Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Interpreting Stream File Timestamps
May 14, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreFortunately, IBM i has an Integrated File System (IFS), into which you can store any kind of data your heart desires. Fortunately, IBM provides an API that your programs can use to retrieve information about IFS stream files. Unfortunately, this API is rooted in the Unix world. Unfortunately, timestamps are stored in what I would call a bizarre manner. Fortunately, you are intelligent enough to learn how this API works.
When you need to know programmatically about a stream file, you can use the stat API. Like many things UNIX, stat is idiosyncratic, especially in the way that it reports
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Magic Software Still Has The Touch In Q1
May 12, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSoftware development tool maker Magic Software Enterprises is riding up the wave of mobile and cloud software development and tools to integrate legacy systems into these new-fangled apps and devices.
In the first quarter ended in March, Magic Software reported revenues of $40.95 million, up 22.6 percent from the year ago period. Its costs did not rise as fast as sales, and neither did research and development costs and other operational costs, and so the company was able to bring $4.85 million to the bottom line, an increase of 29.4 percent over the same quarter in 2013.
The company’s cash
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Mixed Bag For Arrow’s Enterprise Biz In March Quarter
May 12, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMaster reseller Arrow Electronics, like its peer Avnet, is a bellwether for the IT market. And like Avnet, Arrow saw a bit of a slowdown in the first quarter in its Enterprise Computing Solutions business unit.
In the quarter, Enterprise Computing Solutions had sales of $1.66 billion, up a quarter of a point compared to the year-ago period, but taking out the effect of acquisitions (including Computalinks), organic sales actually fell by 11 percent. “We experienced a pause in our hardware business, but our software and security businesses were on plan and delivered growth,” explained Michael Long, who
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Doing The Two-Step To Get To Power8
May 12, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFor most IBM i shops, the advent of the new IBM i 7.2 release and the Technology Refresh 8 for IBM i 7.1, both announced in the past several weeks, are more important than any shiny new Power8 iron, regardless of how much oomph it has. At any given time, only a relatively small percentage of customers are at a point where they absolutely have to upgrade their systems. For most shops, workloads grow more or less along with their revenues and even if they add new workloads, their existing Power6, Power6+, Power7, and Power7+ machines have enough latent capacity
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U.S. Economy Creates A Decent Number Of Jobs In April
May 5, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreGo figure. Gross domestic product figures were lower than expected in the first quarter, but businesses didn’t know that until earlier this week, and so hiring among employers in the United States was up perhaps more strongly than expected. It is hard to argue cause and effect in an economy, so I won’t do that.
What I can say is that according to the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added 288,000 non-farm jobs in April, matching spikes in February and November last year. The unemployment rate took a four-tenths of a percent
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Big Blue Rolls Out New HMC For Power Control Freakage
May 5, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLook out system administrators, there is a new Hardware Management Console in town. Or, if you are not fond of the HMC, perhaps you call it the Hardware Mangling Controller. No matter what you call it, there is a new one of them, and this one is better than its predecessors.
The 7042-CR8 rack-mounted HMC was tucked into the April 28 announcements, which included the new Power8 entry machines as well as IBM i 7.2, as we reported on elsewhere in the issues last week and this week. In announcement letter 114-060, you can’t really see much about this
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IBM Cuts Tags On Removable Disk, Tape For Power Systems
May 5, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs part of the April 28 announcements, IBM is trimming prices on various removable storage for its Power Systems line.
The price cuts, which took effect immediately, are for removable disk drives, USB-attached disk drives, RDX units (a different kind of removable disk encased in cyberfuturistic metal casings), a few SAS-attached LTO tape drives, and a bunch of controllers. Here is the full rundown of the features and their price changes, which were outlined in announcement letter 314-048:
Machine Feature List Price Percent Type Number Description Old New Change 7895 EU01 p260, 1 TB Removable Drive $345 $299 -13.3% -
Google Reveals Its Own Power8 Motherboard; Can It Run IBM i?
May 5, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf nothing else comes of this, IBM has been able to brilliantly leverage the inherent newsiness of search engine juggernaut Google to its advantage in creating some interest in–and dare we say excitement for–the Power8 processor.
At last week’s Impact2014 conference, which we report on elsewhere in this issue, Gordon MacKean, who is engineering director for the platforms group at Google and also the first elected chairman of the OpenPower Foundation, which is tasked with opening up the firmware and hardware for IBM’s Power8 processors, unveiled Google’s own two-socket motherboard for the shiny new IBM chip. If you were not
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TFH Flashback: Self Reliance
May 5, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read morePeople have been buying commercial applications for so long that it is sometimes hard to remember that the System/3X and AS/400 minicomputer businesses were dominated by customers who, by and large, wrote their own software rather than buying it off-the-shelf from a third-party company. Even at the dawning of the commercial Internet era in the early 1990s, the AS/400 community exhibited the kind of self-reliance that we see mostly from hyperscale Web applications these days.
Just for fun, we thought we would take a trip down memory lane and show you what the OS/400 application software market looked like just
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Where Do I Find These IBM i Licensed Products?
April 30, 2014 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI’m installing third-party software on my IBM i. The vendor documentation lists out the following IBM i licensed programs as pre-requisites for installation.
- 5722-SS1–OS/400 – Directory Services
- 5722-JV1–Java Developer Kit 1.5 or higher
- 5722-AC3–Crypto Access Provider 128-bit for AS/400
I can’t find any of these products in my IBM i licensed program list. How do I make sure I have these features? I’m running i 6.1.
–Steve
Because of the way IBM does things combined with some changes to the i operating system over the years, there’s some confusion as to where and how each of these products is included