Oh, YES, Meccano. Actually, I had both as a kid, but Meccano definitely rocks. I think it's called something else in the States -- Erector Sets, perhaps?
I believe the original question submitter posted above this thread to another suggestion about using lights, stating it didn't work for him. But, for anyone else who's having similar problems, this is probably worth a shot. I don't speak from personal experience, but we have deaf neighbours and I've occasionally been leaving for work at some unearthly hour and seen the light flashing in their bedroom.
Frankly, I wish I'd had the foresight to buy SCOX a year ago. I don't think the shareholders are likely to be too concerned so long as they keep up this sort of performance. With that sort of run-up, it shouldn't be too difficult to keep a close eye on the stock for signs of a significant decline and still have plenty of time to get out with a substantial profit.
Excellent, the first poster so far that appears to have RTFA.
The crux is standardization, or, for you DBAs out there, normalization across applications instead of databases.
One of the examples he gives talks about differing field names (last_name versus surname, for example). Well, sorry, but that has nothing to do with whether you're using SQL Server or MySQL and everything to do with standardizing architecture.
But how does one do that across an entity as large as a government? How do you tell programmers they must use only these field names? And how much will it cost to rename fields in existing applications, and ensure all the links, dependencies, etc., are rectified as well? It's not really anything to do with the platform; at the least, it doesn't have anything like the impact the author suggests.
An important issue, as the author says, is that for many applications (such as SAP and JD Edwards), no open source equivalents exist. This is a big problem for purchasers, because it makes them wonder how long open source will take to give them the applications they need (or if they'll ever come). They may have to pay big bucks for that other software, but it integrates with their existing applications and it's a known quantity. Never underestimate the power of familiarity.
And, although I hate to be a grammar nazi, the author might just find himself being taken more seriously if he learns how to use words properly.
Yeah, in all honesty, I am now in despair of news sources getting their spelling and grammar past even the most rudimentary errors.
I was watching CNN this morning and the headline appeared:
Going to far?
(promoting an upcoming item about the U.S. requiring certain people to be fingerprinted and photographed when they enter the country). Yes, for those of you who adhere to the Commander Taco school of ed-yoo-ka-shun, that should have been
Going TOO far?
Yes, I know they're subject to tight deadlines, but really!
Sorry to burst the bubble, but according to the newspaper article I read a day or two ago, the owner of the bar where the pictures were taken was highly offended and claimed to be the individual responsible for tipping off the police.
Winged Migration You want stunning cinematography, this is it. You want a film that will leave you months later looking at a flock of birds in the air and wanting to join them, this is it. Minimal dialog and sound track, it rests on the sheer power of the visual impact -- which, to get in the geek factor, prompted a lot of people to wonder "how did they do that". (I'm looking forward to the DVD special features on this.)
Whale Rider Yes, I'm from New Zealand, so probably biased, but I really enjoyed this. Good proof you don't need a huge budget and blowaway CGI if you actually have a good story and a couple of actors who can, you know, act.
But, for me, Winged Migration should be on every inevitable "end of the year wrapup best films" self-indulgence from the critics.
The initial pilot was 40 users, but of more interest would be what groups those users were in. If it's IT, then you'll typically find these users tend to share documents internally and not be so interested in the niceties of document formatting (vast generalization, I know).
Such issues become rather more important when you start looking at users in Finance, secretaries, etc. These people have to share documents outside the company all the time, and it's pretty much assured that they'll be sharing documents with users who have MS Word (the majority) or WordPerfect (some governmental depts and legal depts). How much pull will those people have? A heck of a lot if they're an executive level secretary to a VP, for example.
And you know that FUD has at least two different interpretations, right? To many people, that D stands for Disinformation. (It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine what the F and the U might stand for.) I think that makes the poster's choice of phrasing quite apt.
At least they don't try to hide it in three point text -- it's right there on the main page. But, anyway...if you want to see another (MS) view, look here.
