We are talking about the CIO here. Do you expect a CFO not to be able to read an accounting statement?
But the issue isn't about what the CIO understands, but how the CIO communicates with other executives particularly other CxOs.
The CIO should understand technology (and, ideally, should do so at least as broadly, though not necessarily as deeply, as any of his underlings), but also needs to understand the business context in which the firm uses technology and, even more importantly than just understanding, needs to focus on the business impacts of technology rather than the technology itself when communicating with other executives, and not divert communication at that level into technical details.
The summary (and the article, which is essentially the same fluff as the summary repeated several times--I RTFA'd so you don't have to) says to avoid technical jargon, which has actual meaning and is therefore terrifying to people who want to be executives
It says to avoid technical jargon, but not because it "has actual meaning". In fact, the advice it gives is just a specific application of the most basic communication advice ever, that is, "know your audience, and address what has meaning and relevance to them". Business executives don't care about the details of technology, they care about the whether and how that technology can deliver value in the context of their business problems. This isn't avoiding real meaning, its addressing relevant meaning.
If you didn't get that from TFA, you may have read it, but you certainly didn't understand it.
If you're running on Windows 7 or Vista, press CTRL, TAB and the "Windows key" at the same time and watch what happens.
If you try "at the same time", its hard to guess what will happen; if press and hold in the order suggested by the order you put the keys, you get normal Ctrl-Tab behavior.
If you do Win+Tab you get a display of the open windows that you can page through with Tab as long as you hold the Win key If you do Ctrl+Win+Tab (or Win+Ctrl+Tab, but the both modifiers have to come before the Tab) you get a persistent view of the open windows that you can either tab through or select with the mouse.
Come on, the damn summary already provided an Apple product that shipped for a decade or so that uses this idea.
For very large values of "a decade or so" (Hypercard was released in 1987, which is 26 years ago), and very loose definitions of "this idea" (while both have a concept called "cards", if you remember -- or use Google Image Search to discover -- what Hypercard's actual UI was like, there is very little similarity.)
Thank God someone's finally looking to the design of Google, so it will no longer be cursed with the most famously easy to use search page that every other search engine on earth chose to imitate.
Outside of the search page, many of Google's products UI's haven't been so great, and often related products had radically different UIs for similar functions; having someone in charge of design and an effort at a unified and consistent look and feel across Google products could be a quite good thing (and, IMO, has in terms ofboth consistency and keeping the clutter down as more features are added and more interaction between products; particularly, even core things like the search results page have gotten cleaner over the last few years, despite having more functionality available.
Seriously, Google has always been a favorite because of its good design.
True of the homepage, the original results page, and maybe early Gmail (though not really so much gmail or the results page by the time the design initiative was being pushed), but not much else of Google's.
And perhaps Microsoft is onto something applying it to current OS interfaces with Live Tiles.
Certainly Microsoft (and many others; they weren't the only ones doing similar things) were on to something a long time ago when they first came up with the UI design principles that evolved into the "Metro" design language, which whatever the problems are with the way they've done some of the concrete implementations, the basic principles are sound,
I disabled it through all possible means (disabled all cards individually, disabled cards/Google Now generally. It reduces their number, but not entirely... as I mention above, for example, I type "What time is it in California" and get a "card" saying "It's 5 oclock in California" or whatever. I don't want that, I want search results only
Those aren't Google Now, which is why disabling everything in Now has no effect on them. Those are search results (I think the cards are all technically part of Knowledge Graph) which (like the calculator results introduced much earlier) are core functionality of Google Search.
You left off the rest: "with his most mundane statements breathlessly repeated as though they were great wisdom." It's not Tyson's being an effective science popularizer that bugs me--I'm all for that--but the cult-of-personality aspect which seems to follow.
The two are inseparable in practice. Charismatic, effective communicators in any field generate cults-of-personality.
It's appropriate that he's going to be doing this show. He's precisely this generation's equivalent of Sagan: a scientist who did good work in his field early on but who has since coasted on a public image as the Voice Of Science
Most of the minority of scientists that do really good scientific work ever do it early on in their career and coast from there on; moving on to be an effective popularizer of science that gets more people interested has at least as much social utility as most other courses that follow early scientific success.
You can't have a single stream of bug numbers in a true multi-vendor open source project.
Since there are schemes for assignment of unique identifiers that allow multiple parties to generate their own identifiers without coordination except on a standard scheme, and to do so maintaining uniqueness, this isn't true.
