Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Humans $4,600, Watson $4,400 in
January 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJeopardy! Beta Test Round
As The Four Hundred has previously reported, IBM‘s question-answer supercomputer, known as Watson after Big Blue’s founder, Thomas Watson, is gearing up for a contest of wits against two top players of the Jeopardy! game show for three days February. To give the human contestants a chance to see what they are up against, IBM held a single round of the game at its TJ Watson Research Center last week.
While the Watson supercomputer sits on the ground floor in the facility, upstairs IBM has built a complete mock up of the Jeopardy! set,
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Reader Feedback on The Carrot: i5/OS V5R4 Gets Execution Stay Until May
January 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHello, TPM:
This is my second response to the 5.4 conversion requirement. Our company can’t–can not–get the source code for the menu/security portion of the ERP system we utilize. We have money and want to upgrade to Power7 hardware, but do not have the $700,000 to $1.5 million to upgrade or change our ERP system.
IBM has told us, through our business partner, that it would cost them $8 million to allow i5/OS V5R4 to run on Power7 and that they don’t see the market to justify the expense. What is $8 million to IBM, a company party?
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Going Full Spiral, Not Coming Full Circle
January 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Mayan calendar says the world is going to end in 2012, and in the unlikely event that doomsday should indeed come to pass, then 2011 will be the last year we have to worry about anything and make predictions about the future. But I doubt very much humanity will get off that easily. We surely have not for the past several million years from the studies I have read. The end of the world is a metaphor, and things long gone often return again, albeit slightly differently.
I was talking to a dear, old friend this week about the
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i5/OS and IBM i Support: How Long Does It Last?
January 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNow that IBM has given i5/OS V5R4 a stay of execution and extended its marketing life out to May 27 of this year, the question that everyone now wants to have answered is how long will that venerable operating system for prior Power-based systems have support from Big Blue? It is debatable how much history is any guide, since the IBM i platform is not at a particularly strong point in its upgrade curve for a lot of different reasons.
As you can see from the official OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i support matrix page, IBM has not yet
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Admin Alert: Basic i/OS Error Monitoring and Response, Part 2
January 12, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreLast week, I began outlining a basic plan for monitoring and answering i/OS error messages, allowing you to resolve system and programming issues without having dedicated 24x7x365 personnel on site. That article focused on detection and notification of errors. This week, I’ll focus on extending the plan to include allowing responders to correct issues from anywhere, to automatically answer error messages without human input, and some other things to do after the error message is resolved.
The Basic Structure of i/OS Error Monitoring and Response
As outlined in Part 1, an i/OS error monitoring and response system contains
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Implementing Binary Trees in RPG
January 12, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Last week, I wrote about linked lists. Each node in the list points to another node. Binary trees differ from linked lists in only one way–each node has two pointers to other nodes. How you label these pointers is up to you, but most people choose to call them left and right.
Here’s a data structure that defines a node with left and right pointers.
D Record ds qualified D Name 20a D City 12a D Left * D Right *A node that points to one
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Clone Memory Maker Dataram Hit by Price Declines in Q2 of Fiscal 2011
January 10, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is never easy to be a manufacturer of any clone product, and despite the fact that many companies are willing to try a third-party memory or disk maker during a recession to save money, they are nonetheless–or perhaps, muchtheless–in the driver’s seat when it comes to negotiating on prices and clone memory or disk makers often see revenues and profits under pressure in a downturn that, in theory, should boost their business. That’s exactly what happened to Dataram in its most recent quarter.
As you know from reading The Four Hundred, Dataram makes clone memory for a lot
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Storage Array Software Add-Ons Lag Capacity Boom
January 10, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDisk array sales were up smartly in the third quarter of 2010, as The Four Hundred reported as last year came to a close, but storage software revenues grew more slowly than raw capacity, according to IDC.
The IT market researcher said that worldwide sales of storage arrays based on disks (either internal or external arrays) rose by 18.5 percent, to $6.97 billion, in the third quarter, with aggregate capacity sold rocketing up a stunning 65.2 percent, to 4,299 petabytes. This robust growth goes a long way toward pulling the disk array business out of the substantial hole that
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IBM’s Watson Supercomputer to Play Jeopardy! and Challenge Humanity
January 10, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read more“This venerable minicomputer platform won the midrange wars, besting Hewlett-Packard’s HP 3000, Digital Equipment’s VAX and MicroVAX, and IBM’s own 9700 and 4300s.”
Ah, but if asked that question on the Jeopardy! game show, would IBM‘s soon-to-be-announced Watson question-answer system actually get the right answer? Considering that Watson owes its existence in part to the fine engineering from the IBM Rochester Labs, one could only hope it would be able to reply, “What is the AS/400?”
In the late 1990s, IBM freaked out Gary Kasparov, a grand master chess player, by defeating him in a chess duel with the
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Lawson Buys Enwisen, Posts Decent Fiscal Q2
January 10, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMidrange enterprise application software maker Lawson Software, which has a strong presence in the healthcare, public sector, and consumer goods sectors, closed out its second quarter of fiscal 2011 ended in November by eating a provider of cloudy human resources management tools called Enwisen.
The deal to buy Enwisen for $70 million was announced on December 20 and closed on December 31, which is when Lawson’s fiscal Q2 ended. Enwisen’s online tools, known as the AnswerSource suite, has an HR central repository and portal for accessing that employee information as well as workflow that controls the hiring and