By the way, I must just grumble at the lack of knowledge some people have on SQL Server. I sat in a meeting a few weeks ago with our Oracle-centric architects who decided that, as SQL Server is being used more and more extensively in our company, they'd better understand something about it. They started asking us various questions which rather puzzled me until I thought I knew what the problem was. "You do realize that SQL Server uses transaction logs, don't you? And that it implements transactional integrity, so, for example, will roll back an incomplete transaction?". Blank stares. "Really? Huh, we just assumed it wouldn't have those features because it's not a real database". Well thanks, guys, for doing your homework and being Oracle defensive on the basis of a good solid knowledge of the issues. At least SQL Server doesn't store internal passwords in a table that I can easily run a SELECT query on. Yes, I know they're encrypted -- but SQL Plus is quite happy to allow me to copy and paste the encrypted password into the authentication dialog and accept that as a valid logon.
Of course Linux has been able to run on 64-bit platforms for quite some time now.
Kind of off-topic here, but so has Microsoft, at least on the server platform. They've kept it away from the consumer platform up until now for deliberate marketing reasons.
Incidentally, once you've got Windows 2000 64 bit edition running on your 64 bit server, what killer app are you going to run on it? Why, 64-bit SQL Server, of course!
Oh grow up. You're putting words into my mouth that are utterly without basis from what I posted. I think any job loss is bad news, and 450 is really distressing. I've been in situations where I've put my shirt on the line for a company I believed in and, in some cases, just wriggled through, and, in other cases, paid the price with my job. And, hey, guess what? In one of those cases I was the sole programmer at a company that ended up struggling and decided to cut me loose first.
If you read my direct quotation of the 2% figure as being somehow trivializing, then you're deliberately trying to spin it. 2% of a company's workforce is, to me, fairly substantial. Getting rid of innovative people such as the undisputedly talented programmers under discussion here is a very real and serious action.
Looking at your other post on this topic, it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder, but it's certainly justifiable. Unlike you, I'm not going to wish you ill or gloat, because I've been there and know how much it sucks, and it's just not worth it to spread the bitterness. I really do hope you find a job soon.
Or, alternately, for those of us who actually RTFA, about 2% of their total workforce of 19,000.
And, to answer the other desperate "please, dear God, let me get something vaguely approaching a first post" mathematically challenged posts -- it will be 375 positions eliminated at their Mountain View Campus, and a total of 450 in California. Yep, AOL is sufficiently large/bloated to have multiple locations in CA.
It also is incredibly annoying; I've been living in Pennsylvania for almost four years now and still don't know what items have sales tax, and how to tell if a price does or doesn't include sales tax.
In New Zealand, a pseudo sales tax was introduced in the 80s/90s (I think) called Goods and Services Tax, or GST. By law, the price displayed must include GST or state it doesn't include GST and somewhere show what the price is with GST added on. In practice, everyday items always have GST included, and only big-ticket items (e.g. AV equipment and computers) show a price without GST. And those advertisements must show somewhere the price including GST. So, for example, it'll say in large type "$1999", and then down the bottom say "($2248.85 incl. GST)".
But there's no dispute -- it either includes GST or it tells you somewhere on the sign what the full price is including GST. Why, oh why, cannot this be the same in the States?
Yes, exactly. As I submitted yesterday (not that I'm bitter or anything)...
2003-12-03 19:26:33 Microsoft to license more technology (articles,microsoft) (rejected)
Read more about it here. This is not the link I'd submitted in my original submission, which had much more information, but I've lost that link now. If only the submission had been accepted...(not that I'm bitter or anything).
Why the {expletive deleted} is this modded so high?
Well, let's see. Perhaps because the parent poster (i) did read the article; (ii) also read the thread here; and (ii) apparently has somewhat better English comprehension skills than someone else I could name.
You see, it's quite simple. He's talking about the initial problem. You're talking about the subsequent problem. The initial problem, from the article...
Unfortunately, a part of the cable near the US coast had already suffered a technical fault earlier this month, which meant there was no built-in redundancy to cope with Tuesday's failure. According to BT, the US-side fault should be fixed by the end of this week, which will bring the cable network online again.
