But Wait, There's More . . .

• Look for the third special edition of The Four Hundred focusing on the technology inside the new OS/400 V5R2 release, which begins shipping August 30. Our techies have gathered a lot of technical information from IBM Rochester to give you a deeper understanding of what's inside this new release of the iSeries operating system. Look for the third and final special edition, sent automatically to subscribers of The Four Hundred newsletter on August 29. (The first and second editions in our series are available online.)

• If you are trying to sort out the latest PTFs for OS/400 and its related systems programs that IBM has released, you need to check out the OS/400 PTF Guides, which our partner, DLB Associates, has compiled for you. The latest OS/400 PTF Guides are for August 17 and August 24. An archive of OS/400 PTF Guides published to date is also available on our site.
  
  
• Registration for OCEAN User Group's seventh annual iSeries technical conference and vendor expo is now open. The one-day event will focus on honing RPG programmers' development skills and will feature classes on RPG IV advanced techniques, WebSphere development tools, and interfacing with the Web, XML, and SQL. The event's featured speakers will be iSeries experts Jon Paris and Susan Gantner, of the Toronto, Ontario, management-consulting firm Partner 400. The conference will be held on September 13 at the Marriott Hotel in Irvine, California. Last year's OCEAN conference was sold out, and OCEAN is encouraging people to sign up soon to reserve their space, which is limited. If you register before August 10, the fee is $225 or, if you're already an OCEAN member, $175. After August 10, those rates go up to $285 and $235 respectively. To register, go to www.ocean400.org.
  
  
• Turbolinux, one of the four major commercial Linux distributors, last week announced it has sold that Linux business to Software Research Associates, one of the oldest software developers in Japan. Turbolinux is important to iSeries customers because it is one of the early and more faithful partners for delivering commercial Linux for iSeries partitions, complete with tech support and services. SRA will retain the Turbolinux company name and brand, and is moving the company's headquarters to Japan. (Turbolinux only recently moved to Silicon Valley to try to do a better job of breaking into the North American market selling Linux licenses.) SRA says it is committed to TurboLinux and to the new UnitedLinux consortium, which SuSE and Conectiva formed with Turbolinux in July to help spread the cost of development for commercial-grade Linux. None of this will, presumably, change Turbolinux's commitment to the iSeries, but we will have to wait and see.
  
  
• Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices got a lift last week when commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced it will support its variant of the Linux operating system on the forthcoming 64-bit "ClawHammer" and "SledgeHammer" processors, which are known by the brand name Opteron, and which are expected to take on Intel's 64-bit Itanium processors, sometime in the first half of next year, in the workstation and server markets. At the end of July, IBM announced it would support the Linux version of its DB2 database on AMD Opteron processors. In late April, AMD inked a deal with Microsoft that will see the Windows operating system--presumably the forthcoming 64-bit version of the "Whistler" version of Windows, which will be marketed under the Windows .NET Server brand name. The UnitedLinux consortium has also announced support for the Opteron processors. Database maker Oracle, never one to turn down a market opportunity, is reportedly in talks on a deal to support the Opterons now that Microsoft has thrown some weight behind them. A number of motherboard makers and peripheral suppliers have also announced that they will support the machines. Exactly who will build and sell workstations and servers using the Opterons is, as yet, unclear. The ClawHammer chip, which should run in the range of 1.2 GHz, is expected to be sold as the Opteron DP, and will be used in uniprocessor and two-way workstations and servers. The SledgeHammer chip, which could run a little bit slower and will almost certainly have larger caches, will be available for four-way and eight-way servers built using AMD's HyperTransport interconnect. This chip will be sold under the Opteron MP brand. Both Hammer chips were expected to have been in the market already but, like Intel's initial "Merced" Itaniums, have been plagued by delays.
  
  

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