common factors - is that they all took place very close to major highways and intersections with large amounts of traffic, whcih would make the volume of data much larger. The guy is probably clever and has learned from the Soho bombing etc. He is probably deeply obsessive and has planned this for months. Maybe, knowing the police are looking for white vans, he has nipped out and bought a red convertible? Which would explain why he hasn't been seen. Twisted he may be, but stupid he doesn't look.
Disagree. If the law is a bad law, repeal the law. What you are saying is either that your democracy isn't working (you can't get a bad law repealed) or you don't believe in democracy (you don't want to obey a law which has been democratically passed by your neighbours). I don't think you meant to sayeither, but that is what comes out from your post.
I don't believe you should pick and choose laws. You should either obey the law, or say that the law is so bad that you are going to brazenly and intentionally break it and take the consequences (like laws sending Jews to the gas chambers). Sly lawbreaking is morally wrong, even if you do not feel morally wrong to break that particular law, because it is refusing to live by the standards of your community.
Could work too. If *everybody* who likes the occasional quiet reefer went to smoke one outside their locak polices station, the system would break down at once, because they couldn't possible arrest 10%-25% of the population. But of course, if only one in ten did, tehy could arrest those.
On staistic to bear in mind is that more children are killed with guns in bona-fide accidents (children thought it was a toy, didn't know it was loaded...) in the US than were killed with guns from all causes from accidents to police marksmen in the UK. (The Economist, a few months ago).
Of course there is a *4 in population to account for here, but it is still a heck of a lot of accidents
So regardless of the rights and wrong, the morality or immorality, the criminals or the innocent hobbyists, the Constitution and all, the US is paying for its freedom with its childrens lives.
But "quite possibly" has not previously been a valid excuse for reducing civil liberties. The article qute clearly stated that, in the ISP's opinion, the govenment had failed to make the case that they data they wanted held would help in the fight against terrorism.
If it would genuinely, provably, help in the fight against terrorism, I would be happy for this sort of thing to go through. But what is happening is that the government is finding things that, in their opinion, might help in the fight against something - social security fraud, for example - and trying to bring that in under the umbrella of the "war against terrorism". And that random extension of police powers on only a vague suspicion that it might help is somethign we must fight against.
As a Brit, I am cheering this report. I don'tr want to be blown up, nor do I want anybody else blown up. But the government has to make a good case that these records will give a better chance of catching terrorists to justify both the infringement of liberties and the costs to the ISPs (which I, the ISP's customer, will pay).
As I understand it, it is not in *exactly* the same orbit, but sometimes inside it and sonetimes outside it.
Say at some moment it is *just* outside the Earth's orbit. It is therefore travelling just slower than the earth, and falling very slowly behind - so slowly that it takes 95 years for the earth to lap it. However, when the earth does lap it, as it comes up behind, the earth attracts the asteroid which, for a period, circles the earth. After whizzing aroind the earth for a while, it gets flung out of earth orbit (conservation of energy says that it has too much energy to remain in earth orbit forever). However, it gets flung out just *inside* the earths orbit - a little closer to the sun and travelling a bit faster than the earth. So this time it creeps ahead of the earth, taking another 95 years to catch up. When it creeps up on the inside track, it gets another whirl around and comes out again back where we started, on the slow track, falling behind the earth again.
From a geocentric point of view, it appears from the other side of the sun, whirls round the erarth a few times, then disappears back where it came from, reappearing some years later from the opposite direction, having another whirl, and dissappearing back where it came from again. Hence the "horseshoe shaped" orbit - funny looking horseshoe if you ask me.
I am not absolutely sure I agree with you. Obviously, it would be totally unethical to delete a third parties email. But you were being asked to delete an email by its originator - someone who could be regarded as its owner. Obviously (IMO), once the recipient has read and taken in the content of that email, s/he has the right to keep it, if only to produce it as evidence of harrassment. But while they are still unaware of the emails existence, I think that ownership of the email remains with the author. So, if the author is requesting that you delete it and you can do so without (as other people have pointed out) infringing the recipients privacy, it seems to me quite ethical to do so.
As for the "it'll teach him to think before he posts" - I think that lesson has been learned, as far as it can be. You don't thunk an executive *likes* having to plead with a sysadm for a favour?
The antenne *is* the drill bit - and the quarter wave rule is to stop it acting as a real antenna and broadcasting microwaves all round the room. Below 1/4 wavelength, some undecribed mechanism creates intense heating just below the drill bit, which is where you want to drill. They can't move the drill forward without moving the (presumably non-conducting) chuck, or all their micropwave energy will radiate sideways, gently heating that which they do not want to heat and failing to heat that which they want to drill.
As I read the article, below 1/4 wave, the drill bit behaved more like a hosepipe - microwave frequency oscillations in the conducting drill bit produce an intense microwave field just beyoind the point of the bit - probably using the Near Field bits of Maxwell's equations, which I never did understand. Above 1/4 wavelength, the drill bit functions as a tradition aeriel, radiating the energy sideways from the drill bit. It is not that some sort of effect doesn't exist at the end of the bit, it is that far to much energy escapes sideways to make it worthwhile.
Except that the leatest, greatest armour is ceramic, not steel. But, according to the article, it limited to the 1/4 wave of the microwaves - an inch or so. And it only makes tiny holes. Somehow I doubt that making pinholes in the armour of a tank is going to slow it down much.
I would guess that temperature is probably a big factor - one of the manufacturers once showed me a graph of failures vs. case temp, and failures basically rose exponetially with case temp above 20C. But it isn't only overclockers who run hot - it is cheap PC builders who save a few dollars relative to the big boys by fitting small fans, or cheap fans which fail silently, leaving the disk to roast itself. Particularly the faster drives generate a lot of heat, and need help to get that out.
If you value your data, it is *much* more important to cool your disks than your CPU. If your CPU kills itself with overheat (and one thing you can say about the Pentiums is that they seem to slow themselves down nicely, unlike Athlons), it is a few tens of dollars, or the low hundreds if you went for the best, to replace. If you cook your drive, not only are you down roughly the same number of dollars to replace the drive, but you have the major hassle of recovering from backups - if you have backups.
I bet few people take image backups of a 40+ Gb drive every day or two: they only back up their crucial data regularly. So you are going to have to go back to your OS masters, clean install the OS. Then recover all the site-based configuration files which you backed up after you set up the system (you did, didn't you?). Then you are going to have to go to last night's backup of hot files and retrieve them. And I bet that, in between times, you installed something else which didn't get backed up, so you are going to have to dig out the install for that (if you remember where you put it). Thhe cost in hassle etc. and time is going to dwarf the cost of a new drive.
Damn - I am talking myself into a Raid very fast.
OK as long as they don't talk to each other to paln it. At least 1 millisecond must elape between MfrA reading a press release that MfrB has dropped its warranty and doing the same thing itself. I shouldn't think it was simultaneous, but I bet it was not many days between.