Now, as you'll see, there is no mention as to what the actual problem was, just a guide as to when it'll be fixed which gives us an indication that it is taking some time. This, in turn, was the subject of discussion of the original post.
I hope this elucidation has clarified the issue for you. Oh yes, one more thing...you're a silly git.
Number 2 is the Sinclair ZX-81. From a technical standpoint, it was junk. From a social standpoint, it did to the UK what the Apple II did to the US.
I have to take exception with this. Sir Clive Sinclair's biggest accomplishment in the ZX-81 was taking the number of chips down from (I think) 21 in the ZX-80 to just 4 in the ZX-81. Yes, just 4. A fully-functioning microcomputer, I/O, on-board BASIC, etc., with just 4 chips. This was what really made it so much cheaper and enabled him to get the functionality in there that sold it to the masses.
I would guess that, on that scale (totally hypothetical, remember), his machine is probably going to be around $25 per CPU. Not hard to multiply that out to $100,000.
Now we've moved from not RTFA to not RTFP (post)! Did you understand the parent post? You donate to the organization, and your donation is used to buy a llama, a cow, a chicken, etc. If it's a chicken, for example, a poor family is able to raise chickens, get eggs, and generally be better off. It's nothing like those Christmas cards you buy from a charity organization -- the poster was saying you can donate in someone else's name and in return receive a nice "thank-you" type of card. You know? One of those gift-card type things? A small piece of inexpensive cardboard?
My goodness, I don't know why I'm bothering. If you couldn't even understand the original post, I don't know how I can simplify it to the point where it will make sense to you.
And it was moderated as Funny! Okay, mildly amusing to think of llamas...but don't you know this is actually a genuinely good thing? They provide for all manner of other animals, and they're actually useful and well thought-out concepts.
Gosh...you don't think that might be because they've only just opened it up and so the vast majority of the site's users up until now would have been internal Microsoft people?
As I look now, a few minutes after the/. story appeared, that's already changing. Number 1 is about Microsoft, and number 2 is about a murder suspect in the UK.
How's this for a test? Everyone on/., go and visit the Tech News Site and click on the Red Hat subscriptions surge article and see how quickly it moves up.
Or, even better, come back to the site after a couple of days and see how it's changed. Then, reevaluate on the basis of some actually vaguely accurate data! Going against the whole rationale of/., I know, but you never know, it might work.
By common agreement, the American convention of a billion = 1,000,000,000 is used in professional contexts. More information from here:
How many is a billion?
If you are American, it is undoubtedly 1,000,000,000. This amount is known to traditionally minded British people as `a thousand million', and by some more adventurous ones as a 'milliard', though this word has not made as much headway in English as in some other European languages. A trillion is then 1,000,000,000,000, and so on.
If you are British, on the other hand, a billion may be 1,000,000,000,000 (a million million), following the older convention.
If you are neither British nor American, you can take your pick! (Both systems were invented by the French, but are called 'British' and 'American' for convenience.)
Once the business world and the financial press found themselves discussing `thousand millions' so much, the 'American' system simply became more convenient, despite a certain lack of logical tidiness. (A 'British' trillion is the third power of a million, while the 'American' one is the fourth power of a thousand, and the 'American' system continues out of sync with the arithmetic). It also makes the profits sound bigger! The 'American' system is now standard use in British government publications, and is becoming the norm in many other languages.
For what it's worth, I grew up in New Zealand, and I have always considered a billion to be a million million (the British system), but have known from my physics and maths classes to use a thousand million in these contexts. So, how's that? Clear as mud?
Re:You will have to work to not travel.
on
Traveling Jobs in IT?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Agreed. It sounds glamorous to anyone who's not actually doing it, and, in truth, it can be a lot of fun. The fun begins to tail off when (i) you've been doing it for months, and/or (ii) you have a family at home.