Yes, fixed rate of exchange between bank notes and gold reserves require that there is enough gold to cover the notes.
No, they don't, and, in fact, historically the former has almost never implied the latter, because its not generally worth the additional overhead costs and counterfeiting risk to issue notes at all if you are doing it at full reserve.
If there aren't there may be bank runs.
Yes, bank runs are pretty much always a risk whenever you have banks holding reserves (whether in the customer deposits or cold reserves backing circulating notes); full-reserve banking is a potential solution to that, of course, but not the usual one, and certainly not a necessary one that is implied by the mere issuing of fixed-exchange-value notes.
Crash in relative value is not the same as crash of fiat.
Its exactly the same. Sure, the exact cause may be different, but a collapse in value is a collapse in value regardless of whether its because someone has found a vastly more efficient way to extract and refine a particular metal, converting it, pretty much overnight, from a precious metal to something much more pedestrian, as happened with aluminum in the 1880s, or because the government whose fiat backs a currency has ceased to be as credible as it was a month before.
As to the life span of the dollar: no paper currency in history lived past 80 years, so at 42 years that's 50%.
The dollar is increasingly not a paper currency, so even if that was a valid basis for estimating the likely lifespan of a "paper currency", it wouldn't seem particularly applicable.
However in that stretch of time the dollar lost over 98% of value
Not by any reasonable standard; 82.6% measured against the basket of goods usually used to measure inflation.
You seem to be measuring against gold (as the 98% number matches what you'd get against gold prices from 1971), which is a mistake.
and the process is accelerating.
No, its not. Over the period since the dollar became a pure-fiat currency, the most rapid gold:dollary price ratio increases were in all in the 1970s; the ratio spread about three times as much in the first decade as it has in the just-over-three subsequent decades.
You can definitely say that this is purely speculation on my part but I feel strongly about it.
Not only is it speculation, but it is speculation starting from false premises.
Sorry, I like the idea of a deflationary currency. It encourages saving, thrift, and money management where as inflationary currency encourages spending, and waist.
You seem to want a pure store of value; what inflationary currency encourages (and deflationary currency discourages) is using productive investment in useful assets as a store of value. A deflationary currency encourages using the currency itself as a store of value, and discourages investment in productive assets.
Believe it or not that is a new idea, for thousands of years the world ran on deflationary currency.
No, it didn't. Economies haven't really "run on" any kind of currency for "thousands of years"; until very recently, in most of the world most transactions were barter and currency use was fairly limited, and the currency used (precious metals, grain, etc.) were not the kind of thing that had a hard production cap (more resources devoted to production would lead to more production) or other features which guaranteed that they would be deflationary.
It was good then and it is still good now.
Even if what was used as currency "then" was good then and is still good now, wouldn't the correct response be to return to what was used then, rather than to invent something new that has radically different basic features to what was "good then"?
Then again, being able to break SHA256 at will would be quite remarkable and would have serious repercussions for a lot of people quite apart from Bitcoin users. I'm not at all convinced breaking Bitcoin would be the best way to use such a trump card.
Since breaking Bitcoin isn't exclusive of any of the other uses for having broken SHA256, there's no reason that it not being the best use of that ability makes it any less likely that it would be one of the things that the SHA256-breaking-entity would use it for, even if you assume that the actor breaking SHA256 will want to maximize return.
They may refuse it, in which case they can drag you to court, which will order you to pay what you owe them plus probable damages and other extras. In legal tender. Now this they can't refuse (unless they want to write if off).
The other piece of this is that evidence of a tender of payment can, depending on the basis of liability, stop any additional damages from that point for interest, etc., that would be due for non-payment.
Gold is valuable to a common man by being universally accepted as money for thousands of years
Gold hasn't been "universally accepted as money for thousands of years". For one, its not universally (or even particularly commonly) accepted as money now, and even in most of the time when it was in theory usable as money, most transactions were barter transactions that didn't use money and most transactions that did use money didn't use gold, they used silver, copper, or representational currencies.
Paper can be printed
Yes, paper currency can be printed, and gold can be mined. Its true that the constraints on the volume of production of paper currency are different than they are for gold (one is social, the other is technical), but just as social constraints can break down, so can technical ones (consider what happened to Aluminum, once considered a precious metal.)
Believe this: central banks in wealth producing nations are accumulating gold reserves.
Sure, lots of gold reserves are held by major-nation central banks (plus the IMF, which is essentially a proxy for major powers). But that just means that a those entities -- the same ones that control major fiat currency -- have the capacity to disrupt the price of gold, just like you seem to fear their power to manipulate prices of the fiat currencies they issue.
