IBM's Plan for an Adjacent, Custom Systems Market
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In seven years, server maker IBM has come a long way. As the millennium turns, Sun Microsystems was growing so fast that it looked like it would overtake the top spot in the server racket in a year or two, and then Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq, and looked like it would unseat Big Blue as the world's largest revenue generator in the market for general purpose servers. Back in 2000, IBM's revenue share had fallen to 22 percent, and now it is pushing up toward 40 percent. READ MORE >

WDSc Version 7.0 Standard Edition Is Missing Two Key Features
by Bruce Guetzkow

Two weeks ago, when IBM announced the latest version of WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc), version 7.0. I was pleased to see the list of enhancements. If you or your company purchased a compiler for your System i, you and all of your company's developers are entitled to a "free" (meaning that you've already paid for it) copy of the Standard Edition of WDSc. But the Standard Edition is missing two key features, and this is a problem. READ MORE >

Is Upgrading a Silly Waste of Time and Money?
Hey, Brian:

We currently have an AS/400 Model 720 at V5R1 and it runs perfectly fine. Two years ago, our business partner told us we were at the end of the line with the Model 720, which has with 512 MB of memory, is rated at 225/35 CPWs, and has 105 GB of disk (after RAID striping) on nine 4 GB drives and five 16 GB drives. We are not at 80 percent of disk capacity. I couldn't find any good reasons to listen to him. I still can't see any good reason to upgrade my software from V5R1 to V5R2, V5R3 or V5R4. READ MORE >

As I See It: The Digital Life
by Victor Rozek

It's situated about 40 miles from Seoul, on 1,500 acres of man-made island off the Inchon coast. When completed in 2014, it is intended to become a living laboratory, a shining microcosm of technologically enhanced life in the new millennium. Think of it as Korea's version of Disney's Tomorrow Land; a place where imagination and IT intersect, backed by a huge investment of cash. It will be clean, modern, and efficient. A place where everything is tracked, every action recorded, every service personalized, and every transaction automated. But unlike Tomorrow Land, people won't just visit, they will actually live and work there. Welcome to the model surveillance society, welcome to Songdo, welcome to the future. READ MORE >