The breaking point for me, when it finally ceased to be so much fun, was when I spent two months living in the same hotel room in Sydney, Australia, and wasn't flying home for the weekends. On the plus side I got to see a lot of the area; on the minus side, living in the same hotel room for anything past about four weeks is not pleasant.
So jobs changed, I stopped travelling so much, and then a few years down the track found myself living in the States, newly married, and was on a major project where I would get up early Monday morning, travel to New York, live there in a hotel room for a week, come home Friday night. Spend the weekend with my wife, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam for several months. I got to hate going to New York, and never wanted to go there on a vacation because, to me, it was just where I went to work. I never got to see anything because I'd start work early in the morning, be working after hours a lot of the time, and by the time you get back to the hotel all you want to do is have dinner and relax for a few hours before going to bed. By the way, it can be really depressing eating in a restaurant night after night by yourself, but you need a break from room service sometimes.
I'm extremely lucky in that my wife grew up with a father who also travelled extensively and so knew what to expect, and (most importantly) had seen how wearing it was on her father and knew that it just wasn't as much fun as it appeared to be. One of my colleagues, on the other hand, was married to a woman who used to get very envious as she saw him always travelling to different locations and eating in hotels and thought he was having a great time, not realizing just how draining and depressing it can be.
If you're going to do it, do it while you're young. Do it before you're married and have a family. I'm no longer travelling; as soon as we decided to start a family, I found a new job where I specifically wouldn't have to travel and could pretty much count on coming home every night to see my daughter.
I'm glad to have had the opportunity; I got to see a lot of places, and it was a great way to see more of the U.S. when I moved here and experience the differences in culture throughout the country (yes, there's a big difference between Georgia and New Hampshire). And I'm very glad now to have the luxury of being home almost every night at a reasonably predictable hour; heck, just being able to go home on a weeknight, rather than having to try and have a family two days out of seven.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, YES, Meccano. Actually, I had both as a kid, but Meccano definitely rocks. I think it's called something else in the States -- Erector Sets, perhaps?
If any organization got as much press as the SCO, regardless of whether they did anything or not, they're stock would rise in value.
Too true! Look what it did for Enron...
Oops
I believe the original question submitter posted above this thread to another suggestion about using lights, stating it didn't work for him. But, for anyone else who's having similar problems, this is probably worth a shot. I don't speak from personal experience, but we have deaf neighbours and I've occasionally been leaving for work at some unearthly hour and seen the light flashing in their bedroom.
Frankly, I wish I'd had the foresight to buy SCOX a year ago. I don't think the shareholders are likely to be too concerned so long as they keep up this sort of performance. With that sort of run-up, it shouldn't be too difficult to keep a close eye on the stock for signs of a significant decline and still have plenty of time to get out with a substantial profit.
Excellent, the first poster so far that appears to have RTFA.
The crux is standardization, or, for you DBAs out there, normalization across applications instead of databases.
One of the examples he gives talks about differing field names (last_name versus surname, for example). Well, sorry, but that has nothing to do with whether you're using SQL Server or MySQL and everything to do with standardizing architecture.
But how does one do that across an entity as large as a government? How do you tell programmers they must use only these field names? And how much will it cost to rename fields in existing applications, and ensure all the links, dependencies, etc., are rectified as well? It's not really anything to do with the platform; at the least, it doesn't have anything like the impact the author suggests.
An important issue, as the author says, is that for many applications (such as SAP and JD Edwards), no open source equivalents exist. This is a big problem for purchasers, because it makes them wonder how long open source will take to give them the applications they need (or if they'll ever come). They may have to pay big bucks for that other software, but it integrates with their existing applications and it's a known quantity. Never underestimate the power of familiarity.
And, although I hate to be a grammar nazi, the author might just find himself being taken more seriously if he learns how to use words properly.
Yeah, in all honesty, I am now in despair of news sources getting their spelling and grammar past even the most rudimentary errors.
I was watching CNN this morning and the headline appeared:
Going to far?