Thousands of years of history prove that gold is money, there is no other thing like it that worked as money for as many people for such long stretches of time.
Actually, pieces of paper have been used by far more people as money, both because there were less people when gold was used directly as money, and because fewer transactions used any "money" at all.
Gold is the money, gold standard means that there is an equivalent amount of notes (not fiat money, but redeemable bank notes), so you can get the weight of gold back for that paper from the bank.
No, that's not what "gold standard" means. Gold standard means that notes (which are money) are redeemable for gold (which is also money) at a fixed rate. It doesn't mean that the gold backing the currency exists in equal quantity to the notes.
Gold as money doesn't 'collapse'
Crashes in the relative value of the commodity lead to crashes in commodity backed money, and this certainly has happened with gold. (The influx in supply from Spain's New World colonies is a particular example.)
Baseless US dollar now is 42 years old. Under normal circumstances I would say it's at 50% of its life span, under the current circumstances I must say it's closer to 98% of its life expectancy.
And the support for either of these estimates of life expectancy is...what?
Weimar Germany, 1921 - 1924. And that *WAS* a major world currency. Situation is actually very similar to ours. The currency was well regarded internationally, and many people held it outside Germany (like the US dollar today). Inflation took off after the government printed massive amounts of currency to pay off war debt.
Insofar as Germany paid off wartime debt (including reparations; which, in either case, is "not very far"), it did so largely by external borrowing, the new debt from which it simply repudiated. There certainly was hyperinflation in Germany, but it wasn't a result of anything it did to pay off war debt (and, since much of the debt was denominated in gold, it couldn't print money to pay it off, anyway.)
You are a fool if you think the same thing couldn't happen here
Its certainly possible that the US could lose sizable tracts of economically-vital territory and a sizable fraction of its working-age male population and acquire a substantial, non-dollar-denominated debt simultaneously in a war in which most of the worlds leading economic powers were aligned on the opposite side, and then be caught up in a major global economic collapse...but not particularly likely.
The dollar will not remain the world's reserve currency forever.
Sure, so? The dollar losing that status wouldn't imply a Weimar-style collapse.
When will people realize that every time we increase the food supply in a region, the population increases in the same proportion.
Never, because its not true.
There will always be starvation until people slow their breeding down to zero population growth, or dare I even suggest it, negative growth.
Which actually has happened in many of the more developed parts of the world: economic development (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn't seem to happen in places with inadequate food supply), especially when coupled with a political-econonmic system with a strong social safety net, strongly tending to produce reduced (and often even negative) rates of natural population growth.
So the best way to deal with the problem you seem concerned about regarding population growth rates is to assure that the conditions for strong economic development -- including adequate food supply -- are present in as much of the world as possible.
It's kind of strange to me that people would first investigate eating insects before plants
In most of the world, eating plants, unlike eating insects, has moved far beyond the "investigate" (or even "experiment" or "fringe practice") stage. So, while it might be strange if people would first investigate eating insects before plants, I don't see that actually happening anywhere.
You are hilariously ignorant of the world of biology around you.
You do realize Earth is a closed-system, right?
If you ignore sunlight, meteors, and a bunch of other interactions with the outside universe that, taken together, might arguably have some effect on the biosphere, sure, Earth is a closed system.
Somehow I doubt they really feel a visceral disgust on the same level as people do with insects. I mean, Jews/Muslims shun pork, but eat other things like chicken/lamb/beef that are very similar in experience
That seems to be a perfect analog to people shunning insects but eating other things like crayfish/crabs/lobsters/shrimp.
I and I suspect most users don't use more than 20-30% of the functionality in the suite as it is. Why pay to rent something you are not going to use?
Why pay for something you aren't going to use whether its buying or renting?
Looks as if Adobe is giving other software vendors a real incentive to displace them in all but the high end niche of the market.
Sure, there's long been a market for below-CS-price-range software for less-serious users. But I don't think this changes the fact that there's a huge gap between the people who make money off what they do with the kind of software Adobe is selling (for whom the price of the rental model isn't going to be a big deal) and those who don't (for whom any non-trivial software cost is going to be a big deal), so, from a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense to focus where Adobe is focussed.
Slashdot Mirror
But the issue isn't about what the CIO understands, but how the CIO communicates with other executives particularly other CxOs.
