Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Sundry April Power Systems Announcements
April 18, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs we reported last week in discussing IBM‘s Power processor roadmap for the next five-plus years, there is not going to be a Power8+ revamp of existing Power Systems machines. Instead, IBM has rejiggered the Power8 chip to create a variant aimed at supercomputing and deep learning workloads that allows for high-speed NVLink coupling between Nvidia “Pascal” Tesla GPU coprocessors and the Power8 chip.
That means there is no performance boost or list price cut (or both) that is normally expected and delivered with a “plus” variant of the Power chips. But as we expected, IBM has made a
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OpenLegacy Partners with ‘Nearshore’ IT Services Provider Softtek. . . Linoma Adds 2FA from RSA to GoAnywhere MFT Suite. . . RVI Partners with Accounting Software Maker. . .
April 13, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read more
OpenLegacy Partners with ‘Nearshore’ IT Services Provider Softtek
OpenLegacy, a provider of legacy modernization solutions for IBM i and mainframe shops and their applications, this month unveiled a partnership with Softtek, a provider of outsourcing services headquartered in Mexico.
The partnership gives OpenLegacy customers access to the development resources of Softtek, a Monterrey-based IT services provider with 30 offices around the world, including United States, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, China, and India. The company, which trademarked the term “Global Nearshore,” positions itself as a closer provider of outsourced IT services than those based in India.
“Our strategic partnership
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Thank You, IBM
April 12, 2016 Brian Kelly
… Read moreThe IBM Corporation was run as a benevolent dictatorship through 1971. Thomas Watson Senior, and then Thomas Junior, ran IBM as if they owned it. They both had an entrepreneurial flair and few would deny that when they were in charge of IBM, they ran the company as if it were a sole proprietorship. They had many wonderful policies such as taking care of the people so that the people would take care of the business, and of course the classic: “Respect for the Individual.”
IBM believed in Wild Ducks and chairman Watson Junior wrote about them. He was not
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IBM Puts Future Power Chip Stakes In The Ground
April 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTwo important things happened at the OpenPower Summit last week. One of them concerns IBM i shops directly and the other one affects them indirectly and perhaps more importantly. The first is that IBM rolled out an official roadmap for Power chip development for the next five-plus years. The second was that search engine giant Google and cloud operator Rackspace Hosting said that they were collaborating on a design of a future system based on the Power9 chip.
Google has been experimenting with Power8 chips for at a couple of years, and we suspect (without any corroborating evidence at all
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Refacing Your Database, Part 1
April 5, 2016 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
In this group of three articles, I will discuss a technique for refacing a traditional DDS defined database as an SQL DDL defined database. There will be no recreation of files or recompilation of programs, and it is not as much hard work as you think it might be.
The stored procedures, functions, programs, and commands used in these articles are available in the library SQLFACE, which can be downloaded here.
Before I get into the nitty gritty of refacing databases, I would just like to say
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Enable or Disable Code at Run Time
April 5, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreIf you program in RPG or C, you should know how to use compiler directives to enable or disable source code at compile time. IBM i programmers should also know how to enable or disable executable code at run time, and why they would want to do such a thing.
Let’s talk about the why first.
One good reason to enable or disable code is for trouble-shooting. You might find it valuable to include commands to:
- Display the job log
- Dump program variables
- Copy QTEMP files to another library
- Build spooled files (like of the type I showed how to
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X Marks The Spot
April 4, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJust because IBM sold off its System x X86 server business to Lenovo Group does not mean magically that X86 servers are no longer relevant to Power Systems customers. As far as we can tell, Big Blue’s exit from this business has had no measurable impact on the use of X86 iron at IBM i shops, although the brand of machines that IBM i customers might choose in their next X86 upgrade cycle might change if they had not already been using gear from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise or Dell, the dominant suppliers of X86 gear in the datacenter.
Last week,
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Finders, Keepers: Long Lost RSE Keyboard Shortcuts
March 29, 2016 Susan Gantner
… Read moreIf you have read many of my past Four Hundred Guru tips, you’ll remember that I write a lot about RSE (a.k.a. RDi) and particularly I write a lot about keyboard shortcuts. I’ve even created my own card with my favorite keyboard shortcuts. This tip is to confess that I’ve recently realized that I’ve been missing out on a set of shortcuts that I should have been using and including on my shortcut cards all along.
I published a tip about a year ago about Playing with Blocks and I included an edited version of that tip on the back
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Ease the Burden of Overloading
March 29, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreA while back I said that function overloading is marvelous. I haven’t changed my mind. The same is true of overloaded stored procedures. The only negatives to overloading are a couple of annoyances that the system requires to maintain order. Fortunately, those annoyances are easily circumvented. Here’s what and how.
Assume a table of items. Each item is identified by a five-digit ID code for internal use only. Customers use an alternate catalog ID to refer to items.
create table Items ( ID dec (5,0), Catalog_ID char(6), MaterialThisLevel dec (5,2), LaborThisLevel dec (5,2), OverheadThisLevel dec (5,2), MaterialLowerLevels dec (5,2), LaborLowerLevels -
Installing PHP on Your Laptop
March 29, 2016 Chris Ringer
… Read moreIn my introductory article I walked you through a crash course in PHP. Now I will show you how obtain a free PHP development environment on your laptop in two easy installations of XAMPP and Netbeans. This allows you the freedom to configure PHP and test your scripts as you choose without affecting a production website or needing management approval.
However, if you need to manage PHP scripts on an IBM i, you will want to alternatively explore using Zend Studio. This full-featured IDE integrates directly with the IBM i and allows you to write and debug scripts