(promoting an upcoming item about the U.S. requiring certain people to be fingerprinted and photographed when they enter the country). Yes, for those of you who adhere to the Commander Taco school of ed-yoo-ka-shun, that should have been
Going TOO far?
Yes, I know they're subject to tight deadlines, but really!
Sorry to burst the bubble, but according to the newspaper article I read a day or two ago, the owner of the bar where the pictures were taken was highly offended and claimed to be the individual responsible for tipping off the police.
Okay, I'm late, but just had to mention:
Winged Migration
You want stunning cinematography, this is it. You want a film that will leave you months later looking at a flock of birds in the air and wanting to join them, this is it. Minimal dialog and sound track, it rests on the sheer power of the visual impact -- which, to get in the geek factor, prompted a lot of people to wonder "how did they do that". (I'm looking forward to the DVD special features on this.)
Whale Rider
Yes, I'm from New Zealand, so probably biased, but I really enjoyed this. Good proof you don't need a huge budget and blowaway CGI if you actually have a good story and a couple of actors who can, you know, act.
But, for me, Winged Migration should be on every inevitable "end of the year wrapup best films" self-indulgence from the critics.
The initial pilot was 40 users, but of more interest would be what groups those users were in. If it's IT, then you'll typically find these users tend to share documents internally and not be so interested in the niceties of document formatting (vast generalization, I know).
Such issues become rather more important when you start looking at users in Finance, secretaries, etc. These people have to share documents outside the company all the time, and it's pretty much assured that they'll be sharing documents with users who have MS Word (the majority) or WordPerfect (some governmental depts and legal depts). How much pull will those people have? A heck of a lot if they're an executive level secretary to a VP, for example.
And you know that FUD has at least two different interpretations, right? To many people, that D stands for Disinformation. (It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine what the F and the U might stand for.) I think that makes the poster's choice of phrasing quite apt.
At least they don't try to hide it in three point text -- it's right there on the main page. But, anyway...if you want to see another (MS) view, look here.
By the way, I must just grumble at the lack of knowledge some people have on SQL Server. I sat in a meeting a few weeks ago with our Oracle-centric architects who decided that, as SQL Server is being used more and more extensively in our company, they'd better understand something about it. They started asking us various questions which rather puzzled me until I thought I knew what the problem was. "You do realize that SQL Server uses transaction logs, don't you? And that it implements transactional integrity, so, for example, will roll back an incomplete transaction?". Blank stares. "Really? Huh, we just assumed it wouldn't have those features because it's not a real database". Well thanks, guys, for doing your homework and being Oracle defensive on the basis of a good solid knowledge of the issues. At least SQL Server doesn't store internal passwords in a table that I can easily run a SELECT query on. Yes, I know they're encrypted -- but SQL Plus is quite happy to allow me to copy and paste the encrypted password into the authentication dialog and accept that as a valid logon.
Of course Linux has been able to run on 64-bit platforms for quite some time now.
Kind of off-topic here, but so has Microsoft, at least on the server platform. They've kept it away from the consumer platform up until now for deliberate marketing reasons.
Incidentally, once you've got Windows 2000 64 bit edition running on your 64 bit server, what killer app are you going to run on it? Why, 64-bit SQL Server, of course!
Looks like they need to bring in some university professors as consultants on grade inflation.
Oh grow up. You're putting words into my mouth that are utterly without basis from what I posted. I think any job loss is bad news, and 450 is really distressing. I've been in situations where I've put my shirt on the line for a company I believed in and, in some cases, just wriggled through, and, in other cases, paid the price with my job. And, hey, guess what? In one of those cases I was the sole programmer at a company that ended up struggling and decided to cut me loose first.
If you read my direct quotation of the 2% figure as being somehow trivializing, then you're deliberately trying to spin it. 2% of a company's workforce is, to me, fairly substantial. Getting rid of innovative people such as the undisputedly talented programmers under discussion here is a very real and serious action.
