This isn't the answer you're looking for, but it depends on the games you want to play.
Mobile phones and tablets have a lot of games on them, although many would be characterised as 'casual' and avoid the cash grabbing "free to play" bullshit.
Consoles let you game on your TV using a game controller. They're good for action games, sports games and action oriented RPGs.
PCs are the more expensive option but support almost everything consoles do (Forza being an example of an anomaly) and also let you play RTS, TBS and grand strategy games, in-depth RPGs and many games support extensive modding.
There are a lot of people happy with any or all of those choices, and they're far from exclusive. But probably the best option for you is to find someone else that has a decent games library and get them to let you try various games.
It'll confirm for you that you'll get value from whatever you buy, and it'll help you choose a platform that supports the types of games you enjoy.
So all these people crossing the seas from Turkey to Greece are being persecuted in Turkey? All these people cross the land border into Hungary or Romania are coming straight from a warzone?
None of that has anything to do with the geographical location. Your country could be anywhere
Actually no. He's quite clearly not in Saudi Arabia, where women can't freely drive. He's clearly not in certain parts of Syria or Iraq, where people can't vote. He's clearly not in Russia, where men can't marry whoever they want.
It's far more dangerous to be a driver than to get in a car with one.
Yes, but I'm not going to assault a taxi driver, and I'm not a taxi driver, so the risk to them is entirely fucking irrelevant to my choice of transportation. The risk to me on the other hand is not.
Ouch. So they've made it 6% taller than the Nexus 5, negating the whole fucking point of having a phone that fits in a pocket, and they're charging an excessive price for it in the UK?
Forget it, I'll buy a different phone from someone else. The Nexus 5 is an excellent phone, but the 5x is just begging to be ignored.
I have a personal metric: Every year I try and find a way for my employer to save more money than they spend on my salary.
If I can do that, I know that everything else I do that year is free to my employer and my year end review is a lot easier. All I need to do the rest of the year is avoid adding negative value and I'm sorted.
It's surprisingly easy to hit this metric too. Most companies have a ton of waste.
Yeah, but they capped max karma and switched from numeric to textual description.
I've had "Karma: Excellent" for well over a decade. Fuck knows how close to the cap I am, or whether I've ever been modded down enough to risk dropping to 'Good' or whatever comes next.
So you're a single point of failure, and you don't see that as a problem that needs solving? Train up a co-worker to be able to cover for you, you'll add more value to your company and be able to get some time off.
I work because earning money funds a lifestyle I enjoy.
That's the reason I work. That's not the reason I take a given job.
I took my current job because it interests me, it's fun, it offers me a challenge I can enjoy, I get to work with intelligent passionate people, I can choose my own hours, I can largely choose my own tasks, I manage my own time and when I want to, I can work from home and cuddle my cats while I work.
So no, I don't need a job where my boss gives me a hug every day, but I sure as shit don't work for the pitiful salary I earn.
You want productivity, you'd better give me the working environment that encourages it. Don't like that? Go hire some muppet with no brain.
EA forums are full of people promoting the one true way. I've been doing it too long, bored with the theory these days and just focus on tangible outcomes.
Although Gartner are now pushing that theme too - outcome centric EA. Well shit Gartner, who'd have thought.
What helped me was realising that the business leaders knew 90% of the right answer already. Instead of spending months confirming the obvious I switched to focussing on helping them deliver the stuff they did know about. Means throwing 90% of EA methodology out of the window and covering the whole range of EA, Solutions Architect, Strategist, IT Manager, Process Architect and Programme Manager activities to a small degree, but it means I get shit done, people are happy, we improve as an organisation and I build up the goodwill that lets me influence.people into spending time, effort and budget fixing that last 10% for me.
The term 'fucker' is a throwaway catchall. Don't take it personally. It's a kinder word than 'muppet' which I'm more likely to use in the office;)
However : Yes, I'm grotesquely over-simplifying.
