Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Newsflash: Developers Hate to Test Their Software
June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere are some things that transcend platform differences. All computers wait at the same speed. All projects come in over budget and beyond their projected windows. Sometimes people change things for the sake of change and for no damned good other reason. And, according to a recent survey, application software developers hate to test their code.
So why not do what the computers do best and automate the testing? Well, because programmers are artists as much as they are techies, and they all have their own ways of writing code and therefore their own methods for testing code. What’s an
-
IBM Chops Maintenance on a Whole Bunch of Old Stuff
June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAt some point in every piece of hardware’s life, enough is enough. It long since might not have made any economic sense to keep a piece of gear in use, but it worked and a vendor was willing to support, so even if it probably was expensive to buy the support contract, the vendor made out like a bandit and customers could avoid change and risk, which has its own economic benefits.
Eventually, even the vendor can’t make money offering support. There are just too few customers and it takes too much time to scrounge for parts and train someone
-
Disk Array Sales Are Spinning Up, Says IDC
June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn the past few weeks, it has become apparent that hardware, not software or services, is going to lead the recovery in IT spending this year. After having already cased the server racket for the first quarter, IDC has dutifully dissected the disk array market, and spending is rebounding.
On a global basis, spending on all kinds of disk arrays, be they tucked under the skins of a server or in a separate box linked to the server through Fibre Channel, iSCSI, converged Ethernet, InfiniBand, or other wires, rose by 18.8 percent, to $6.71 billion.
If you carve out external
-
JDA Software’s i2 Unit Smacked with $246 Million Judgment
June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJDA Software didn’t try to acquire supply chain software specialist i2 Technologies once, but twice–first in August 2008 for $346 million, an attempt that failed, and again in November 2009 for $396 million. Whoever did the due diligence as part of the merger and reckoned the effect of a lawsuit between the Dillard’s department store chain and i2 did not reckon on the jury in the District Court of the State of Texas for the County of Dallas, which came to the conclusion that i2 had not met its software license agreements and awarded $246 million in damages.
Yeah, you
-
IBM Adds Power7 Boxes to Trade-In Deals
June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWell, it looks like IBM is having a little more trouble moving the Power7-based midrange servers it announced back in February than it anticipated. A long-running trade-in deal allows customers to get cashish as they dump older Power-based machines or competitive Unix and proprietary boxes. The deals are technically trade-in rebates, but the practice among Big Blue’s channel partners is to flip them around instantly so they work like discounts. The trade-in deals now include the new Power 750, 770, and 780 servers.
The latest incarnation of the entry Power Systems trade-in deal from last week in announcement letter 310-205
-
The AS/400 at 22: Yesterday and Forever
June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen people ask me how long I have been married, I give them two answers: yesterday and forever. I am not trying to be cute or funny–well, maybe a little–but I am actually trying to convey precisely how it feels to be married as long–or short–as I have been. I am also covering for the fact that I actually don’t know. I know my anniversary, which is October 4, as does my wife, but neither of us is very good at remembering the year.
Neither one of us is very good at remembering what life was like without the
-
How Do I Tell These Partitions Apart?
June 16, 2010 Hey, Joe
… Read moreMy organization has five different i/OS partitions. Yesterday, I thought I was working on a test partition green screen and it turned out that I was signed on to a production system. Worse, I deleted a production file and it caused a lot of problems. Can you think of any good way I can stop that from happening in the future?
–Jim
One of the few problems with i/OS is that there isn’t any “are you sure?” button that pops up when you’re going to delete a file. And in one of the few areas that I think Windows has
-
Apple’s iOS 4: That’s Exactly What I Was Thinking!
June 14, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI know many of you are Apple fanbois and fangirlz and that you were goofing off at work last week, watching Steve Jobs introduce what was formerly known as the iPhone OS 4.0 and now known as iOS 4, to run, starting on June 21, on iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad devices. It didn’t take long for the giggling to start among the AS/400 faithful, and many of you sent me emails just in case I didn’t see it and missed the several layers of irony. Here’s one:
Hey, TPM:
As always, thank you for your phenomenal work and tireless
-
IBM Launches Application Runtime Expert for i
June 14, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe AS/400 was an application box from the get-go, and system administrators and end users on the box think of it at the application level, not as a collection of components with their own performance specs and attributes. But, when you are trying to deliver a certain level of performance, as consistently as possible, to end users, then you have to get down into the weeds of the individual performance of hardware and software components of the system.
This is not the kind of thing that SMB shops are particularly good at, and nor should they have to be. This
-
Activist Investor Icahn Puts the Squeeze on Lawson Software
June 14, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt takes money to make money, so they say, and if you have enough money, you can apparently make people let you take their money or their company. That, in essence, is what grumpy
corporate raidersactivist investors like Carl Icahn do for a living. They find companies that are not doing as well as they could be, buy up stock, push their way onto boards, sell off assets or whatever it takes to drive up the stock, and then sell their shares and leave with a bigger pile of cash to go make trouble somewhere else. Lawson Software,