Hook (hardware)

“ Turn two large screweyes into the under side of a shelf, as far apart as is necessary, and slip a rod into the eyes. The rod may be kept from slipping out by threading each end and turning on a nut after it is in place. Hooks are made from heavy wire, in the shape of the letter "S," and placed on the rod. A screweye is turned into the end of each chisel handle and used for hanging the tool on an S-hook. As many hooks are provided as there are tools in use. ”

“ The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since only the testers would be inconvenienced.
:crawling horror: /n./ Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive by forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like {dusty deck} or {gonkulator}, but connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation but an active menace to health and sanity. "Mostly we code new stuff in C, but they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror...." ”

“ With these tiny components and new circuit modes a supercomputer could be built, stored with information, and programmed to solve what one of the participants called the most difficult problem the human being faces today—that of bargaining.
This computer has not yet been built; it won’t be for some time. But design and fabrication are moving in that direction on a number of fronts. One of these fronts is that of hardware, the components used in building up the computer circuitry. In a decade we moved from vacuum tubes to transistors to thin-film 252devices. ”

“ It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who) .
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words `magic' and `more magic'. The switch was in the `more magic' position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! ”

“ Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists and academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of behavior to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most hackers anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program behavior in terms of wants and desires. ”

“ All science relies on telling other people what you've done so that they can verify it, learn from it, and improve on it, and hacking is all about that process, so there's plenty published on the subject.
Start with Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's "Hacking the Xbox," (No Starch Press, 2003) a wonderful book that tells the story of how Bunnie, then a student at MIT, reverse-engineered the Xbox's anti-tampering mechanisms and opened the way for all the subsequent cool hacks for the platform. In telling the story, Bunnie has also created a kind of Bible for reverse engineering and hardware hacking. ”

“ New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an {operating system}, an {HLL}, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase `programming on the bare metal', which refers to the arduous work of {bit bashing} needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment. ”

“ But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer -- it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box. ”

“ They didn't even steal computer equipment—most had day-jobs messing with hardware, and could get all the cheap secondhand equipment they wanted. The hottest hackers, unlike the teenage wannabes, weren't snobs about fancy or expensive hardware. ”

“ With fewer resources than their MIT brethren, Unix developers had customized the software to ride atop a motley assortment of hardware systems: everything from the 16-bit PDP-11-a machine considered fit for only small tasks by most AI Lab hackers-to 32-bit mainframes such as the VAX 11/780. By 1983, a few companies, most notably Sun Microsystems, were even going so far as to develop a new generation of microcomputers, dubbed "workstations," to take advantage of the increasingly ubiquitous operating system. ”

“ In making some kinds of lace work different-sized hooks must be used as the work proceeds. Considerable time will be lost in changing from one hook to another, if they are separate. The best way is to mount all the hooks necessary on one handle, as shown in the sketch. The handle part is made of a large wire or small rod, bent to the shape shown and with holes drilled through the ends for a small rivet. The ends of the hooks are drilled or bent to fit on the rivet. A small tin ferrule is made to slip over the handle and the hooks not in use. ”

“ It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak by now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile) . Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks ”

“ Not all hardware and software are compatible. In fact, hundreds of producers of computer equipment and computer programs are in the market, and there are few across-the-board standards. So it's important to get hardware and software that are compatible.
Software, or the computer programs themselves, are not like records that can be played on any record player. They have to be compatible with the hardware in terms of the programing language used, operating system, size, format, and other factors. ”

“ Hardware or software activity designed to start or keep two machines or programs in synchronization as they do protocol. Often applied to human activity; thus, a hacker might watch two people in conversation nodding their heads to indicate that they have heard each others' points and say "Oh, they're handshaking!". ”

“ At Limerick, in Ireland, the best of these hooks are manufactured. A hook, whose point stands outwards, ought never to be chosen, as it frequently scratches the fish without laying hold; if the points were somewhat shorter, and the barbs a trifle wider, the hooks of every maker would be improved. When hooks are blunt, a small whetstone will restore their sharpness much better than a file, which always leaves them rough and jagged. ”

