But Wait, There's More

• If you are trying to keep up with PTFs on OS/400 and related systems programs, check out the OS/400 PTF Guides, put together by our partner DLB Associates.
  
  

• November 8
• November 1
• October 25
• October 18
• October 11

• IBM has widened the scope of a special deal it has been giving to customers in the United States when their Software Maintenance or Software Subscription contracts lapse. Under this deal, IBM has been giving customers discounts on the after license fee (which is IBMese for the fee to get current after lapsing) that range from 8 to 100 percent, provided that they do not lapse for more than 12 months. The deal has now been extended to Canada and Latin America. Under the deal, if you lapse for only one month, IBM gives you a 100 percent discount on the after license fee, and every month you delay after that, the discount on the fee drops, until it reaches 8 percent, if you are in month 10 but not yet in month 12. After that, you have to pay the full fee.
  
  
• It was ironic that, at the same time Hewlett-Packard was killing off its venerable HP 3000 proprietary minicomputer, which was launched in 1972 and will no longer be developed by HP, IBM was celebrating the 25th birthday of the granddaddy of the iSeries, the System/38. (We supposed, by analogy, that makes the System/36, which is half of OS/400, to some thinking, the grandmomma of the iSeries.) The System/38 and its Control Program Facility (CPF) operating system debuted in 1978. The largest machine in the line had approximately 1.7 CPWs of computing power, 1.5 MB of main memory, and 387 MB of disk capacity in external arrays. The AS/400 Model B60, the biggest machine launched at the June 1988 launch of the AS/400, had about 15.1 CPWs of power, supported 96 MB of main memory, and had 27.3 GB of storage in external disk arrays. Both the top-end System/38 and AS/400 machines in the original lines were uniprocessors. Today's 32-way iSeries Model 890 delivers 37,400 CPWs and has a maximum memory of 256 GB and maximum internal disk storage of 144.5 TB.
  
  
• Everybody is touchy about the increasing practice of offshoring IT jobs from major Western countries to emerging countries in Central and East Asia. Consultancy Gartner has issued a report called "AD Sourcing Cost Model: Can Indiana Compete with India?" The report indicates that companies should think twice about offshoring. "ESPs using U.S.-based labor will find it impossible to compete with ESPs using offshore labor for the lowest billing rates, but they can compete in communication and effectiveness," says Audrey Apfel, a vice president and research fellow at Gartner who is tracking the offshoring phenomenon. "Offshore ESPs, such as vendors located in India, capable of maximizing the amount of AD [application development] efforts conducted offshore, will improve their chances of winning bids for AD projects over U.S. ESPs. ESPs using U.S.-based labor that target projects with onsite needs (for security, regulatory or other purposes) or require AD resources with high scores in effectiveness and communication will improve their chances at winning bids for those projects, as well." Basically, the initially billing costs for programming are only part of the deal. Telecom and coordination costs, language barriers, and the quality of the final work product are issues that often get glossed over and add significant costs to offshored projects.
  
  
• Open Source Development Labs, which is overseeing the rollout of the next Linux kernel, release 2.6, has put out a test version of the code for people to play with. The Linux 2.4 kernel debuted in January 2001 and more or less attained parity with Windows 2000 Server (for entry two-way machines) and Windows 2000 Advanced Server (for four-way and eight-way machines). Tweaks made by Red Hat and SuSE in particular made Linux 2.4 more palatable for commercial users, as did the services and technical support that these companies offer as their main source of income. With Linux 2.6, Linux will be able to scale to 32 processors in a single-system image, and has even been tested in beta form on 64-way machines. However, on 32-bit X86 machines, Linux 2.6 will apparently be limited to 8 GB of main memory when it first rolls out. A 32-way 32-bit machine will need to support 64 GB of main memory (the theoretical maximum that is also the limit for Windows 2000 and Windows 2003), and a 64-bit machine will need to support 512 GB or 1 TB of main memory to be a balanced system. The coders behind Linux 2.6 know this, but they are shooting for the belly of the market, which is two-way-capable and four-way-capable machines, plus a smattering of very large, very expensive boxes with 8, 16, 24, or 32 processors. Linux 2.6 has a new CPU scheduler, a new memory management scheme, a new file system, and a new device driver layer that makes it easier to write drivers for peripherals and boosts the performance of those peripherals, too. It also has a new Native POSIX Thread Library, which provides performance that is at least an order of magnitude better on heavily threaded applications.
  
  
• Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is going whole hog for the enterprise. The company will discontinue support and patches to Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 on December 31. Support for Red Hat Linux 9.0 will end April 30, 2004. You can find out more about the support issues on Red Hat's Web site. Essentially, Red Hat is doing away with the low-cost Linuxes it distributed, and is now only selling its Red Hat Enterprise Linux variants, which are at the 2.1 and 3.0 release levels (3.0 just started shipping a week ago and is available on the iSeries) and come in different versions for workstations, entry servers, and midrange servers.
  
