Timothy Prickett Morgan
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PDF = Pretty Darn Fine!
April 30, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreIf you’re running IBM i 6.1 or later, you have a great alternative to spooled files at your disposal–PDF. Here are four easy ways to add PDF generation to your programming.
Method 1: Write directly to PDF.
You can make your RPG (or COBOL or whatever) programs write directly to PDF stream files. You’ll need to specify the proper values in the Create Printer File (CRTPRTF), Change Printer File (CHGPRTF), or Override with Printer File (OVRPRTF) commands:
- Device type (DEVTYPE) must be *AFPDS
- Workstation customizing object (WSCST) must be *PDF
- To stream file (TOSTMF) must have a valid directory or
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Manager And Programmer Ratios In IT Shops
April 28, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHow many IT managers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Hopefully not more than one at most IBM i shops, and in many cases the IT manager does double-duty as a system administrator and sometimes triple-duty as a programmer at IBM i shops. That is the great thing about the IBM i platform: It takes very few people to get a lot of application work done, making it a perfect platform for small and medium businesses who wanted to be experts in their businesses, not in hardware and systems software.
That doesn’t mean there are not big
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Avnet Sees IT Spending Slowdown March Draws To A Close
April 28, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt could just be a hiccup in the downstream channel from Avnet, or it could portend something else happening in the market for data center equipment. But the master reseller, which is one of the largest distributors of IT gear on the planet, had a weak close in its Technology Solutions business in the 13th and final week of its fiscal third quarter.
In the March quarter, which is the third quarter of Avnet’s fiscal 2014 year, the company booked $6.68 billion in total revenues across its electronic components and IT distribution businesses, an increase of 6.1 percent from
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A Real Open Power Server, Finally
April 28, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou cannot get one just yet, but perhaps in the not-too-distant-future if you want to hack together your own Power-based IBM i server, you will be able to do just that. Last week at the OpenPower Innovation Summit in San Francisco, IBM and its OpenPower Foundation partners showed off the first non-IBM motherboard based on a commercial-grade, 64-bit PowerPC or Power processor.
In fact, if this OpenPower scenario plays out the way Big Blue is hoping that it will, there will be multiple processor and motherboard makers who supply components to system suppliers as well as those who design and
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IBM i Runs On Two Of Five New Power8 Machines
April 28, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue was widely expected to trot out the new entry Power Systems machines based on its Power8 processors this week, but it looks like the company wanted to make sure that the machines had a day of their own rather than being a part of the broader discussion about big data and cloud at the Impact2014 shindig that IBM is hosting. The interesting bit of news for IBM i shops that came out last week as IBM preannounced the Power8 systems is that there are five new systems, but only two of them are certified to run IBM i.
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IBM Italy Gives Power-To-Pure Migration Rebate
April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHere is the kind of deal that I would have expected to see a lot more of since the PureSystems family was introduced in April 2012. IBM’s Italian subsidiary is giving customers who transition from regular Power Systems blade servers tucked into BladeCenter enclosures rebates to move to PureFlex converged systems.
Specifically, in announcement letter ZA14-1132, IBM Italy is giving distributors a €3,000 rebate if their downstream solution provider customers convince customers to make the jump to modern, converged machinery. Customers can either own or lease the Power Systems blade servers, and can work out a deal with the
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Gartner Says Take A Hard Look At App Dev And Maintenance
April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMaking the application code and tending that code as systems, conditions, and other code around it all change eats a big part of the IT budget at most companies. And the analysts at Gartner say there is a methodical way to rein those costs in and have the funds available to apply to other projects.
Perhaps even a decent pay raise. . . .
Gartner is hosting an application development summit next month, and as is its tradition, it puts some teaser information out there to whet people’s appetite and get them thinking about what they are doing in their
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IBM Pulls The Plug On Some More Power Iron
April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Power8 server announcements have been on the horizon since last August, when IBM first started giving out details about the chips that will be at the heart of the new systems. Since that time, as is usual, IBM has been warning customers that it will be withdrawing some older iron from its sales catalog, and it did so again recently.
In announcement letter 914-055, selected features will be withdrawn from marketing through the summer and into the fall.
On July 11, the BladeCenter PS700, the entry single-socket blade server that was aimed predominantly at IBM i shops back
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IBM Enhances I/O On Power7 And Power7+ Machines
April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Power8 system announcements might be right around the corner, but IBM has not forgotten about customers using its current machines based on Power7 and Power7+ processors. As part of the trickle of announcements on April 15 that saw Technology Refresh 8 for IBM i 7.1 roll out, Big Blue made some enhancements to the enterprise-class machines and put out a bunch of Ethernet and storage controller adapters.
As you can see in announcement letter 114-054, IBM is allowing customers to have static processor activations for Power 770, Power 780, and Power 795 machines and convert them to mobile
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Power Systems: Look Ahead, Don’t Look Back
April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere is no two ways about it. The declining sales of IBM‘s Power Systems line is a cause for concern at the company and is as troubling in some ways as the drop in the company’s sales of X86-based machinery and various kinds of storage arrays. Many IBM i shops buy all of this gear from Big Blue, and they may be wondering what kind of commitment IBM has for the long term with any of these platforms, given the diminishing revenues.
The fact of the matter is that IBM not only needs to stay in the hardware business