I can't do my job by being a blocker. People would escalate around me, I'd get grief from my management, I'd be ineffective. That doesn't help anybody.
Broad brush, behave, follow the standards. Specific cases (and everything becomes a specific case) lets take a look and understand the right approach. Hell, the standard might be wrong.
Get the culture embedded of adopting the standard and suddenly life is a lot easier. All the special cases _are_ special cases, and you can devote time and energy to making good decisions, not trying to prevent bad ones.
When I say I want to know what everybody's installing, it's because I'm taking accountability for helping control IT spend, for helping people make optimal decisions that balance across the global organisation rather than just their local project, and I do the work with their management and budget holders to push through a sensible decision, not an expedient one.
As proof by analogy, consider that I'm currently fighting my way through management trying to explain why a cloud-based monitoring solution is not going to work on systems that are designed to have no network connectivity.
There's a big difference between "I need a monitoring system" "Here's the one we already have licenced, installed and supported" and "I need software that can capture system metrics so that if the server fails we can connect to the console via a serial port and run some diagnostics" "Ok, we don't have anything in that space, what would you recommend?"
Clearly you've found another route through, but that's not a failure of standardisation, that's a failure of process or the people following it.
So what, you want me to know in detail the needs of every team in the organisation, and the capabilities of the 1300 pieces of software we already have deployed, and the opportunities presented by the 80,000 pieces of software we could potentially deploy?
Don't be bloody stupid. I need to trust other people in the company. I need to encourage them to collaborate, find common solutions - IT or otherwise - and avoid duplication. Where people tell me they have a special requirement and they're precious and I just don't understand, I take the time to understand. If they're right, great, lets find them a solution.
If (as so often happens) they just have a 'not invented here' syndrome, want to empire build, want control or just think they're so supremely talented that nobody could understand them, then I'm more than happy to invite them to just get on with using the same approach as everybody else.
That doesn't mean it's perfect, it means there are a whole range of factors that require compromise and the people running the company have chosen to prioritise cost control over perfection. Other companies may differ.
Shadow IT is something to understand and manage. Some element of it is probably desirable - innovation and pace being the usual drivers - but if there's a lot of it at the company, you're inherently going to be spending too much on IT. Dogmatic imposition of standards, rigidity and intolerance aren't the answer, but neither is a fucking free-for-all.
As for vendor management, that's an art in itself. Very few suppliers are sole-product providers and want to sell us other products too, which rather helps. Oddly enough, factoring their long term support capabilities, product roadmaps, commercial flexibility and past history is a big part of this.
Incidentally your comical example conflating desktop support with in-house data centres is indeed comical. It may even have happened. Hopefully you now work with people that understand the difference.
Is it cheaper to configure the tool to support your complex multinational reward structure, or to build multiple national reward systems?
Is it cheaper to configure industry standard GL and financial reporting software to meet your reporting needs, or to bespoke the lot?
I trust my development teams to build world class software that delivers discernable differentiation in the market place. For that reason I have them doing that, not rebuilding the same fucking HR, finance, sales and marketing systems that I can go out and buy, particularly when my finance department are several decades behind state of the art management accounting.
I don't lose competitive advantage that way, I gain market parity on the non-differentiators and focus on the areas that earn us revenue, make our customers happy and actually add value.
I have yet to find a single architect who knows what he is talking about
While I have met many people using the title 'architect' as a vanity thing, or flat out misrepresenting their skills, to have found none that are competent suggests that the issue may lie with you rather than them.
Architects by definition are shitty developers that can't code if their lives depended on it
I'd like to challenge 'better skills'. Different skills.
Going from software and solution architecture to enterprise architecture, my hands-on development and software engineering skills have atrophied and it'd take me months to get anywhere near competent again.
My software and solution architecture skills are still there, but primarily at a high level. I can't dive into the detail quickly and without research.
What I can now do is the politics, stakeholder management, the communication and the other soft skills needed to get people to agree on the right solution to a business problem. I didn't need those skills as much before, I do need them now.
