IT Matters
Steve Burrows wrote the IT Matters page for the Business News section of the Isle of Man Newspapers Examiner newspaper between July 2014 and June 2018 - 100 articles - as a pro-bono initiative to raise awareness of the importance of corporate IT matters in business within the Isle of Man.
The Weakest Link
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- Created on 20 April 2017
- Written by Steve Burrows
I’ll make no apologies for another article about Cyber Security, according to the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) (http://www.britishchambers.org.uk) digital survey which was published last week, 20% of the c. 1,200 businesses responding had fallen victim to a cyber attack in the previous year. Narrowing the results to “larger” businesses (with more than 100 employees) and the percentage which were victims of cyber attacks rises to 42%.
Stuck In The Middle of Nowhere
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- Created on 04 April 2017
- Written by Steve Burrows
Middle of Nowhere might be a bit of a cruel way to describe Horncastle, a small and ancient market town in the Lincolnshire Wolds halfway between Lincoln and Skegness and a one hour drive to the nearest motorway. With a population of under 7,000 souls it is a bit larger than the villages of Port Erin and Port St. Mary combined, but miniscule in comparison with most UK towns. There is little industry other than agricultural supplies and retail; the old grain warehouses and woollen mills have been taken over by the antiques trade, the dense concentration of antiques shops draws in coach-loads of customers in for the whole town, which retains a wide selection of small independent retailers, restaurants and coffee bars despite the dramatic depopulation of the surrounding countryside due to the mechanisation of farming in the 20th century. It is one of those quaint places where one can pleasurably mooch for hours; despite having old shops, old pavements, narrow streets etc., “regeneration” is not on the horizon and there are very few empty retail premises.
Futurology and the Bombs
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- Created on 18 March 2017
- Written by Steve Burrows
If you’ve been following my IT Matters articles you’ll realise that I mostly write about the exploitation of information technology in business, and recall that recently I have written about advances in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Quantum Computing. I’ve previously written about the past and possible future impacts of progress in IT on employment, business and value creation through automation, information sharing and globalisation.
A Quantum of Progress
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- Created on 07 March 2017
- Written by Steve Burrows
Apologies to the geeks, nerds, physicists and mathematicians, some concepts in this article are massively simplified for a non-technical readership.
What’s a digital computer processor? Crudely it’s an electronic adding machine which works in binary (base 2). Each binary digit (bit) has one of two values (on or off, one or zero). There is no magic, everything in a digital computer processor such as the one on your desk or in your smartphone is ultimately achieved by using binary arithmetic to calculate values. The largest single value that can be manipulated in an 8-bit (one byte) processor such as that used by the Apple II, released in 1977, ran is 11111111, which is equivalent to 255 in denary (base 10). If you want to process a bigger value you chop the problem into pieces or factor it and process the problem iteratively by using memory to hold your partial products. Modern desktop computers typically use 64-bit processors so the largest value they can process in one go is 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 which is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 in denary (quite big), hence most modern programmers rarely need to use fancy techniques to chop up big numbers.
We’ve Lost Our Memories
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- Created on 19 February 2017
- Written by Steve Burrows
A long, long, long time ago, thought to be between 48 BC and 642 AD, the Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed. Allegedly up to 400,000 scrolls were lost. We don’t know whether it was destroyed by the notorious vandal Julius Caesar, or in the Muslim conquest of Alexandria, or due to some other event in between. It may have been destroyed several times, certainly there are historical accounts of multiple events to which the destruction is attributed, or it may have merely been partially destroyed in each until the last, final obliteration. Whichever, the destruction of the Royal Library of Alexandria was a major loss that, today, is still mourned by historians because it is presumed that it contained important documents which would enhance our understanding of the Ancient Egyptian and Greek history upon which western civilisation is founded. With the destruction of the Great Library history lost the repository that was responsible for “collecting all the world’s knowledge”.
Can You Work With Me?
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- Created on 09 February 2017
- Written by Steve Burrows
As employers, business people, senior managers etc., many of those of you reading this article will have built teams, some of you may even list team-building as one of your strengths on your resume. You will each have your own approach to the problem of bringing together a group of people and enabling them to cooperate, so here’s a challenge to think about: bring together half a dozen people who are complete strangers to each other and get them to achieve something without them needing to meet, without having a boss or appointed leader or office or facilities etc., and without the knowledge to tell them what to do or how to do it …. All you can communicate is a desired outcome.
Receiving You Loud and Clear
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- Created on 27 January 2017
- Written by Steve Burrows
In 1982, early in my IT consulting career, a manufacturing client came to us to ask how microprocessor controls could be used to automate his machine shop lathes so that the operators could have both hands free to manipulate the tools and the object being shaped. The answer we came up with was voice control, using very new ultra-high tech dedicated audio-processing hardware which could store and recognise a vocabulary of twenty control words. Thirty-five years ago the idea of being able to talk to a computer was, for pretty much all of us, science fiction.
Democratisation of Knowledge
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- Created on 11 January 2017
- Written by Steve Burrows
I started teaching myself to play guitar forty-something years ago, with a second-hand classical guitar and a classical / folk songbook as a combined birthday and Christmas present from my parents. I still have the book, from which I learned basic chords and technique, but the tunes within were soon displaced by many books of contemporary music scores. My pocket money was largely spent on these, at one pound fifty to ten pounds each in the early 1970’s they were incredibly expensive, but they were how I learned and money was a constraint to the pace of my development.
2017 New Year’s Resolutions
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- Created on 28 December 2016
- Written by Steve Burrows
Happy New Year to y’all - and thank you for reading. From an IT perspective 2016 was dominated by cyber security and data protection issues. Actually I’m never really sure these days whether I should say “cyber security” or “cyber crime” because such a high proportion of “cyber” incidents, whilst they are breaches of security, are intentional crimes committed for profit. If an authorised person enters your premises and takes away your possessions that’s normally a crime, even if you were so stupid as to leave the front door unlocked and open.
