Nut (hardware)

“ Under skilful operation, however, both in the manufacture of the screw-cutting tools and in their operation, a degree of accuracy can be obtained in tapped nuts and die-threaded bolts that is sufficient with a single nut for ordinary uses, but in situations in which the direction of pressure on the nut is periodically reversed, or in which it is subject to shocks or vibrations, the check nut becomes necessary, as before stated. ”

“ When, however, the work had made another revolution, both the feed screw and the work would again come into position for the tool and nut to engage properly, and it follows that in this case the tool will always fall into proper position for the nut to be locked. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the sketch herewith is shown an appliance for cracking nuts which will prevent many a bruised thumb. To anyone who has ever tried to crack butternuts it needs no further recommendation. The device is nothing more than a good block of hardwood with a few holes bored in it to fit the different sized nuts. There is no need of holding the nut with the fingers, and as hard a blow may be struck as desired. Make the depth of the hole two-thirds the height of the nut and the broken pieces will not scatter. ”

“ The personal computer, once a hobbyist's toy, had grown to full-scale respectability, giving a whole new generation of computer users access to hacker-built software. And while the GNU Project had not yet reached its goal of a fully intact, free software operating system, curious users could still try Linux in the interim. ”

“ Software that has some important functionality deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay for a working version. 2. [Cambridge] Variety of {guiltware} that exhorts you to donate to some charity (compare {careware}, {nagware}) . 3. Hardware deliberately crippled, which can be upgraded to a more expensive model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper) .
An excellent example of crippleware (sense 3) is Intel's 486SX chip, which is a standard 486DX chip with the co-processor dyked out (in some early versions it was present but disabled) . ”

“ The point of the set screw indents the nut and raises a bur which would interfere with the free turning of the nut in the recess if the bur was not at the bottom of a groove. Additional security is obtained by drilling a hole through the point of the bolt, and fitting it with a split pin E.
Locking arrangements for nuts are exceedingly numerous, and many of them are very ingenious, but want of space prevents us describing them. We may point out, however, that many very good locking arrangements have the defect of only locking the nut at certain points of a revolution, say at every 30°. ”

“ In practice, the thin nut, called the lock nut, is often placed on the outside, for the reason that ordinary spanners are too thick to act on the thin nut when placed under the other. [Pg 21]
Another very common arrangement for locking a nut is shown in fig. 19. A is the bolt and B the nut, the lower part of which is turned circular. A groove C is also turned on the nut at this part. The circular part of the nut fits into a circular recess in one of the parts connected by the bolt. ”

“ 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...." ”

“ The action of this nut is such as to prevent stripping the threads of either bolt or nut.
As only one nut is used with each bolt, and as no washer or other extra appliance is required, it is obvious that a great saving is effected by this invention.
We are informed that several of the leading railroads have adopted this nut, and use it on the tracks, engines, cars, and machinery. The Atwood Safety Nut Company manufacture this article in a variety of forms. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Sure, PCs were more powerful, but in commoditizing the PC marketplace with its chips, Intel had created a situation in which proprietary software vendors now held the power. For every new user won over to the free software cause via Linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were booting up Microsoft Windows for the first time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If the nut then be withdrawn from thread g, and the work allowed to make another revolution, the nut will stand in a precisely similar position with relation to the lead screw thread as it did in position 2, and by forcing it down into thread h the carriage would be again forced to the right, causing a third thread, c, to be cut. ”

“ 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." ”

“ As soon as fit for cracking, and before becoming so dry that the kernels break badly, the nuts should be shelled. The hammer and a solid block of wood, or a piece of metal with a shallow cupped depression in which to place the nuts while held for hitting, is the most common outfit in use. Various handpower machines are appearing on the market, and already designers are at work attempting to devise power machines. ”

“ Free hardware is the process of taking that free software and ensuring that the network within which it exists remains under the control of the people who own and use the hardware itself.
This seems very simple.
But it is not very simple because hardware is now the ground of contestation of the counterrevolution. The distributors of everything, those people who are sorry to hear that their expiration date on their legal regime has arrived, have a proposal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The belief, sometimes taken unconditionally, that information should be free was a direct tribute to the way a splendid computer, or computer program, works—the binary bits moving in the most straightforward, logical path necessary to do their complex job, What was a computer but something which benefited from a free flow of information? If, say, the accumulator found itself unable to get information from the input/output (i/o) devices like the tape reader or the switches, the whole system would collapse. In the hacker viewpoint, any system could benefit from that easy flow of information. ”

“ In various statements Intel assured customers that the average computer user would typically run across the problem once every 27,000 years. The official line was that nontechnical people needn’t worry. Intel announced it would replace chips if people could show that the defect could harm their work.
That still didn’t placate the Net and the media. Netwise reporters at papers such as the Washington Post and New York Times and at Newsday warned the thousands of Christmas shoppers who were about to buy $2,000 Pentium machines. Billions of dollars were at stake here. ”

“ Control NIC, and you owned a virtual pass-key into any computer on the Internet which `trusted' another. And most machines trust at least one other system.
Whenever one computer connects to another across the Net, both machines go through a special meet-and-greet process. The receiving computer looks over the first machine and asks itself a few questions. What's the name of the incoming machine? Is that name allowed to connect to me? In what ways am I programmed to `trust' that machine—to wave my normal security for connections from that system? ”

“ In the event of a maintenance problem, the software was designed to transmit coded error messages describing the symptoms of the problem only if supplied with a valid password. [146] Custom Hardware Engineering (“CHE”) was a competitor of StorageTek’s in the aftermarket for technical service and maintenance of StorageTek’s products. To access the maintenance error codes on tape libraries manufactured by StorageTek, CHE designed two devices to circumvent StorageTek’s password protection system. ”

“ Most dongles on the market today (1991) will pass data through the port and monitor for {magic} codes (and combinations of status lines) with minimal if any interference with devices further down the line —- this innovation was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles for multiple pieces of software. The devices are still not widely used, as the industry has moved away from copy-protection schemes in general. 2. By extension, any physical electronic key or transferrable ID required for a program to function. See {dongle-disk}. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nowadays, there are version control systems to track the evolution of algorithms and computer programs or changes in scripts. Bitbucket, Git, Subversion, and Mercurial are among the most widely used version-control systems. You should use a standardized name system to identify changes. If you have a paper lab notebook, you should record the name and location of the scripts. Those using electronic lab notebooks can add links to each version of their scripts or programs. ”

“ The computer chip itself is a conceptual accomplishment beyond anything we can conceive of. The depth encountered in the functioning of the digital computer-from the whole it represents to its smallest components endowed with functions integrated in its operation-is of a scale to which we have no intuitive or direct access. Computers are not a better abacus. Some computer users have even noticed that they are not even a better cash register. They define an age of semiotic focus, in that symbol manipulation follows language processing. ”