I was recently rung at work by someone from Sage, producers of some popular accounting software. Continue reading
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Hello friendly lawyers… Not for the first time, the behaviour of Manchester United has made me wonder. David Beckham has a contract with them for two or three more years, yet they've anounced that they want to sell him to Barcelona… without apparently asking him first.
Presumably he can say 'get lost, we have a contract, pay my wages for the next two or three years'?
Could he successfully claim constructive dismissal? If he were out of contract, he'd be able to make more money and they'd be left with no transfer fee.
One of the reasons for ManU picking Barcelona is that they are not a club they are likely to face in the European Cup, unlike eg Real Madrid. Presumably if they tried to include a clause in the sale that said 'you can't sell him onto Real Madrid', it'd be declared an unlawful restraint of trade?
After the death of Doge Renier Zeno in 1268 the Venetians instituted a new system of election to the Dogeship. I've always thought it could be adopted to pick a President or Prime Minister, or even a leader of the bisexual empire. Continue reading
My first 1G drive was £540.
It was put in a PC with a 120M drive that had cost about £120 second hand a few months to a year earlier. So paying 'only' 50p a megabyte didn't seem too bad. At the time anyway. And in 1986, someone paid about that for the 20M disk I used to work on.
My first sub-single speed CD-ROM – you may have heard me shout "how $%^&ing fast?!?" when must-have CD-ROM game The 7th Guest revealed the truth about what its sustained data rate really was about a year later – was £500.
As the paper version of the encyclopeadia was about £700 at the time, there's part of me that thinks it wasn't too bad a deal. But I wish the people who'd sold it to me had still been in business when I discovered they'd lied.
The replacement, a double speed Mitsumi bought to play 7th Guest on, was £120.
I wish I could remember when I paid £250 – second-hand! – for four 4M SIMMs and thought I'd got a bargain.
I can remember a 120k floppy disk drive should have cost me £150 in 1983.
Such has been the rate of progress since then that my new P4/2G PC costs less than the keyboard and mono text only graphics card of the original IBM PC.
I don't have the receipt for this one, but it was bought about a year earlier. Single speed, it said, although it couldn't actually keep up with 150k bytes per second – its real speed was about 75k/s.
About the size of a hi-fi CD player, it needed an interface card to talk to the PC. You had to put the actual disk in a caddy before you could insert it – none of those trays or disk slots here! It came with an encycopaedia, Groliers, and a disk of share/freeware.
Tidying up the flat, I came across the receipt for my 1G hard drive. Bought in 1994, it could be made to appear as two 512M drives as lots of PCs wouldn't accept anything larger than 512M existed. It still works.
But…
Last night, just as I'd walked across the railway bridge, some man 'indecently exposed' himself to me – he had his penis out and was masturbating, asking if I wanted 'any of this'.
I ignored him (I was on the other side of the road) and called the police when I was around the corner.
Odd location – in no way is it a cruising ground, it's a reasonably busy walking route. My guess is that he had some mental health problem, meaning I was more sad for him than pissed off / scared.