I think you're misreading your contract. Hard to say since the quote began mid-sentence, but if it's the same as the ones I've signed in the past, you're not allowed to take a job with customers of the company you contracted for (meaning you can't steal their business by cutting out the middleman). This isn't just for the term of the contract, it's for whatever time period the contact specifies.
Same goes for the part about taking a job with a competitor.
And, imo non-compete clauses should be illegal in every state, but since we can't even get right-to-work laws in all of them, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
Common house doorknob locks, sure. Deadbolts are a lot harder, especially good brands like Schlage. Once you move up to commercial stuff by Medeco, or even padlocks by American Lock Co., forget it. Those all take time and a lot of patience, assuming they even use a normal pin configuration that standard picks work on.
I got a good laugh watching a movie the other day where someone popped open an American padlock in like 5 seconds. Then again, I really wouldn't want to watch a movie where 30 minutes of it was watching some guy curse at some bastard lock that won't open, so I guess it's for the best that they lean toward the less-than-realistic side of things. To the movie's (Enemy of the State) credit, they also had a scene where someone used a mechanized pick on a deadbolt and it failed to open the lock at all (which is pretty realistic in my experience--those things suck).
Re: making picks... you're right, it's really easy to make diamonds and hooks from common spring steel (hacksaw blades, wiper blade inserts, plumber snake, etc.). You can also get templates on the web for the more complicated rake designs. Making torsion wrenches is the hardest part imo, because they're the most important tool to get right if you want any kind of success at picking. Some kinds of spring steel can be bent without heat, but you need to re-harden it or it'll just break quickly anyway. It's especially important if you want a 90 degree twist in the wrench for better "touch". There's lots of good info http://www.lockpicking101.com/ if you're interested.
I agree, if there was any justice in the hardware world, Creative Labs would have been put out of business a decade ago. Their products are inferior to the competition and the team they have writing drivers seems to be incompetent. EAX as a position audio solution is a worthless "standard" when game makers could have been using Dolby instead if not for Creative pressuring them to stick to proprietary junk for so long.
Onboard used to be vastly superior to Creative cards for one simple reason -- nForce 1 and 2 chipsets could encode Dolby Digital on the fly. Sadly nVidia dropped that feature in their later revisions, despite being the only company in the market which had it.
Fortunately another company finally made a chipset (CMedia's 8768+) which is capable of this. It's being sold as the HDA Digital Mystique 7.1 Gold (PCI card). You can occasionally find them on Ebay for $60-70 shipped from Korea, or if you wait til June/July the US version should be available. Blue Gears is the distributor here.
This was a few years back when Ultrix was the required OS for everything in CS. Nowadays I hear they just use Windows.
I had to use AIX, SunOS, VMS, IBM370/ASM, and a few other even more obscure systems for my CS courses. In light of the fact that I have never had nor wanted a job working on any of those OSes (aside from a brief stint where VMS came in handy) I still consider it inexcusable that one of the top CS programs in the country (at the time) didn't offer even the most basic courses in DOS/Windows programming.
In regards to "just using Windows" now, I'm sure it varies by program, but checking into my own school's current curriculum shows that there's still a pretty heavy *NIX bias, but most courses allow students to choose Windows if they want (and a compiler is available). It also looks like the course layout has greatly improved in terms of real-world application; I always felt like I was learning things for the sake of academia, but the things they offer courses on now are things I actually use in my work. I wish I could say the same for what they offered back in the early 90s.
Every single noun has a gender association and in most cases this is UTTERLY random. The word for woman, "Fraulein," is neuter! Please explain the logic of that.
Frau is the word for woman. Fräulein is more like "young woman" or "girl" and is neutral because of the suffix -lein (Mädchen, the other word for girl is neuter for the same reason). All words ending in -lein or -chen are 'das'. The explanation I was given many years ago when I first learned German was that it was a diminuative form.
Also, the fact that Fräulein and Mädchen are neuter makes them unpopular with many women who don't want to be referred to as an 'it' rather than a 'she.'
English has none of this. It's "the boy" "the girl" "the dick in my ear" - which is actually an even better example because in German the 'my' (mein) must also reflect the gender of the word 'ear.'
It's actually worse than that even. Not only does the suffix on "mein" have to reflect the gender, it also has to point out the case (subject/direct object/indirect object/possessive). "in my ear" becomes "in meinem Ohr" rather than just "Mein Ohr".
I agree with you though. English is very easy to learn to a functional level, but once you think you have it figured out there's a million special cases where the 'rules' don't quite apply. German is more unforgiving to a beginner, but it is also a lot more rigid in grammatical form and there are few exceptions to the rules (other than the occasional feeling that a particular word's der/die/das association was picked out of a hat).
