Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Pushes Moore’s Law Limits With Carbon Nanotube Transistors
November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSilicon-based chip etching technologies are going to reach the lower limits of the atomic scale at some point, and chip equipment and chip designers are all looking out ahead into the future to try to come up with new technologies that will extend or replace current silicon-based chips so out electronics will get faster, more capacious, and less expensive over time, tracking with Moore’s Law.
Scientists working at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, offer one possible tweak to current technology, having come up with a technique that will create chips based on carbon nanotubes, which offer better performance
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Arrow Boosts ECS Sales Despite System Slowdown In Q3
November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDespite an expected and somewhat abrupt drop off in server sales in the third quarter that most IT suppliers experienced, master reseller Arrow Electronics was nonetheless able to boost its sales of software and storage to compensate and post growth in its Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) group in the third quarter. However, overall revenues took a hit and profits took an even bigger dive in the quarter thanks to falling margins in ECS and components and falling revenues in components.
In the quarter ended in September, Arrow had $4.96 billion in revenues, down 4.3 percent. Net income at the company
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Testing For Success Sometimes Doomed To Failure
November 5, 2012 Yvonne Enselman
… Read moreAs my position has shifted from being a programmer to a tester, I have not lost interest in the IBM i world. How the platform functions and what trends drive development remain relevant to my job. If I don’t understand it, I can’t test it. While I find information that helps me grasp what the techies are doing, it is difficult to find information relevant to other teams in our i-focused publications. It’s time to start talking about application testing for IBM i developers and other IBM i professionals who don’t understand why platform matters.
Starting from the developer point
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Rumors Say JDA Software Slaps On For Sale Sign
November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt has been a very expansive, exciting, and sometimes exasperating couple of years for JDA Software, which has shored up its revenues streams and customer bases in retail and supply chain management software through a bunch of acquisitions, as well as losing a costly lawsuit against a big customer and having to restate its financials. Now, there are rumors going around Wall Street that JDA, which is a publicly held company, might have put itself up for sale.
The rumors broke in a story from Reuters on October 29, just as Hurricane Sandy was preparing to punch the Mid-Atlantic
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IBM i Top Concerns: Build Skills, Add High Availability, Serve Users
November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs this newsletter so aptly demonstrates, you don’t have to be an IBM i shop to be intimately interconnected with the IBM i community and therefore have your own concerns about the health and wealth of the platform. The community is dominated by users, of course, but software developers, consultants, resellers, IBMers, and wiseguys like reporters and analysts all have skin in the game, and they voiced their opinions in the latest Top Concerns survey performed by COMMON Europe.
First of all, for all of you who participated in this year’s Top Concerns survey, the seventh of which closed
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Changing Sub Tree Authorities In An IFS Folder
October 31, 2012 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI need to change access authority for all the objects in a specific AS/400 Integrated File System (AS/400 IFS) folder and all its sub-folders. What’ the best way to do this? I’m running IBM i 6.1.
–Pete
Changing authorities for an IFS folder and its entire sub tree (objects and sub-folders) is a relatively easy task to accomplish. You just have to remember three things when updating this authority.
- You must change the folder’s authorities using the green-screen Change Authority (CHGAUT) command. I haven’t been able to find any way to change sub tree authorities in Systems i Navigator V7R1M
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Data Structures Make Good Status Parameters
October 31, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreWhen a good program goes bad, someone must fix it. Sometimes that someone is me. As for the “when,” it’s never a good time. It’s important to me that the failing program give me as much information as possible to help me pinpoint the cause of the error as quickly as possible.
There are two ways a program can inform its caller that it could not complete normally. One way is by sending a message. (I have written about this topic before; see the Related Stories at the end of this article.) The other way is to use a status
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SAP Powers Shakes Off World’s Economic Jitters In The Third Quarter
October 29, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreGerman application software giant SAP has had its share of technical, financial, and legal woes in recent years. But the company was firing on all cylinders in the third quarter ended in September. Hopefully SAP is a better bellwether for the IT economy than the server racket, which took a bit of a pause as September got rolling, as recent financials from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, and Avnet show.
In the third quarter, SAP’s revenues rose by 16 percent to €3.95 billion. In the year ago period, SAP had stopped the bulk of its litigation with
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Arrow Empowers Partners To Peddle Converged Systems, Eats Another IT Recycler
October 29, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt would be a good thing for IBM to be able to have the full focus of a master distributor such as Arrow Electronics when it introduces a new technology such as the PureFlex modular systems. But the master distributors are just that: The main conduits that buffer the server makers from the capriciousness of the IT buyers and lets them all get product into a vast distribution channel and essentially outsource the sales job to all but the largest accounts. In exchange for that service, companies like IBM have to share the attentions of Arrow and give them the
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Cisco: Data Center Traffic To Quadruple Thanks To Clouds
October 29, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like you are probably going to join the 10 Gigabit Ethernet wave in your data center, and it looks like increasingly cloudy applications, which cut across servers in distributed architectures, are going to be the force driving you to upgrade your network. That’s the prognosis from networking giant and server wannabe Cisco Systems, which obviously has a vested interest in seeing network traffic and greenfield cloudy server installations take off.
The analysts at Cisco have taken a sample of data center traffic inside 10 midrange and large data centers, with a mix of public and private data