Looking at your other post on this topic, it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder, but it's certainly justifiable. Unlike you, I'm not going to wish you ill or gloat, because I've been there and know how much it sucks, and it's just not worth it to spread the bitterness. I really do hope you find a job soon.
Or, alternately, for those of us who actually RTFA, about 2% of their total workforce of 19,000.
And, to answer the other desperate "please, dear God, let me get something vaguely approaching a first post" mathematically challenged posts -- it will be 375 positions eliminated at their Mountain View Campus, and a total of 450 in California. Yep, AOL is sufficiently large/bloated to have multiple locations in CA.
It also is incredibly annoying; I've been living in Pennsylvania for almost four years now and still don't know what items have sales tax, and how to tell if a price does or doesn't include sales tax.
In New Zealand, a pseudo sales tax was introduced in the 80s/90s (I think) called Goods and Services Tax, or GST. By law, the price displayed must include GST or state it doesn't include GST and somewhere show what the price is with GST added on. In practice, everyday items always have GST included, and only big-ticket items (e.g. AV equipment and computers) show a price without GST. And those advertisements must show somewhere the price including GST. So, for example, it'll say in large type "$1999", and then down the bottom say "($2248.85 incl. GST)".
But there's no dispute -- it either includes GST or it tells you somewhere on the sign what the full price is including GST. Why, oh why, cannot this be the same in the States?
Yes, exactly. As I submitted yesterday (not that I'm bitter or anything)...
2003-12-03 19:26:33 Microsoft to license more technology (articles,microsoft) (rejected)
Read more about it here. This is not the link I'd submitted in my original submission, which had much more information, but I've lost that link now. If only the submission had been accepted...(not that I'm bitter or anything).
No, but this could cause them to kick themselves.
Did you see that 52 week range? 1.09 - 22.29. Currently sitting at 16.631.
Why the {expletive deleted} is this modded so high?
Well, let's see. Perhaps because the parent poster (i) did read the article; (ii) also read the thread here; and (ii) apparently has somewhat better English comprehension skills than someone else I could name.
You see, it's quite simple. He's talking about the initial problem. You're talking about the subsequent problem. The initial problem, from the article...
Unfortunately, a part of the cable near the US coast had already suffered a technical fault earlier this month, which meant there was no built-in redundancy to cope with Tuesday's failure. According to BT, the US-side fault should be fixed by the end of this week, which will bring the cable network online again.
Now, as you'll see, there is no mention as to what the actual problem was, just a guide as to when it'll be fixed which gives us an indication that it is taking some time. This, in turn, was the subject of discussion of the original post.
I hope this elucidation has clarified the issue for you. Oh yes, one more thing...you're a silly git.
Number 2 is the Sinclair ZX-81. From a technical standpoint, it was junk. From a social standpoint, it did to the UK what the Apple II did to the US.
I have to take exception with this. Sir Clive Sinclair's biggest accomplishment in the ZX-81 was taking the number of chips down from (I think) 21 in the ZX-80 to just 4 in the ZX-81. Yes, just 4. A fully-functioning microcomputer, I/O, on-board BASIC, etc., with just 4 chips. This was what really made it so much cheaper and enabled him to get the functionality in there that sold it to the masses.
I would guess that, on that scale (totally hypothetical, remember), his machine is probably going to be around $25 per CPU. Not hard to multiply that out to $100,000.
Now we've moved from not RTFA to not RTFP (post)! Did you understand the parent post? You donate to the organization, and your donation is used to buy a llama, a cow, a chicken, etc. If it's a chicken, for example, a poor family is able to raise chickens, get eggs, and generally be better off. It's nothing like those Christmas cards you buy from a charity organization -- the poster was saying you can donate in someone else's name and in return receive a nice "thank-you" type of card. You know? One of those gift-card type things? A small piece of inexpensive cardboard?
My goodness, I don't know why I'm bothering. If you couldn't even understand the original post, I don't know how I can simplify it to the point where it will make sense to you.