The CIO should understand technology (and, ideally, should do so at least as broadly, though not necessarily as deeply, as any of his underlings), but also needs to understand the business context in which the firm uses technology and, even more importantly than just understanding, needs to focus on the business impacts of technology rather than the technology itself when communicating with other executives, and not divert communication at that level into technical details.
It says to avoid technical jargon, but not because it "has actual meaning". In fact, the advice it gives is just a specific application of the most basic communication advice ever, that is, "know your audience, and address what has meaning and relevance to them". Business executives don't care about the details of technology, they care about the whether and how that technology can deliver value in the context of their business problems. This isn't avoiding real meaning, its addressing relevant meaning.
If you didn't get that from TFA, you may have read it, but you certainly didn't understand it.
Win+Tab and Ctrl+Win+Tab are closely related, different effects.
If you try "at the same time", its hard to guess what will happen; if press and hold in the order suggested by the order you put the keys, you get normal Ctrl-Tab behavior.
If you do Win+Tab you get a display of the open windows that you can page through with Tab as long as you hold the Win key
If you do Ctrl+Win+Tab (or Win+Ctrl+Tab, but the both modifiers have to come before the Tab) you get a persistent view of the open windows that you can either tab through or select with the mouse.
For very large values of "a decade or so" (Hypercard was released in 1987, which is 26 years ago), and very loose definitions of "this idea" (while both have a concept called "cards", if you remember -- or use Google Image Search to discover -- what Hypercard's actual UI was like, there is very little similarity.)
Outside of the search page, many of Google's products UI's haven't been so great, and often related products had radically different UIs for similar functions; having someone in charge of design and an effort at a unified and consistent look and feel across Google products could be a quite good thing (and, IMO, has in terms ofboth consistency and keeping the clutter down as more features are added and more interaction between products; particularly, even core things like the search results page have gotten cleaner over the last few years, despite having more functionality available.
True of the homepage, the original results page, and maybe early Gmail (though not really so much gmail or the results page by the time the design initiative was being pushed), but not much else of Google's.
Certainly Microsoft (and many others; they weren't the only ones doing similar things) were on to something a long time ago when they first came up with the UI design principles that evolved into the "Metro" design language, which whatever the problems are with the way they've done some of the concrete implementations, the basic principles are sound,
Those aren't Google Now, which is why disabling everything in Now has no effect on them. Those are search results (I think the cards are all technically part of Knowledge Graph) which (like the calculator results introduced much earlier) are core functionality of Google Search.
The two are inseparable in practice. Charismatic, effective communicators in any field generate cults-of-personality.
Most of the minority of scientists that do really good scientific work ever do it early on in their career and coast from there on; moving on to be an effective popularizer of science that gets more people interested has at least as much social utility as most other courses that follow early scientific success.
Since there are schemes for assignment of unique identifiers that allow multiple parties to generate their own identifiers without coordination except on a standard scheme, and to do so maintaining uniqueness, this isn't true.
No, they don't, and, in fact, historically the former has almost never implied the latter, because its not generally worth the additional overhead costs and counterfeiting risk to issue notes at all if you are doing it at full reserve.
Yes, bank runs are pretty much always a risk whenever you have banks holding reserves (whether in the customer deposits or cold reserves backing circulating notes); full-reserve banking is a potential solution to that, of course, but not the usual one, and certainly not a necessary one that is implied by the mere issuing of fixed-exchange-value notes.
Its exactly the same. Sure, the exact cause may be different, but a collapse in value is a collapse in value regardless of whether its because someone has found a vastly more efficient way to extract and refine a particular metal, converting it, pretty much overnight, from a precious metal to something much more pedestrian, as happened with aluminum in the 1880s, or because the government whose fiat backs a currency has ceased to be as credible as it was a month before.
The dollar is increasingly not a paper currency, so even if that was a valid basis for estimating the likely lifespan of a "paper currency", it wouldn't seem particularly applicable.
Not by any reasonable standard; 82.6% measured against the basket of goods usually used to measure inflation.
You seem to be measuring against gold (as the 98% number matches what you'd get against gold prices from 1971), which is a mistake.
No, its not. Over the period since the dollar became a pure-fiat currency, the most rapid gold:dollary price ratio increases were in all in the 1970s; the ratio spread about three times as much in the first decade as it has in the just-over-three subsequent decades.
Not only is it speculation, but it is speculation starting from false premises.
You seem to want a pure store of value; what inflationary currency encourages (and deflationary currency discourages) is using productive investment in useful assets as a store of value. A deflationary currency encourages using the currency itself as a store of value, and discourages investment in productive assets.