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I think you're misreading your contract. Hard to say since the quote began mid-sentence, but if it's the same as the ones I've signed in the past, you're not allowed to take a job with customers of the company you contracted for (meaning you can't steal their business by cutting out the middleman). This isn't just for the term of the contract, it's for whatever time period the contact specifies. Same goes for the part about taking a job with a competitor. And, imo non-compete clauses should be illegal in every state, but since we can't even get right-to-work laws in all of them, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
Common house doorknob locks, sure. Deadbolts are a lot harder, especially good brands like Schlage. Once you move up to commercial stuff by Medeco, or even padlocks by American Lock Co., forget it. Those all take time and a lot of patience, assuming they even use a normal pin configuration that standard picks work on.
I got a good laugh watching a movie the other day where someone popped open an American padlock in like 5 seconds. Then again, I really wouldn't want to watch a movie where 30 minutes of it was watching some guy curse at some bastard lock that won't open, so I guess it's for the best that they lean toward the less-than-realistic side of things. To the movie's (Enemy of the State) credit, they also had a scene where someone used a mechanized pick on a deadbolt and it failed to open the lock at all (which is pretty realistic in my experience--those things suck).
Re: making picks... you're right, it's really easy to make diamonds and hooks from common spring steel (hacksaw blades, wiper blade inserts, plumber snake, etc.). You can also get templates on the web for the more complicated rake designs. Making torsion wrenches is the hardest part imo, because they're the most important tool to get right if you want any kind of success at picking. Some kinds of spring steel can be bent without heat, but you need to re-harden it or it'll just break quickly anyway. It's especially important if you want a 90 degree twist in the wrench for better "touch". There's lots of good info http://www.lockpicking101.com/ if you're interested.
I agree, if there was any justice in the hardware world, Creative Labs would have been put out of business a decade ago. Their products are inferior to the competition and the team they have writing drivers seems to be incompetent. EAX as a position audio solution is a worthless "standard" when game makers could have been using Dolby instead if not for Creative pressuring them to stick to proprietary junk for so long.
Onboard used to be vastly superior to Creative cards for one simple reason -- nForce 1 and 2 chipsets could encode Dolby Digital on the fly. Sadly nVidia dropped that feature in their later revisions, despite being the only company in the market which had it.
Fortunately another company finally made a chipset (CMedia's 8768+) which is capable of this. It's being sold as the HDA Digital Mystique 7.1 Gold (PCI card). You can occasionally find them on Ebay for $60-70 shipped from Korea, or if you wait til June/July the US version should be available. Blue Gears is the distributor here.
This was a few years back when Ultrix was the required OS for everything in CS. Nowadays I hear they just use Windows. I had to use AIX, SunOS, VMS, IBM370/ASM, and a few other even more obscure systems for my CS courses. In light of the fact that I have never had nor wanted a job working on any of those OSes (aside from a brief stint where VMS came in handy) I still consider it inexcusable that one of the top CS programs in the country (at the time) didn't offer even the most basic courses in DOS/Windows programming. In regards to "just using Windows" now, I'm sure it varies by program, but checking into my own school's current curriculum shows that there's still a pretty heavy *NIX bias, but most courses allow students to choose Windows if they want (and a compiler is available). It also looks like the course layout has greatly improved in terms of real-world application; I always felt like I was learning things for the sake of academia, but the things they offer courses on now are things I actually use in my work. I wish I could say the same for what they offered back in the early 90s.
Every single noun has a gender association and in most cases this is UTTERLY random. The word for woman, "Fraulein," is neuter! Please explain the logic of that.
Frau is the word for woman. Fräulein is more like "young woman" or "girl" and is neutral because of the suffix -lein (Mädchen, the other word for girl is neuter for the same reason). All words ending in -lein or -chen are 'das'. The explanation I was given many years ago when I first learned German was that it was a diminuative form.
Also, the fact that Fräulein and Mädchen are neuter makes them unpopular with many women who don't want to be referred to as an 'it' rather than a 'she.'
English has none of this. It's "the boy" "the girl" "the dick in my ear" - which is actually an even better example because in German the 'my' (mein) must also reflect the gender of the word 'ear.'
It's actually worse than that even. Not only does the suffix on "mein" have to reflect the gender, it also has to point out the case (subject/direct object/indirect object/possessive). "in my ear" becomes "in meinem Ohr" rather than just "Mein Ohr".
I agree with you though. English is very easy to learn to a functional level, but once you think you have it figured out there's a million special cases where the 'rules' don't quite apply. German is more unforgiving to a beginner, but it is also a lot more rigid in grammatical form and there are few exceptions to the rules (other than the occasional feeling that a particular word's der/die/das association was picked out of a hat).