And it was moderated as Funny! Okay, mildly amusing to think of llamas...but don't you know this is actually a genuinely good thing? They provide for all manner of other animals, and they're actually useful and well thought-out concepts.
ARRGH!
Gosh...you don't think that might be because they've only just opened it up and so the vast majority of the site's users up until now would have been internal Microsoft people?
/. story appeared, that's already changing. Number 1 is about Microsoft, and number 2 is about a murder suspect in the UK.
/., go and visit the Tech News Site and click on the Red Hat subscriptions surge article and see how quickly it moves up.
/., I know, but you never know, it might work.
As I look now, a few minutes after the
How's this for a test? Everyone on
Or, even better, come back to the site after a couple of days and see how it's changed. Then, reevaluate on the basis of some actually vaguely accurate data! Going against the whole rationale of
By common agreement, the American convention of a billion = 1,000,000,000 is used in professional contexts. More information from here:
How many is a billion?
If you are American, it is undoubtedly 1,000,000,000. This amount is known to traditionally minded British people as `a thousand million', and by some more adventurous ones as a 'milliard', though this word has not made as much headway in English as in some other European languages. A trillion is then 1,000,000,000,000, and so on.
If you are British, on the other hand, a billion may be 1,000,000,000,000 (a million million), following the older convention.
If you are neither British nor American, you can take your pick! (Both systems were invented by the French, but are called 'British' and 'American' for convenience.)
Once the business world and the financial press found themselves discussing `thousand millions' so much, the 'American' system simply became more convenient, despite a certain lack of logical tidiness. (A 'British' trillion is the third power of a million, while the 'American' one is the fourth power of a thousand, and the 'American' system continues out of sync with the arithmetic). It also makes the profits sound bigger! The 'American' system is now standard use in British government publications, and is becoming the norm in many other languages.
For what it's worth, I grew up in New Zealand, and I have always considered a billion to be a million million (the British system), but have known from my physics and maths classes to use a thousand million in these contexts. So, how's that? Clear as mud?
Agreed. It sounds glamorous to anyone who's not actually doing it, and, in truth, it can be a lot of fun. The fun begins to tail off when (i) you've been doing it for months, and/or (ii) you have a family at home.
The breaking point for me, when it finally ceased to be so much fun, was when I spent two months living in the same hotel room in Sydney, Australia, and wasn't flying home for the weekends. On the plus side I got to see a lot of the area; on the minus side, living in the same hotel room for anything past about four weeks is not pleasant.
So jobs changed, I stopped travelling so much, and then a few years down the track found myself living in the States, newly married, and was on a major project where I would get up early Monday morning, travel to New York, live there in a hotel room for a week, come home Friday night. Spend the weekend with my wife, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam for several months. I got to hate going to New York, and never wanted to go there on a vacation because, to me, it was just where I went to work. I never got to see anything because I'd start work early in the morning, be working after hours a lot of the time, and by the time you get back to the hotel all you want to do is have dinner and relax for a few hours before going to bed. By the way, it can be really depressing eating in a restaurant night after night by yourself, but you need a break from room service sometimes.
I'm extremely lucky in that my wife grew up with a father who also travelled extensively and so knew what to expect, and (most importantly) had seen how wearing it was on her father and knew that it just wasn't as much fun as it appeared to be. One of my colleagues, on the other hand, was married to a woman who used to get very envious as she saw him always travelling to different locations and eating in hotels and thought he was having a great time, not realizing just how draining and depressing it can be.
If you're going to do it, do it while you're young. Do it before you're married and have a family. I'm no longer travelling; as soon as we decided to start a family, I found a new job where I specifically wouldn't have to travel and could pretty much count on coming home every night to see my daughter.
I'm glad to have had the opportunity; I got to see a lot of places, and it was a great way to see more of the U.S. when I moved here and experience the differences in culture throughout the country (yes, there's a big difference between Georgia and New Hampshire). And I'm very glad now to have the luxury of being home almost every night at a reasonably predictable hour; heck, just being able to go home on a weeknight, rather than having to try and have a family two days out of seven.