Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Madoff’s RPG Coders Indicted in Ponzi Scam
March 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe two programmers who have been implicated in the massive $36 billion Madoff stock investing Ponzi scheme were indicted last week in New York in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. This is where the U.S. Attorneys Office originally brought charges against Bernie Madoff and now the coders who helped him defraud investors and fool regulators.
As The Four Hundred reported last fall, Jerome O’Hara, 47, of Malverne, New York, and George Perez, 44, of East Brunswick, New Jersey, were arrested in connection with the Madoff Ponzi scheme on November 13, 2009. They were
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IBM Flexes Java Muscles on Power7 Iron
March 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe benchmark test results are starting to trickle out on IBM‘s Power7 servers running the i for Business operating system. Last week, I told you about the SAP data warehousing tests that Big Blue did to compare the new Power 750s to older Power-based systems running i 6.1. This week, let’s take a look at the SPECjbb2005 benchmark from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. The Power 750 did alright compared to its AIX and Linux brethren, best I can figure.
The SPECjbb2005 benchmark is a tweaked version of the Transaction Processing Council‘s TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark
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Power7: Upgrade or Sidestep, Start Planning Now
March 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the Power 750, 770, and 780 machines here with their shiny new eight-core Power7 processors and the future Power 720 entry and Power 795 high-end servers still on the horizon, now is a good time to start thinking about the upgrade options you face in 2010 if you are running out of gas on your existing iron and your company has budget to buy some new iron this year. If your company doesn’t have budget for upgrades, your life may not be any easier, but your options are simpler.
Customers using Power5 or Power5+ machine, your options are simple
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Does An IPL Really Help Improve System Performance?
March 17, 2010 Hey, Joe
… Read moreMy i/OS system performance hasn’t been very good lately and my storage usage is starting to shoot up. I’m thinking I should IPL my System i 550 box to reset the system. Will an IPL help me regain storage and improve performance?
–Tom
The short answer is. . . it depends. Being IT professionals who also deal with Windows machines, sometimes our first response to bad system performance is to reboot the system. Fortunately for iSeries, System i, and Power i administrators, we don’t IPL our systems as much as others may reboot their Windows boxes, and we can usually
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A Good Use for Global Variables
March 17, 2010 Ted Holt
… Read moreUsing global data (fields, variables and constants) is generally considered to be poor programming practice. One reason is that a subroutine or subprocedure that uses global data is not easily placed into service elsewhere. Another reason is that undesirable side effects may occur when one routine changes a variable that another routine uses. However, in some situations global data makes sense. I would like to provide one example.
Assume a service program with several subprocedures. The source code for the module from which the service program is built looks like this:
H nomain D/copy prototypes,mysvcpgm P DoThing1 b export D
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The State of the UNION
March 17, 2010 Skip Marchesani
… Read moreDB2 for i supports the concept of union, which creates or derives a single result set table by combining two other result set tables, each of which was derived from a SELECT statement or another UNION. (See the discussion on cascading unions at the end of this article). A union is very useful when an SQL query must operate on two or more tables where JOIN cannot be used to produce the desired result set table.
UNION is actually a clause for what is referred to in SQL terminology as a FULLSELECT. The combination of the first SELECT statement, followed
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The Top Brass at Big Blue Do Pretty Okay in 2009
March 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you have found yourself wondering why IBM‘s top brass seem to do everything in their power to prop up the company’s stock, the answer has always been the same since the 1980s: because that’s how they make a fortune personally.
Nothing illustrates this more–and perhaps frustrates the i community more–than the company’s annual proxy statement, which outlines how the top executives at Big Blue are compensated. As is the case in just about every public company I have ever heard of, executive compensation is tied to the performance of the company, more or less. But the actual compensation
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IBM Debuts New Half Rack and BladeCenter E Chassis
March 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are one of the avant garde of the i customer base that is using a mix of BladeCenter Power-based blade servers to run i 6.1 applications, or if you have some rack-based Power Systems machines mixed with System x boxes, then IBM has a new half rack for you.
The new S2 25U half rack, which is detailed in announcement letter 110-064, takes standard 19-inch server, storage, and networking gear, and comes on casters so you can move it around. The rack has a solid top with access holes for passthrough cables, lockable doors and side panels
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Google Jumps Into Business Apps
March 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMaybe we should just call it Google/400 and get on with it?
Not content with owning the search market and expanding into office suites and smartphone and soon netbook and smartbook operating systems, cash-drenched Google is living up to the enormity of its name and unlimited aspirations by expanding its cloud computing efforts to include actual business applications with its Google Apps Marketplace.
As you can see from the Apps Marketplace site, it has that austerity that we have all come to know and love. These are not ERP systems, mind you, but for plenty of small businesses living
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Reader Feedback on IBM Starts Cutting U.S. Jobs Again
March 15, 2010 Hey, TPM
… Read moreYou may have heard this from some other sources, but just in case: The Rochester Post Bulletin reported recently that some more cuts were going to occur. . . no comment from IBM, as usual.
I have heard from an inside source that IBM is closing the Rochester iSeries Briefing center, the Rochester iSeries Benchmarking center, and the Graphics Design center. The current staff has 30 days to find a job in IBM or they’re gone.
The affected people are among the top iSeries people in the industry and to let them go is the height of folly, but so