• Rocket DevOps Gets Update for Free Format RPG, VS Code, and DORA

  April 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The latest release of Rocket’s change management tool for IBM i brings several new capabilities, including improved support for VS Code and Free Form RPG. Rocket DevOps version 10.3.1 also brings better code testing capabilities and will help companies comply with new regulations, such as the EU’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA).

  Rocket Software added support for the browser-based development environment VS Code last fall with the launch of Rocket DevOps version 10.2.2. Customers will find the new release of Rocket DevOps improves on that initial VS Code support, says Puneet Kohli, the president of the Rocket’s Application Modernization Business …

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• LightEdge Acquires Connectria To Round Out Each Other’s Power Play

  April 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there is a large group of IT customers who pay a premium for a premium product but who are also going to be experiencing a skills shortage in the coming years, then you want to be in the position of selling them networking, compute, and storage capacity in the cloud or in co-location facilities. And you also want to be able to sell them add-on managed services to get a bigger share of their overall budget while also helping them to get more things done.

  That, in a nutshell, is why LightEdge Solutions is acquiring Connectria Hosting. Both companies …

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• What Degree? Kisco’s RCL Fellowship Spotlights Value of Training, Hard Work

  April 22, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Having a college degree is certainly one path to having a career in IT. But it’s not the only one, a point that Kisco Systems president Justin Loeber is making with the latest round of the Richard C. Loeber Fellowship, which is now accepting applications.

  It’s not that Justin Loeber is adamantly opposed to college degrees. After all, the current Kisco Systems owner eventually received a diploma in environmental science and public policy, which he called “a passion play.”

  But his father, Rich Loeber, never got a college degree. Despite proving his worth in data processing at a railroad and …

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• Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 1

  April 22, 2024 Chris Ringer

  Way back in the 1990s, I recall accessing data with only RPG III F-Specs. But nowadays some of that critical data may live in the cloud. The good news is tools like HTTPAPI and RXS and SQL functions like SQL HTTP are available to access that remote data from the IBM i. But what you may not know is how to actually format components in those HTTP requests.

  Here I will discuss some techniques to build those components in an HTTP request before sending it across the web.

  HTTP Get Versus Post

  The two most common methods for an HTTP …

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• Gartner: IT Spending To Grow Faster Than Expected In 2024

  April 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The adoption of generative AI by enterprises and the acceleration of the rates of use of IT services from outside consultants to get stuff done is going to boost IT spending higher than expected this year, according to the prognosticators at Gartner.

  In terms of aggregate dollars, the effect if the latter is much larger than the former. The broad IT services category is now expected to account for $1,520 billion in spending worldwide this year, up 9.7 percent compared to last year and representing a $19 billion increase from the forecast that Gartner made in January. It will not …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 16

  April 22, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  It is an interesting time out there in PTF Land, so brace yourself. There are four security bulletins and two security warnings about potential denial of service vulnerabilities. Let’s do the security bulletins first and then the denial of service issues.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i Access Client Solutions is vulnerable to an infinite loop or out of memory error due to vulnerabilities in Apache Commons Compress, which you can find out more about at this link. The affected product(s) include IBM i Access Family versions 1.1.2 – 1.1.4, and versions 1.1.4.3 – 1.1.9.4. The issue can …

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• Drilling Down Into New IBM i Perpetual And Subscription Pricing

  April 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we reported in last week’s issue, Big Blue increased pricing on its pricing for per-core perpetual software licenses, per user licensing fees, Software Maintenace, and subscription prices back on January 1. We missed the change – again, apologies for that – and let you know about the basics of these and other hardware and software price changes. This week we are going to look at the effect of these changes on the cost of the base IBM i systems software stack.

  To review: On September 9 last year, IBM announced the price increases that went into effect as …

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• Securing The Crown Jewels When Intruders Break Into The Glass House

  April 15, 2024 Ash Giddings

  Recognizing the importance of proactive cybersecurity, Maxava is proud to announce the launch of Maxava Security, a ground-breaking solution set to revolutionize IBM i data protection. Departing from conventional reactive measures prevalent in many IBM i security solutions, Maxava Security heralds a proactive paradigm shift, prioritizing heightened visibility along with swift recovery over the traditional incident-response model.

  The IBM i server has long been a workhorse in the business world. Renowned for its reliability, stability, and ability to secure, it hums away in the background, running key applications while housing mission critical data for countless organizations. Yet, no system is …

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• Guru: Fooling Around With SQL And RPG

  April 15, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  Editor’s Note: This was originally scheduled to be published on April 1. No joke. And for a lot of complex reasons, that could not happen. But, it’s still fun, so enjoy.

  I started out one morning, purely interested in having a bit of fun. Honest. In RSS within ACS, I often like to run this SQL:

   select *
   from json_table(
        QSYS2.HTTP_GET('https://icanhazdadjoke.com/',
                '{"header": "Accept,application/json", "sslTolerate":"true"}'),
                'lax $' columns ("joke" varchar(200) CCSID 1208)
        )
  

  

  Okay, that was fun. This is harmless, good fun. But then I thought, what if I put this into a simple RPG program? Then I …

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• As I See It: With Deepfakes, Nothing Is Real Except The Consequences

  April 15, 2024 Victor Rozek

  With an election looming that promises to be conducted with snake-oil ethics, the Congress recently turned its attention from its usual dysfunctional finger pointing to hear testimony about the growing plague of deepfakes.

  The usual suspects were represented, in this case Google and Meta, by a spokesman from the industry-funded lobbying group NetChoice. Not surprisingly, they wrapped themselves in the First Amendment and accepted little or no responsibility for what their users post online. They argued that existing laws governing fraud and harassment were sufficient to protect targets (aka victims) of deepfakes.

  Standing against the “it’s-not-our-fault” brigade was the mother …

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