Salary wise, you may be right. It's because instead of solving all the problems for a project, or a programme, or a change initiative, you're trying to solve them for a country, a continent or the entire company. Same problem solving techniques, different scale, higher stakes. It's still fun though:)
I have the title of "enterprise architect" and there's only one thing you've written that I'd disagree with:
EAs can almost be thought of academic positions.
Noooo! It's a very engaged pragmatic role. Otherwise you do get the technology religion, framework nazism or ADHD architecture anti-patterns you've capably described.
EAs need to be personally accountable for business change, or they dissociate themselves from its failures and rescind into academic ivory towers where "It's a solid plan, if only they'd implemented it properly."
No. Help them implement it properly, help them adjust and tweak it to meet changing requirements, a changing business environment and frankly a better understanding of the problem domain.
Sure, a good systems or solution architect can take the lead and do the legwork, but an EA can't walk away muttering under their breath.
No, awful analogy. Landscape architects turn up, get a JCB to dig you a new pond, throw some rocks in and fuck off. Shit grows, but gardeners look after it and 200 years later it's a national park.
EAs turn up, get no funding, get an impossible set of criteria to meet, do their best to facilitate constructive change, then before anything is delivered the business changes direction and they have to start again. Repeat. Infinite loop.
It's a very different set of challenges, and needs a very different approach as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't the answer you're looking for, but it depends on the games you want to play.
Mobile phones and tablets have a lot of games on them, although many would be characterised as 'casual' and avoid the cash grabbing "free to play" bullshit.
Consoles let you game on your TV using a game controller. They're good for action games, sports games and action oriented RPGs.
PCs are the more expensive option but support almost everything consoles do (Forza being an example of an anomaly) and also let you play RTS, TBS and grand strategy games, in-depth RPGs and many games support extensive modding.
There are a lot of people happy with any or all of those choices, and they're far from exclusive. But probably the best option for you is to find someone else that has a decent games library and get them to let you try various games.
It'll confirm for you that you'll get value from whatever you buy, and it'll help you choose a platform that supports the types of games you enjoy.
Just don't buy an nvidia shield.
Do you own fucking google search you lazy cunt.
You do realise that 55% of the population of London - the capital of the UK and its largest city - is not white British?
I can easily believe that there are parts of the country in which the person to whom you replied feels a stranger.
So all these people crossing the seas from Turkey to Greece are being persecuted in Turkey?
All these people cross the land border into Hungary or Romania are coming straight from a warzone?
No. Citation my cock.
None of that has anything to do with the geographical location. Your country could be anywhere
Actually no. He's quite clearly not in Saudi Arabia, where women can't freely drive. He's clearly not in certain parts of Syria or Iraq, where people can't vote. He's clearly not in Russia, where men can't marry whoever they want.
WAY TO COMPLETELY MISS THE POINT.
Well, yes. You did.
Sources, you racist idiot?
I'm curious, what did the AC say that's racist or that suggests that they are?
Stop throwing around emotionally loaded terms to try and avoid debating real issues.
It's far more dangerous to be a driver than to get in a car with one.
Yes, but I'm not going to assault a taxi driver, and I'm not a taxi driver, so the risk to them is entirely fucking irrelevant to my choice of transportation. The risk to me on the other hand is not.
Ouch. So they've made it 6% taller than the Nexus 5, negating the whole fucking point of having a phone that fits in a pocket, and they're charging an excessive price for it in the UK?
Forget it, I'll buy a different phone from someone else. The Nexus 5 is an excellent phone, but the 5x is just begging to be ignored.
I have a personal metric: Every year I try and find a way for my employer to save more money than they spend on my salary.
If I can do that, I know that everything else I do that year is free to my employer and my year end review is a lot easier. All I need to do the rest of the year is avoid adding negative value and I'm sorted.
It's surprisingly easy to hit this metric too. Most companies have a ton of waste.
Yeah, but they capped max karma and switched from numeric to textual description.
