Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Novell Shareholders Vote Yes for $2.2 Billion Attachmate Acquisition
February 21, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHost access, application modernization, and security software maker Attachmate is that much closer to closing its $2.2 billion acquisition of systems software maker Novell.
Last week, in an 8K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Novell said that a sufficient number of its shares were pledged to the Attachmate deal for it to get done–provided government regulators in the United States and Germany give it the go ahead. Either by showing up to a special meeting in the company’s Waltham, Massachusetts, headquarters or sending in proxies, people and companies with an aggregate of 66.4 percent of the company’s
-
IBM Discounts BladeCenter 10 GE Switches Bought Online
February 21, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you have IBM‘s BladeCenter blade servers running either your Power or X64 workloads, or you are looking to move to blades, then Big Blue has a deal for you.
Last week, in announcement letter 311-021, IBM said that if you buy the latest 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches for your BladeCenter box, instead of holding back with only Gigabit Ethernet devices, and if you buy them online, and therefore save IBM the trouble of making a sales call, then it will give you a 40 percent discount off list price on selected switches that plug into the back
-
Reader Feedback on AS/400 to i Mystery Solved
February 21, 2011 Hey, TPM
… Read moreYou wrote: “I would love to see a Windows and SQL Server skin for IBM i that would let Windows applications run on the i box, in fact. I am going to think about what that might mean and how one might build such a thing. IBM is using the PowerVM Lx86 emulator to run Linux apps compiled for x86 on Power processors, and perhaps it can use the same QuickTransit tools to emulate Windows apps on IBM i. To do so would merely require IBM to want to try to crush Windows with its own platforms, and IBM doesn’t
-
Humans Fight, But Watson’s Chips Beat Quiz Champs
February 21, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLike a lot of Americans, the only time I ever watch the Jeopardy! game show is if I happen to be exhausted on a Friday night, I happen to have my work done early, and I happen to feel like spending a little cash to go down to the local beer and burger joint with the wife and kids. And when we do go, we inevitably fight over who gets to sit in the benches that face the TV so we can watch the game clues and try to come up with the questions and play along.
But last week,
-
New Power Systems VP Talks IBM i Strategy, Roadmaps
February 21, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s another year, and now there is another executive who has taken charge of the Power Systems lineup and there is an updated IBM i Strategy and Roadmap. As The Four Hundred reported last year in the wake of the consolidation of Software Group and Systems and Technology Group under Steve Mills, Tom Rosamilia was tapped to run a converged System z and Power Systems server unit. But IBM still wants an executive that is responsible for the Power Systems line, and that is Colin Parris, vice president and business line manager for that unit.
Parris was formerly in
-
Admin Alert: Six Techniques to Prevent Power i Upgrades from Slowing Down
February 16, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreWhen I’m ready to perform a significant software or hardware upgrade, I use a series of techniques to cut upgrade time, avoid mistakes, and avoid delays. This week, I’ll review six of those techniques in the hope that you can use some of them to make your next Power i upgrade go easier.
Keeping the Upgrade from Slowing Down
I’ve always found that you can never increase Power i upgrade speed, you can only stop an upgrade from slowing down. In no particular order, these six tips can help you reduce the amount of waiting time in the Power i
-
Commands: Underused and Unappreciated
February 16, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreAs programming languages go, CL is not glamorous. Nevertheless, it is practical and effective, and it has some nice features. One of my favorite features is the ability to extend the CL language by creating my own commands. I have used this feature many times to great advantage over the years, and I am amazed that so many programmers have never written a command. In this article I discuss advantages of creating commands and give an example of how to do so.
I have noticed that many shops use the CALL command exclusively to start execution of a program. CALL
-
Magic Software Shoots Skyward Again in Q4
February 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM i development tool maker Magic Software Enterprises has turned in another explosively growing quarter, finishing out a year that saw the company acquired, focused, and growing smartly.
In the fourth quarter of 2010 ended in December, Magic Software’s revenues shot up 72.8 percent, to just over $25 million. And if you ignore a one-time capital gain of $2 million from last year’s fourth quarter, when Magic Software sold its headquarters building, then net income from the company’s core operations more than doubled, to $3.08 million. Including the sale of the HQ building, which is what you have to do
-
Ken Olsen, Midrange Giant, Dies at 84
February 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreKen Olsen, the co-founder and long-time leader of minicomputer originator Digital Equipment Corporation died last week at 84. Perhaps more than any other man, all of us in the midrange owe Olsen for our paychecks and for the innovation that his engineering mind brought into being.
I was born the week before the first true minicomputer, the PDP-8, was brought into the world. At the time, the PDP-8 was noteworthy because a base configuration cost only about $18,000 with 4 kilowatts of 12-bit core memory and a teletype for input and output. After a bunch of DECies defected in 1968
-
Reader Feedback on Fractal Expressionism
February 14, 2011 Victor
… Read moreI wonder what your relationship with Richard Taylor is? This is very old news and has no value of bringing it as new. The last anyone has heard from Taylor was 2005. Why did you conveniently leave out the fact that Taylor’s fractal analysis has been debunked years ago? I have seen several paintings that are clearly not by the hand of Jackson Pollock who passed his fractal test. Are you willing to put down $100 million for those paintings? And what are we going to do with some of the known works from Jackson Pollock that did not pass