Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Reader Feedback On Control Your Code, Control Your Costs And Destiny
January 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHi Timothy,
Thanks for the article on home-grown RPG software. The company I work for is still running the software we wrote on the System/38 and we continue to enhance it daily. I believe it has given us an edge over many packaged software customers. We don’t have to ask for changes, we make them.
Yes, we too have looked into replacing our systems several times, but haven’t found packages doing things the way we have done for 27 plus years! I just need to find some young talent that wants to learn RPG and doesn’t mind the green screen.
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Power Systems Eating Into Mainframe Sales
January 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM closed out 2011 on a somewhat somber note in terms of hardware sales, but not because of the Power Systems line. That’s good news for any customer that relies on Power Systems, and so is the fact that Big Blue is stealing away business from Unix rivals Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, and so is IBM’s frank admission that Power7-based machines are also taking share away from System z mainframes in the enterprise segment of the server racket.
IBM reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2011 after the market closed last Thursday, and because of currency fluctuations
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IBM Slashes Some Power7 Processor Prices
January 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe new year is well under way and IBM, as we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, has closed out last year and is facing whatever new challenges it has. The big one is that new Opteron 6200 processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Sparc T4 processors from Oracle are out, and the even bigger problem is that the Xeon E5 processors from Intel are shipping under NDA to selected customers and are expected to launch this quarter.
And so, IBM is tweaking its Power Systems Power7 processor pricing a little bit to blunt the
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IBM Rules The Patent Roost Again, But Samsung Is A-Coming
January 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn an extraordinary run that probably shows a commitment to research and development as much as it shows that companies are building up their patent portfolios as defensive and offensive weaponry, the U.S. Patent and Trade Office has awarded a record-breaking 224,505 utility patents to companies and independent inventors from all over the world in 2011. That’s a 2 percent increase over 2010, the former top patent count year.
“Global companies, and especially Asian ones, are collecting U.S patents at a dizzying pace, and now Asian firms hold eight of the top 10 slots in the 2011 ranking,” explained Mike
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Flash Storage Gets Cheaper, Disk Storage Gets More Expensive
January 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHere’s a confluence of events that is sure to make IT shops interested in high performance data subsystems happy. Flash storage, which is at the beginning of its adoption cycle in the enterprise, is getting less expensive by the week just as disk shortages due to the flooding in Thailand, where about a quarter of the world’s disk drives are made, are causing disk vendors to raise their prices.
For now, the disk shortages have mostly centered on drives aimed at desktop and laptop PCs, but some drive component manufacturers are under water (literally, not just financially) and the issue
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IBM’s Move On Up To Power7 Upgrade Math
January 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are using an old PowerPC, Power4, Power5, or Power5+ system, you have no doubt long since paid for the machine. And I would even go so far as to guess that you have created your own applications to run on OS/400 or i5/OS–and perhaps even IBM i–on these old machines, or maybe you have some third-party apps that do what you tell them to and, more importantly, don’t do things you don’t tell them to do, like crash all the time.
So with the economy not exactly exuding exuberance, rational or any other kind, you are probably feeling
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Control Your Code, Control Your Costs And Destiny
January 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAfter decades of reading this newsletter, you know a thing or two about me. One of them, which may not be immediately obvious, is that I can be something of a control freak. (Just saying that in a sentence is difficult, and I want to deny it. But there it is.) And guess what? So were AS/400 shops back in the day, and a fair argument could be made that they were better off, technically and economically, when they freaked out (in a good way) and controlled their application code.
Maybe I have been around too long, but I am
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Admin Alert: Is It a Performance Issue or a Throughput Issue?
January 11, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIt’s common for Power i users to complain their batch jobs are running too slowly. But is system capability responsible for slow batch throughput or could the problem be caused by poor work management procedures? This week, let’s look at a few scenarios where users say their batch jobs are running too slowly and discuss what, if anything (short of a hardware upgrade), can help speed up batch processing.
Getting To the Bottom of Slow Batch Processing
Users who feel that their batch work isn’t completing in a timely manner may blame that perceived slowness on the system hardware. This
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IBM i and Zip Files
January 11, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreYou may have heard of the new zip file APIs–QZipZip and QZipUnzip–that IBM added to IBM i 7.1. I am looking forward to using them. But if your shop is like mine, that is, you’re not running 7.1, there’s another way to work with zip files, and it does a good job.
The other way is the Java Archive utility, or jar. It’s an easy command to use, and it runs under Qshell. Here’s how it works.
The jar command has several parameters. First is a case-sensitive list of options. You will always need a lowercase “f” option.
Second is
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Big Blue Slashes Prices on IBM Forms Electronic Forms Apps
January 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is eager for customers to use its IBM Forms electronic forms software, and is so eager that it got the red pen out as the new year started and started marking down prices bigtime.
In announcement letter 312-003, IBM announced a special promotion that runs until March 15 that cuts the price of IBM Forms by 60 percent when purchased through IBM’s Passport Advantage e-commerce site.
This deal, which is being offered in the United States and Canada, covers Forms Designer, which does exactly what the name suggests and plugs into Eclipse-based integrated development environments. The discount is