Server buyers sure do have a lot to think about these days. Perhaps more than they have had to consider in a fourth quarter of a year in a number of years, in fact. That’s because there are a lot of new processors due from IBM, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and Oracle. The latter doesn’t have much of a direct effect on IBM i shops, right?

Correct–right up to the moment when Larry Ellison’s sales force suggests you dump your Power Systems gear and run JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on a cluster of Sparc T and Sparc

IBM i shops that were hesitant to deploy pre-packaged PHP apps on the platform because of the end of MySQL support from Oracle can go forward with their plans now thanks to the public unveiling of Zend DBi, a new IBM i-specific version of MySQL that Zend Technologies will develop, maintain, and support. Zend DBi is slated to ship with the upcoming December release of the Zend PHP software stack for the IBM i server, the company said last week.

Ever since Oracle announced plans to drop MySQL support for i5/OS V5R4 and IBM i 6.1 last December, IBM and

Some people never lose their natural desire to explore, create, share, and learn. That’s even true for RPG programmers, although it’s widely called into question by folks who have never met any RPG programmers. Imagination is often limited by environment and Laura Ubelhor has an idea that she thinks will foster the imaginations of RPG programmers. She’s leading a project based at the Southeast Michigan iSeries User Group (SEMiUG) that connects programmers willing to learn new a new skill with companies open to innovation.

Here’s the plan: Ubelhor, who is the president of the SEMiUG, put out the call for

At one time, bloody bandages were hung on poles to dry after patients were bled by physicians. It was the origin of the now innocuous red-striped barber pole. Of course, the association of barber poles with primitive medical practices has long been lost because bleeding is no longer an unchallenged medical practice. But that’s the way of certainty: it crumbles like a stale cookie.

Certitude is a beast with a short life span. What people believe, what they live for, die for, and kill for, changes as surely as the seasons. Truth is mutable and yesterday’s facts become today’s folly.

For the past two years, Oracle has been pitching its Exadata parallel database clusters and Exalogic parallel application server clusters to large enterprises, the kinds that normally buy big RISC, Itanium, or mainframe servers to run their back-end databases and applications. These machines, while interesting, are about as useful to an SMB as a Power 795 or zEnterprise 196. To go after small and medium businesses, Oracle needs to think smaller.

Thus, the company last week rushed out its announcement of the Oracle Database Appliance, a pretuned cluster of two X86-based rack servers designed to run the company’s 11g Enterprise

There were so many interesting possibilities for the QuickTransit emulator created by upstart Transitive, founded by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer science professor at the University of Manchester. But after being absorbed into IBM‘s Power Systems division nearly two years ago, little has been heard of the innovative emulation technology, which could have been put to many uses in the service of the Power Systems platform–particularly those of us who make a living with IBM i.

Transitive came out of stealth mode in 2004 after four years of serious development and five years before that of tooling around by grad

With the economy a bit jumpy all over the globe, even in what seemed to be unstoppable China, IBM has to do what it can to calm down CIOs and CFOs and get them to spend on new Power Systems gear. Big Blue last week put out another deal aimed its Northern European customers.

In this one, detailed in announcement letter ZA11-1048, is a cashback program for customers who buy application software for either AIX or IBM i and are putting that software into their companies for the first time. If they buy from the approved list of applications

Companies are as addicted to their email as their end users are. But corporations are going to give serious consideration to moving their email out there on the cloud.

That is the word from on high from Gartner, who says that cloud-based email only makes up about 3 or 4 percent of the market (presumably counting seats) at enterprises with more than 5,000 seats, the company expects cloud email to be 20 percent of the market as 2016 comes to a close and 55 percent by the end of 2020. It is worth noting that Google currently has about

Just a couple weeks ago, the Omni User group, based in Chicago, presented its annual one-day technical conference. So I checked in with Jerome Hughes, an Omni User board member, for a quick review of how things went.

From an attendee standpoint, speakers and topics are what put people in the seats and in Hughes’ judgment there were several top speakers. This included Scott Klement, one of the best-known and best-liked presenters on RPG topics. “There are always a lot of meat and potatoes RPGers attending our conferences and they pick up a lot of information from Scott,” Hughes says.

I must be doing something wrong. I have been working from home for eight-plus years, and I can easily spend an entire day at my desk trying to get everything done. I find myself coming back into the office in the evenings, and even wandering in on weekends to try to get a jump on the upcoming week. I habitually check my email to make sure nothing’s come up that requires my attention.

Or maybe it’s just that I like, and value, my job.

But not all telecommuters are quite as fired up to get things done at home, at