“ The Sony BIOS was copied again each time the engineers booted up their computer and the computer copied the program into RAM. All of this copying was intermediate; that is, none of the Sony copyrighted material was copied into, or appeared in, Connectix’s final product, the Virtual Game Station.
Methods (3) and (4) constitute “disassembly” of object code into source code. [3] In each case, engineers use a program known as a “disassembler” to translate the ones and zeros of binary machine-readable object code into the words and mathematical symbols of source code. ”

“ They were designed to do damage not only to the data, but to the computer hardware itself. Some were designed to overload communications ports with tight logical loops. Others were designed to destroy the hard disk by directly overdriving the disk or would cause amonitor to self-destruct. There is no limit to the possibilities.
"You sound as though you hold their skills in high regard, Doc- tor." Rickfield continued to make snide remarks whenever possi- ble.
"Yessir, I do. Many of them have extraordinary skills, that are unfortunately misguided. They are a new breed of bored criminal." ”

“ After all, it was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24 hour right to a video, or the right to move music onto an iPod, but not the right to move music from the iPod onto another device, but how the Hell could you do that once you'd given them the file? In order to do that, to make this work, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances. ”

“ This causes the knob shanks, when rotated, to bind, or stick, in the sleeve, or collar, of the escutcheon, thereby holding back the latch bolt after the latch is withdrawn into the lock case. It is also found that proper adjustment is seldom given to the knobs and spindles passing through the escutcheons. In many cases when the hardware is applied carelessly, the owner, not knowing the real cause of the trouble, condemns the best hardware as being cheap and unsatisfactory. ”

“ If they broke into the operator's station and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious. If they broke into a telco building and went after an electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at least leave many traces. But people can do all manner of amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today. The extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life about any computer on a network. ”

“ The fewer the cords that are tied to each hook, the greater is the variety of shedding that can be made on the same number of warp threads, till, when there is but one cord to the hook, any thread or any number of threads can be raised independently of any of the others. ”

“ In some instances, for additional security and for special work, the corrugations in the keyway are changed in shape so that the manufacturers’ regular type of key will not enter the keyway, or plug, thus allowing no chance for the regular type of key to operate the lock. ”

“ The bend of the hook over the knife, therefore, must be sufficient to prevent the hook being pushed off the knife, and it will be noticed that the hooks in this class of machine are bent more than the hooks in a single-lift machine. The hooks rest on the grate G, Fig. 111, and the shape of the hook at this point acts as a spring to straighten the lifted hooks after the pressure of the card has been taken off the needles. A machine of this kind can be run at a speed of about 160 or 170 picks a minute, as compared with the 130 or 140 picks of a single-lift. ”

“ Stick it in a Walkman and listen to all the little digits spin by? In hi-fi?"
"I've got a reader at home . . . but wait, there's a better way." She lifted it from my grasp and headed out onto the floor. "Ever hear of computer crime?"
"In passing."
"Good. Then what you're about to witness won't shock you."
I watched as she kicked on one of the NEC desk stations and loaded in a program. Next she walked over, flipped a switch on a little box, and a drawer glided out. In went Mori's shiny disk. Another button was pushed, the drawer receded, and the disk was spinning silently. ”

“ The term carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built by IBM, Unisys, and the other great {dinosaur}s surviving from computing's {Stone Age}.
It is common wisdom among hackers that the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market for {number-crunching} supercomputers (see {cray}) ) , having been swamped by the recent huge advances in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. ”

“ Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again. ”

“ Through a cable called a null modem, you can pipe valuable reports from your portable to a larger computer a few feet away. You may want to do this, anyhow. Your lap-sized computer simply may run out of storage room much more quickly than a bigger machine and may lack floppy disks to spread those bits and bytes around. So make sure your portable software lets you zip material back and forth between machines. ”

“ Application of Hardware.—Owing to the fact that hardware has become more intricate in its manufacture and therefore more complicated in its construction, it is found that the proper amount of intelligence is not always exercised in its application. Frequently it is applied so carelessly that the hardware practically loses its most essential features. In the case of mortise-lock sets, all of the better grades are made with easy springs, so that the door will close gently and surely. ”