I've had "Karma: Excellent" for well over a decade. Fuck knows how close to the cap I am, or whether I've ever been modded down enough to risk dropping to 'Good' or whatever comes next.
So you're a single point of failure, and you don't see that as a problem that needs solving? Train up a co-worker to be able to cover for you, you'll add more value to your company and be able to get some time off.
Or do you enjoy being the prima donna?
So don't do it. Negotiate time off instead of just a payrise.
It is possible to find a balance.
I work because earning money funds a lifestyle I enjoy.
That's the reason I work. That's not the reason I take a given job.
I took my current job because it interests me, it's fun, it offers me a challenge I can enjoy, I get to work with intelligent passionate people, I can choose my own hours, I can largely choose my own tasks, I manage my own time and when I want to, I can work from home and cuddle my cats while I work.
So no, I don't need a job where my boss gives me a hug every day, but I sure as shit don't work for the pitiful salary I earn.
You want productivity, you'd better give me the working environment that encourages it. Don't like that? Go hire some muppet with no brain.
EA forums are full of people promoting the one true way. I've been doing it too long, bored with the theory these days and just focus on tangible outcomes.
Although Gartner are now pushing that theme too - outcome centric EA. Well shit Gartner, who'd have thought.
What helped me was realising that the business leaders knew 90% of the right answer already. Instead of spending months confirming the obvious I switched to focussing on helping them deliver the stuff they did know about. Means throwing 90% of EA methodology out of the window and covering the whole range of EA, Solutions Architect, Strategist, IT Manager, Process Architect and Programme Manager activities to a small degree, but it means I get shit done, people are happy, we improve as an organisation and I build up the goodwill that lets me influence.people into spending time, effort and budget fixing that last 10% for me.
Well, yeah, I'd like to have a solid baseline set of inputs, time to.implement and stability through that period.
Since we know that's not going to happen, let's avoid pretending that it is and instead focus on what can sensibly be.done.
Not sure I'm being all that patient or selling the role, but thanks anyway :)
The term 'fucker' is a throwaway catchall. Don't take it personally. It's a kinder word than 'muppet' which I'm more likely to use in the office ;)
However : Yes, I'm grotesquely over-simplifying.
I can't do my job by being a blocker. People would escalate around me, I'd get grief from my management, I'd be ineffective. That doesn't help anybody.
Broad brush, behave, follow the standards. Specific cases (and everything becomes a specific case) lets take a look and understand the right approach. Hell, the standard might be wrong.
Get the culture embedded of adopting the standard and suddenly life is a lot easier. All the special cases _are_ special cases, and you can devote time and energy to making good decisions, not trying to prevent bad ones.
When I say I want to know what everybody's installing, it's because I'm taking accountability for helping control IT spend, for helping people make optimal decisions that balance across the global organisation rather than just their local project, and I do the work with their management and budget holders to push through a sensible decision, not an expedient one.
As proof by analogy, consider that I'm currently fighting my way through management trying to explain why a cloud-based monitoring solution is not going to work on systems that are designed to have no network connectivity.
There's a big difference between "I need a monitoring system" "Here's the one we already have licenced, installed and supported" and "I need software that can capture system metrics so that if the server fails we can connect to the console via a serial port and run some diagnostics" "Ok, we don't have anything in that space, what would you recommend?"
Clearly you've found another route through, but that's not a failure of standardisation, that's a failure of process or the people following it.
So what, you want me to know in detail the needs of every team in the organisation, and the capabilities of the 1300 pieces of software we already have deployed, and the opportunities presented by the 80,000 pieces of software we could potentially deploy?
Don't be bloody stupid. I need to trust other people in the company. I need to encourage them to collaborate, find common solutions - IT or otherwise - and avoid duplication. Where people tell me they have a special requirement and they're precious and I just don't understand, I take the time to understand. If they're right, great, lets find them a solution.