  
• What is a poor elementary school in central Florida doing with a brand-new, $1 million iSeries Model 820? That's what a news crew from the WKMG Local 6 TV station is trying to find out. A "problem-solvers" segment developed by the TV news organization has led to an investigation into potential misuse of more than one million dollars in federal grant money that was supposed to help poor school districts buy computer equipment. The Brevard County School District has received $5 million from the federal program since 2001, but WKMG says the school district received $1.5 million that it shouldn't have because it overstated its rate of poverty and the number of kids getting free or discounted lunches. Brevard portrayed Endeavour Elementary School as the poorest in its district and was subsequently awarded about $1 million to buy an iSeries Model 820, which the district intended to use as a Web server, for posting student grades and hosting student Web sites. Another district school improperly received $531,000 for advanced fiber-optic cables, computer switches, phone equipment, and other improvements, the TV station says. So why did a school purchase a refrigerator-sized server more suited to running a $500 million corporation, as WKMG pointed out, than a couple of simple school Web sites? Because Brevard intended to run the entire 81-school district on the Model 820 but would have been denied the money if it had come out and said so, according to WKMG. After running the Endeavour Elementary School Web site for one year, the district intends to repurpose the iSeries to run district-wide applications, saving the district $1.6 million, the district says. According to a WKMG story, the federal agency in charge of the computer program is investigating the situation and could require refunds.
  
  
• MAPICS recently announced its financial results for the fourth quarter ending September 30. The Atlanta company reported its second straight quarter of profitability, following its acquisition of Windows ERP vendor Frontstep earlier this year. But it was close. The company eked out a profit of $893,000 on revenues of $45.1 million, a decline compared with its third-quarter, when the company reported net income of about $3 million on revenues of $47.0 million. Year-to-year comparisons of MAPICS's fourth-quarter revenues look promising: License revenue increased 31 percent, to $12.1 million; services revenue increased 55 percent, to $33 million; total revenue increased nearly 48 percent, to $45.1 million. But MAPICS's expenses also increased as a result of the acquisition, by 76 percent, to $42.9 million for the quarter, and MAPICS decided to announce adjusted earnings of about $2.1 million for the quarter, which takes into account a $1.2 million restructuring charge. MAPICS chief executive Dick Cook says the positive results show the company is moving forward. "We have now reported two full quarters of financial results since the [Frontstep] acquisition, and our results clearly validate our strategy as well as support our goals for the new MAPICS," he stated. MAPICS also said it expects fiscal year 2004 revenues to be between $190 million and $200 million. Following the news, MAPICS stock, which is traded on the Nadaq stock market, increased by about 11 percent, to about $11.25, more than twice its 12-month low.
  
  
• It used to be that the Christmas shopping season didn't begin in earnest until after Thanksgiving. But now that it's been moved up to Halloween, OS/400 software developer Bytware has decided to throw a software sale in order to prod corporations into the spending spirit. The Reno, Nevada, software vendor announced last week that companies that have bought StandGuard Anti-Virus are now eligible to get the StandGuard Network Security product for 50 percent off list price. The deal is good now through December 31 and could save companies thousands of dollars off StandGuard Network Security's list price, which ranges from $2,800 to $11,000. This is the first of a series of discounts Bytware that will be giving as part of its new customer rewards program, called the StandGuard Premier Customer program. "It's not just a promotion to try to pump up year-end numbers," says Bytware spokesman Chris Jones. "There will be a series of promotions for StandGuard customers coming out at different intervals in the future." The company decided to give an early Christmas present to StandGuard Anti-Virus customers to thank them for helping to launch the product earlier this year, and because network security goes hand-in-hand with virus scanning for the iSeries, Jones says.
  
  

Sponsored By FAST400

What makes IBM different from Microsoft regarding Fast400?? What is Fast400? You are hearing a lot about Fast400 aren't you? But what is Fast400? Fast400 is a "tuning" product for the iSeries. Fast400 will allow an iSeries server to utilize the available CPW for interactive processing. IBM would have you believe that these interactive cards that cost thousands to millions of dollars, actually add value to your server. By buying Fast400, you do not ever need to buy another interactive card for your iSeries. For a free demonstration of Fast400, please visit www.fast400.net. Why Fast400? A few years ago Microsoft would not let other software companies build tools to work with the Windows operating system. Microsoft did all kinds of scurrilous things to stop other manufacturers' software from working on their platform. They would put code in the base operating system that prevented other companies code from working properly. IBM even had these issues with Operations Navigator. In the early days of Operations Navigator, the developers in Rochester had to scrap early versions because Microsoft did not want IBM leverage on what was proprietary to them. Netscape also had a few problems using the Windows operating system. The result Now we all know what happened to Microsoft. After spending tens of millions of our tax dollars in the trial, the US government told Microsoft that they were acting as a monopoly and what they did was not right or fair. The similarity IBM is doing exactly the same thing to Fast400 as Microsoft did. IBM has changed the operating system of the iSeries 400 to prevent Fast400 from working. In fact this has been done several times now, and each time the Fast400 developers produce a new fix to circumvent the IBM action. Why does IBM do this? because Fast400 takes money out of IBM's pocket. The potential for IBM to make billions from its user base, for delivering virtually no product is tantamount to corporate deception! Did IBM change the operating system when EMC introduced a low cost storage solution for the iSeries? The future The cat and mouse game between IBM and Fast400 is already a year old. Every time IBM changes the operating system to disable Fast400, the developers of Fast400 produce a new version within days to enable it again. Does Fast400 have a commercial agenda? Of course it does. Fast400 is in business to provide its clients with added benefits, which will maximise the interactive performance of iSeries 400 servers. And as we are a business, why shouldn't we charge a nominal fee for that service? A fee that our clients see as being fair and proper. After all, it's not Fast400 that is making enemies in the user base. As long as IBM wants to play "David and Goliath" we will continue to "out" the giant. Fast400 is not running, you can be assured!! For more information, please visit www.fast400.net.