No, it didn't. Economies haven't really "run on" any kind of currency for "thousands of years"; until very recently, in most of the world most transactions were barter and currency use was fairly limited, and the currency used (precious metals, grain, etc.) were not the kind of thing that had a hard production cap (more resources devoted to production would lead to more production) or other features which guaranteed that they would be deflationary.
Even if what was used as currency "then" was good then and is still good now, wouldn't the correct response be to return to what was used then, rather than to invent something new that has radically different basic features to what was "good then"?
Since breaking Bitcoin isn't exclusive of any of the other uses for having broken SHA256, there's no reason that it not being the best use of that ability makes it any less likely that it would be one of the things that the SHA256-breaking-entity would use it for, even if you assume that the actor breaking SHA256 will want to maximize return.
The other piece of this is that evidence of a tender of payment can, depending on the basis of liability, stop any additional damages from that point for interest, etc., that would be due for non-payment.
Gold hasn't been "universally accepted as money for thousands of years". For one, its not universally (or even particularly commonly) accepted as money now, and even in most of the time when it was in theory usable as money, most transactions were barter transactions that didn't use money and most transactions that did use money didn't use gold, they used silver, copper, or representational currencies.
Yes, paper currency can be printed, and gold can be mined. Its true that the constraints on the volume of production of paper currency are different than they are for gold (one is social, the other is technical), but just as social constraints can break down, so can technical ones (consider what happened to Aluminum, once considered a precious metal.)
Sure, lots of gold reserves are held by major-nation central banks (plus the IMF, which is essentially a proxy for major powers). But that just means that a those entities -- the same ones that control major fiat currency -- have the capacity to disrupt the price of gold, just like you seem to fear their power to manipulate prices of the fiat currencies they issue.
Actually, pieces of paper have been used by far more people as money, both because there were less people when gold was used directly as money, and because fewer transactions used any "money" at all.
No, that's not what "gold standard" means. Gold standard means that notes (which are money) are redeemable for gold (which is also money) at a fixed rate. It doesn't mean that the gold backing the currency exists in equal quantity to the notes.
Crashes in the relative value of the commodity lead to crashes in commodity backed money, and this certainly has happened with gold. (The influx in supply from Spain's New World colonies is a particular example.)
And the support for either of these estimates of life expectancy is...what?
Insofar as Germany paid off wartime debt (including reparations; which, in either case, is "not very far"), it did so largely by external borrowing, the new debt from which it simply repudiated. There certainly was hyperinflation in Germany, but it wasn't a result of anything it did to pay off war debt (and, since much of the debt was denominated in gold, it couldn't print money to pay it off, anyway.)
Its certainly possible that the US could lose sizable tracts of economically-vital territory and a sizable fraction of its working-age male population and acquire a substantial, non-dollar-denominated debt simultaneously in a war in which most of the worlds leading economic powers were aligned on the opposite side, and then be caught up in a major global economic collapse...but not particularly likely.
Sure, so? The dollar losing that status wouldn't imply a Weimar-style collapse.
Never, because its not true.
Which actually has happened in many of the more developed parts of the world: economic development (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn't seem to happen in places with inadequate food supply), especially when coupled with a political-econonmic system with a strong social safety net, strongly tending to produce reduced (and often even negative) rates of natural population growth.
So the best way to deal with the problem you seem concerned about regarding population growth rates is to assure that the conditions for strong economic development -- including adequate food supply -- are present in as much of the world as possible.
Seafood (except for fish) is generally aquatic bugs to start with, so that's not much of exchange.
In most of the world, eating plants, unlike eating insects, has moved far beyond the "investigate" (or even "experiment" or "fringe practice") stage. So, while it might be strange if people would first investigate eating insects before plants, I don't see that actually happening anywhere.
If you ignore sunlight, meteors, and a bunch of other interactions with the outside universe that, taken together, might arguably have some effect on the biosphere, sure, Earth is a closed system.
That seems to be a perfect analog to people shunning insects but eating other things like crayfish/crabs/lobsters/shrimp.
Why pay for something you aren't going to use whether its buying or renting?
Sure, there's long been a market for below-CS-price-range software for less-serious users. But I don't think this changes the fact that there's a huge gap between the people who make money off what they do with the kind of software Adobe is selling (for whom the price of the rental model isn't going to be a big deal) and those who don't (for whom any non-trivial software cost is going to be a big deal), so, from a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense to focus where Adobe is focussed.