TFH Volume: 27 Issue: 69 Archives

Advice For The Power Systems Shop That Has To Buy Now

October 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Having to buy a new computer as one generation is ending and the new one is not quite yet beginning puts users in a tough spot. Without knowing the feeds and speeds of the system, you can’t compare what you might be giving up if you buy now. And without knowing the price of the new machine, and the current price of its predecessor that you might buy, you can’t tell how hard you have to negotiate if you buy the current model instead of the one that is coming down the pike in a few months.

IT budgets tend …
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Vision Adds Security To HA Management Service

October 23, 2017 Alex Woodie

Fresh off its acquisition of Enforcive, Vision Solutions last week unveiled a new managed resilience service that adds professional IBM i security services to its managed offering for high availability and disaster recovery.

As part of its managed HA and DR services, Vision Solutions (which has been merged with Syncsort) works with customers to ensure that their MIMIX, iTera, and OMS/ODS environments are shipshape and read to be called into duty in the event of an unexpected outage or natural disaster.

Now Vision is adding the same type of options to its managed security service and selling it alongside …
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Guru: Wow! I Could Have Had Long Column Names! – Take 2

October 23, 2017 Ted Holt

In 1990, three computer science professors named Gorla, Benander, and Benander wrote about debugging effort in COBOL programs. Among their claims was that debugging is easier if variable names were between 10 and 16 characters long. The original native data definition facilities allowed variable names up to 10 characters, but nowadays we can define alias names that Gorla, Benander, and Benander would be proud of.

It is common in many DB2 for i shops to have physical files with field names of six characters or less. This practice dates to predecessor systems, such as the System/36, for which the …
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A Skills Shortage Solution Alert

October 23, 2017 Dan Burger

Employee development doesn’t get the credit it deserves when it comes to talent acquisition. Putting the right people in the right place and giving them the right tools is not a new concept. Many of the top programmers work for companies where this concept has been in place for years. They are homegrown. It follows a pattern: Hire programmers with useful skill sets and if that doesn’t include modern RPG, train them.

The steep green-screen learning curve and natural tendency for young developers to resist the old fixed format RPG isn’t really a factor with modern free format RPG and …
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Big Blue Profits, Poised For The Power9

October 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Let’s just cut straight to the good news. Even though IBM’s revenues have declined for the 22nd quarter in a row, and its profits are declining even faster, the substantial investments that Big Blue has made in its System z14 mainframes and Power9 systems is about to start paying off.

The System z14 mainframes made their debut in July and start shipping in the middle of September, converting from a drain on the company to a fairly large flow of cash. Power9 chip development ceased a while ago, and we presume most of the system engineering is done, and even …
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Advice For The Power Systems Shop That Has To Buy Now

Vision Adds Security To HA Management Service

Guru: Wow! I Could Have Had Long Column Names! – Take 2

A Skills Shortage Solution Alert

Big Blue Profits, Poised For The Power9

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