If (as so often happens) they just have a 'not invented here' syndrome, want to empire build, want control or just think they're so supremely talented that nobody could understand them, then I'm more than happy to invite them to just get on with using the same approach as everybody else.
That doesn't mean it's perfect, it means there are a whole range of factors that require compromise and the people running the company have chosen to prioritise cost control over perfection. Other companies may differ.
Shadow IT is something to understand and manage. Some element of it is probably desirable - innovation and pace being the usual drivers - but if there's a lot of it at the company, you're inherently going to be spending too much on IT. Dogmatic imposition of standards, rigidity and intolerance aren't the answer, but neither is a fucking free-for-all.
As for vendor management, that's an art in itself. Very few suppliers are sole-product providers and want to sell us other products too, which rather helps. Oddly enough, factoring their long term support capabilities, product roadmaps, commercial flexibility and past history is a big part of this.
Incidentally your comical example conflating desktop support with in-house data centres is indeed comical. It may even have happened. Hopefully you now work with people that understand the difference.
Is it cheaper to configure the tool to support your complex multinational reward structure, or to build multiple national reward systems?
Is it cheaper to configure industry standard GL and financial reporting software to meet your reporting needs, or to bespoke the lot?
I trust my development teams to build world class software that delivers discernable differentiation in the market place. For that reason I have them doing that, not rebuilding the same fucking HR, finance, sales and marketing systems that I can go out and buy, particularly when my finance department are several decades behind state of the art management accounting.
I don't lose competitive advantage that way, I gain market parity on the non-differentiators and focus on the areas that earn us revenue, make our customers happy and actually add value.
Shit, even Google buy software.
I have yet to find a single architect who knows what he is talking about
While I have met many people using the title 'architect' as a vanity thing, or flat out misrepresenting their skills, to have found none that are competent suggests that the issue may lie with you rather than them.
Architects by definition are shitty developers that can't code if their lives depended on it
Ok, confirmed. The issue is you.
I'd like to challenge 'better skills'. Different skills.
Going from software and solution architecture to enterprise architecture, my hands-on development and software engineering skills have atrophied and it'd take me months to get anywhere near competent again.
My software and solution architecture skills are still there, but primarily at a high level. I can't dive into the detail quickly and without research.
What I can now do is the politics, stakeholder management, the communication and the other soft skills needed to get people to agree on the right solution to a business problem. I didn't need those skills as much before, I do need them now.
Salary wise, you may be right. It's because instead of solving all the problems for a project, or a programme, or a change initiative, you're trying to solve them for a country, a continent or the entire company. Same problem solving techniques, different scale, higher stakes. It's still fun though :)
I have the title of "enterprise architect" and there's only one thing you've written that I'd disagree with:
EAs can almost be thought of academic positions.
Noooo! It's a very engaged pragmatic role. Otherwise you do get the technology religion, framework nazism or ADHD architecture anti-patterns you've capably described.
EAs need to be personally accountable for business change, or they dissociate themselves from its failures and rescind into academic ivory towers where "It's a solid plan, if only they'd implemented it properly."
No. Help them implement it properly, help them adjust and tweak it to meet changing requirements, a changing business environment and frankly a better understanding of the problem domain.
Sure, a good systems or solution architect can take the lead and do the legwork, but an EA can't walk away muttering under their breath.
No, awful analogy. Landscape architects turn up, get a JCB to dig you a new pond, throw some rocks in and fuck off. Shit grows, but gardeners look after it and 200 years later it's a national park.
EAs turn up, get no funding, get an impossible set of criteria to meet, do their best to facilitate constructive change, then before anything is delivered the business changes direction and they have to start again. Repeat. Infinite loop.
It's a very different set of challenges, and needs a very different approach as a result.
Yeah. EAs need to be business people,and use that set of jargon.
At the same time to retain any credibility with the technical teams, they need to be technical people, and use that set of jargon.
It's why the job is fun. You're bridging two very different worlds and trying to help them find common ground and deliver the same outcomes.