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Comment Re:Reading TFA (Score 5, Informative) 82

It is about the number of countries you can visit without requiring a visa.
The top three are Singapore, South Korea and Japan in that order, then it's a bunch of EU countries. This list has 5 countries in 4th, 7 more in 5th and so on - meaning there are way more than 11 countries ahead of the US.
I was just looking at countries where I'd need a visa and basically they are not places I have any interest in visiting anyway.

Comment Re: Part of this decline is all MBA-driven (Score 1) 187

Related story:
We once had a production server where java went from 2GB ram usage to 10GB n 2 minutes. I told the main Dev he had a bug in his code. He went over my head to the VP and forced us to upgrade the servers to 20GB (we had VMs so it was possible). A week later, same day, same time, the RAM went from 2GB to 20GB. We could not double the RAM again so they actually looked at the bug. The issue was a customer clicked on a sorting tab on a table in the web UI. The code made a SQL query, with no LIMIT, then sorted everything in RAM. With millions of records, that crashed.

I've seen something similar on a mainframe, it must be almost 30 years ago now.
There was a SORT processor which did what you'd imagine. An optional parameter was the number of records to be sorted, something to help the processor work out how much on-disk temporary workspace it needed to allocate (how much memory it should use was another optional parameter). That RECORDS parameter was in thousands of records, something hardly anyone noticed when they first used the clause. Given that the the only sorts worth optimising are the really big ones, everything would be running normally and then all of sudden, we'd be out of disk space.
Having fallen into that trap myself (on much smaller sorts), the first thing I'd to would be to see who was using SORT and speak to them. Terminating the run doing the sort released all those temporary files and everything was back to normal. Nobody made that mistake more than once, but quite a few made it once.

Comment Re:Big deal (Score 1) 55

No chance, Greece has the Washington State bridge beat hands down, that article says there are two of those bridges, I've only seen the southernmost (SE, Isthmia) one. Crossing the canal on that bridge is really fraught when it is wet (which is most of the time), you are walking on a smooth wooden surface and it is like walking on sheet ice.

Comment Re:Return to office (Score 1) 125

I worked for a company which outsourced a lot of work to an Indian company. Some of them were on our site (in a separate office, a couple of miles from where I was working then) and some more were in India. It worked by and large, and I only ever actually saw most of the "local" Indians two or three times over all the years I worked there.
As for people "working from home", that often meant they could not be reached at all, or the background noises made it clear they were walking the dog.

Comment Re:roundabouts (Score 1) 181

There's roundabouts and there's Denham Roundabout (just west of London, on the M40).
Back when I lived in the area it was a perfectly normal roundabout with 5 roads leading off, two of which were slip roads to/from the M40 (it may have been the A40 then).
I was there again a few years later and each junction was a mini-roundabout and you could head clockwise on the outside or anti-clockwise on the inside, depending on whether the exit you wanted was closest going left or right. Google Maps satellite view says it's still like that now. Scary stuff for the uninitiated.
I believe there's another one like that around Swindon.

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