Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Crazy Idea Number 528: Apple Mac OS X on Power Systems
November 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou know the old saying: One door closes, and another one opens. Last week, a door closed for customers using Apple‘s Xserve rack-mounted servers, and just possibly a door opened for IBM‘s Power Systems division. The door was actually kind of slammed in Apple Xserve customers’ faces, in fact, not merely closed. So if you think AS/400 shops are the only server customers who are fiercely loyal to their platform and yet get mistreated by their platform’s maker, you are wrong.
Here’s the deal. Apple announced on November 4 that it was getting out of the rack-mounted server
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Admin Alert: Things to Think About When Changing Hardware Maintenance
November 10, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreAbout the time your System i machine turns three years old, you might start thinking about more than a system upgrade. You may have to determine how to extend your hardware and software maintenance beyond IBM‘s standard maintenance period of three years, i.e., extending your maintenance contract. This week, let’s look at the pitfalls of extending hardware and software maintenance.
The Need
There are several reasons you may need to extend iSeries, System i, and Power i hardware and software maintenance past its initial three-year maintenance period:
- If you leased your machine for more than three years and your
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Down with Assumptions! Up with Diagnostics!
November 10, 2010 Ted Holt
… Read moreEven though assumptions have no place in proper programming, programmers sometimes infuse their code with assumptions. Such practice brings to mind something I once read: If builders built houses the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization. I’ve written about the problem of assumptions before. Today is a good day to revisit the subject.
Programmers who cut their teeth on native I/O (as did I) often depend on the system to alert them when something goes wrong. That is, they assume an I/O operation completed normally unless they hear differently. The bad way to
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Two Tips Are Better Than One
November 10, 2010 Patrick Botz
… Read moreIn my two previous tips, I discussed the alternative PUBLIC authority technique and the re-adopted authority utility implemented via a Submit Job (SBMJOB) command exit point. Using these two ideas together provides an environment where everyone can continue to work normally while, at the same time, providing an environment where you can identify special cases requiring additional changes and can test all of your changes without affecting normal production usage.
Let’s see how this works. If you recall, alternative PUBLIC authority involves setting up a group profile; we’ll call it ALTPUBLIC. After adding all of the production users (or all
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Magic Software Rides UniPaaS and iBOLT Waves in Q3
November 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAsseco Group, the Polish holding company that is traded on the Warsaw Stock Exchange that recently took control of IBM i development tool maker Magic Software Enterprises, must be feeling pretty good about its investment. Magic Software’s sales and profits have shot up like a rocket in the most recent quarter.
In the quarter ended September 30, Magic Software reported sales of $22.4 million, up 65.9 percent from the year ago period, and net income more than tripled to $2.6 million. This is the second quarter in a row of strong sales and profits from the software tool
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Oracle and SAP Talk Settlement on TomorrowNow Legal Fees
November 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe lawsuit between software giants Oracle and SAP got underway last week in Oakland, California, as expected, with new Hewlett-Packard CEO and former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker dodging his subpoena to testify, and new Infor and former Oracle co-president Charles Phillips taking the stand.
Early in the week, there were reports, which started at Reuters, that SAP had proposed shelling out $120 million to cover Oracle’s legal costs in the TomorrowNow lawsuit, in which Oracle has accused the former SAP unit of stealing its documentation and software patches for PeopleSoft, JDE, and Siebel software suites for its third-party
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Arrow Sees Enterprise Sales Rebound a Bit in Third Quarter
November 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe tech recovery is gaining momentum at IT distributor Arrow Electronics, which saw its sales rise by 26.9 percent to $4.66 billion. The company’s net income was impacted by $14.3 million in restructuring charges–a lot lower than the $37.6 million it had in the year ago quarter. But because of that revenue boost for both components and enterprise products, Arrow was able to boost net earnings by nearly a factor of 10 to $118.5 million.
While the electronics components business accounts for the largest part of the revenue stream at Arrow, with sales of $3.44 billion (up 35.3 percent)
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IBM i Gets Pressure from Microsoft’s Small Biz Server 2011
November 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI have said it before, and I will say it again. The basic concepts of the Smart Cube server appliance, launched by Big Blue without much fanfare two years ago based on Power Systems and what is now called the IBM i operating system, are correct. You want to drop an application system into SMB shops that provides an application store like iTunes and that provides a consistent support mechanism, managed by IBM and its software partners together, as well as remote, utility-style computing that integrates into the box. IBM seemed to get it, I think.
As the launch last
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Let’s Take a Deep Dive Into IBM’s System Sales in Q3
November 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWell, I took a little time last week and I found the bug in my Excel spreadsheet model of IBM‘s quarterly revenues for its systems, and that means this week I can tell you what I think happened in the server racket for Big Blue in the third quarter. You will recall that back in August I admitted that something was wacky in my model where it broke server sales down by platform type, and it turns out I had three cells in the chart that were making absolute references instead of variable ones as I cascaded the equations.
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Smackdown: Linux on X64 Versus IBM i on Entry Power 7XXs
November 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM should be grateful that Linux and open source relational databases like MySQL (now from Oracle) and PostgreSQL (which is commercially supported by EnterpriseDB are about as unfamiliar as Vulcan is to those who speak Klingon but have managed a little broken English. (Yes, that was a metaphor for Unix or Linux, IBM i, and Windows.) Because as cheap as the more familiar Windows entry servers are compared to entry and midrange Power7 servers, Linux systems are even less costly.
Like crazy stupid less expensive.
The good news for IBM and its ISV partners, who still bundle software on