The AS/400 at 22: Yesterday and Forever
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When people ask me how long I have been married, I give them two answers: yesterday and forever. I am not trying to be cute or funny--well, maybe a little--but I am actually trying to convey precisely how it feels to be married as long--or short--as I have been. I am also covering for the fact that I actually don't know. I know my anniversary, which is October 4, as does my wife, but neither of us is very good at remembering the year. READ MORE >

i/OS 7.1 Marks a Change in the JVM Guard
by Alex Woodie

There is one piece of news from IBM's i/OS 7.1 roll-out that didn't generate a lot of attention in the System i community, but is important for programmers who develop in Java as well as their customers. Starting with i/OS 7.1, IBM no longer supports the Classic Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that Rochester developed years ago specifically for OS/400. This leaves the platform with two JVMs: one 32-bit and the other 64-bit. IBM says that performance and cross-platform compatibility will improve with the new JVMs, although some developers may need to fiddle with their apps to make them work. READ MORE >

IBM Adds Power7 Boxes to Trade-In Deals
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, it looks like IBM is having a little more trouble moving the Power7-based midrange servers it announced back in February than it anticipated. A long-running trade-in deal allows customers to get cashish as they dump older Power-based machines or competitive Unix and proprietary boxes. The deals are technically trade-in rebates, but the practice among Big Blue's channel partners is to flip them around instantly so they work like discounts. The trade-in deals now include the new Power 750, 770, and 780 servers. READ MORE >

As I See It: Against All Currents
by Victor Rozek

You gotta love a guy who stands against the traffic on a one-way street and yells with full-throated conviction: You're going the wrong way. But that's Malcolm Gladwell. In his best-selling books The Tipping Point, Blink, and now Outliers, he bitch-slaps prevailing wisdom, digging beneath the obvious to unearth surprising truths lurking below our awareness. READ MORE >