Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Is One Step Closer to High Speed, Low Power Racetrack Memory
January 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTape storage, the oldest commercially viable magnetic medium, works by moving the magnetic tape that encodes the 1s and 0s of data over a stationary head. The genius of disk storage was to move both the disk and the head together to radically speed up the retrieval of data. Now, IBM researchers are one step closer to coming up with a completely new way of storing and reading data.
The new technology that the techies at IBM Research are working on is called racetrack memory, and no, it is not about picking the ponies and remembering to tell the truth.
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Secondhand Power 520s from IBM Global Financing Pretty Pricey
January 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith IBM saying that it is sold out of older Power 520 machines as well as the new Power7-based Power 720 and 740 entry boxes, if you are trying to upgrade from a vintage OS/400 machine to a more modern release, your other option is to get a refurbished computer from IBM Global Financing or some other used equipment reseller.
IBM is not showing off a huge inventory of machines right now in its Global Financing subsidiary, but as you can see on its refurbished AS/400, iSeries, System i equipment site, it does have two configurations available.
The first
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IBM Brags About Power Systems Takeouts in Q4
January 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn discussing IBM‘s fourth quarter and full year financial results last week with Wall Street, Mark Loughridge took a few moments, as he has done for several years now, to brag about the competitive wins that the Power Systems lineup is getting against rivals Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. While takeouts had been losing steam earlier in 2010, they heated up as the year ended and IBM got the entire Power7 lineup shipping.
In the fourth quarter of 2010, Loughridge said that IBM had over 280 competitive displacements, which accounted for around $325 million in revenues for Big Blue. (Those
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Computer Economics Sees Optimism in 2011 IT Budgets, Too
January 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like 2011 is getting off to an optimistic start, at least as far as the budget forecasting for IT spending goes. Two weeks ago, the prognosticators at Gartner were projecting that IT spending on hardware, software, and services would rise by 5.9 percent this year to $1.46 trillion. And now, Computer Economics has put together its projections and the news is good after two years of bad. Surveys of the midmarket by IBM show budgets on the rise, too.
In its Outlook for IT Spending and Staffing in 2011 report, announced last week, Computer Economics did surveys
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The Midrange, Stuck in the Middle with You
January 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou may not be aware of it, but IBM still has a cross-platform Midmarket Division even if we no longer have a System i Division. While we could talk on into the night about what Big Blue does and does not do to support the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i platforms, there are actually people at IBM who are dedicated to the midmarket customer base. They think about your business and what it might need in the way of IT products and services, and they want to know where you are going.
Just to put names to the roles, Andy
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Power Systems Stabilize in Q4 Thanks to Entry Boxes
January 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLet’s cut right to the chase scene. The entry systems portion of the Power Systems lineup that matters most to i5/OS and IBM i shops started to show some signs of life in the fourth quarter, according to the financial results released by IBM last Tuesday after Wall Street closed down to get home through a slushy and cold New York evening. So, like me, you can exhale and then breathe a little bit.
In the fourth quarter ended in December 31, IBM’s revenues grew by 6.6 percent to just a hair over $29 billion, and net income rose by
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Solving PC5250 Printing Problems and Tweets About i/OS Error Messages
January 19, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI’m having problems with printing my iSeries Access Personal Communications PC5250 screens. Every time I print a screen, it comes out in a large font and the letters run on top of each other, making the text unreadable. How can I straighten out this issue? We’re running iSeries Access for Windows V5R4M0.
–Bob
This is an issue with your PC5250 setup and you should be able to solve it in one of two ways.
The first thing you’ll want to check is your PC5250 Page Setup function. The Page Setup function allows you to designate the following standard text parameters
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A Reusable Routine for Doubly-Linked Lists, Part 1
January 19, 2011 Miguel Ortiz Martín and Ted Holt
… Read moreIn Implementing Linked Lists in RPG, Ted Holt explained that a linked list consists of a sequence of data records, or nodes, where each node keeps a reference–a pointer–to the next node in the sequence. This sequence might or might not be sorted. Due to the fact that each node points only to the next node in the sequence, this kind of list is also called a singly-linked list.
Doubly-linked lists differ from singly-linked lists in that each node of the list keeps pointers to both the previous and the next nodes in the sequence. Whereas a singly-linked list
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Rising Spending Tide Finally Raises the SAP Boat
January 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA rising tide indeed does eventually raise all boats. The recovery in application software spending that has been helping Oracle post decent financial results in the past few quarters has finally lifted the revenues of SAP, which is still the largest provider of applications on the planet and which still supports the OS/400 and IBM i platform.
SAP released preliminary financial results for the fourth quarter of 2010, which include the revenue and profits it will derive from its acquisition of database maker Sybase. In the quarter, SAP said that it raked in €1.5 billion in software license sales,
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Rimini Street Says Third Party Support Biz Is Booming
January 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOracle‘s prevailing over SAP in a lawsuit regarding TomorrowNow, a provider of third-party support for PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards application suits, to the tune of $1.3 billion plus interest has apparently not diminished the financial prospects of Rimini Street, which is itself embroiled in a lawsuit with Oracle.
Rimini Street is not a public company, so it does not have to report its financial results. But in a statement released last week, the company said that it had over $7 million in revenues in the fourth quarter of 2010, its highest quarterly revenue to date and up