• Are You Experienced? IBM i Users Weigh In

  March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time here at The Four Hundred thinking about the vintage of the hardware, operating systems, and applications running on the IBM i platform and its forbears. But we are also concerned, as you know, with the vintage of the people who are running and programming the systems out there in the IBM midrange installed base.

  It is hard to get any quantifiable data on the people out there running the platforms – and we thank you, as loyal readers of this publication for several decades now for being in this market for even more decades …

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• Building Out The .NET Stack Around Mono for IBM i

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The first release of a Mono .NET port to IBM i was issued last year. Since then, the IBM i open source community has been busy building many of the other middleware components that will make it easier for developers to build IBM i applications using Microsoft tooling.

  Mono was ported to AIX and IBM i (via the PASE AIX runtime) last year, which gave IBM i and AIX shops the capability to run the open source .NET runtime on Power Systems servers, thus opening the door to allowing Microsoft‘s highly regarded suite of development tools to be …

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• Supreme Court Weighs In On Oracle Vs. Rimini Street

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The United States Supreme Court last week ruled against Oracle in its ongoing copyright infringement case against Rimini Street, handing the provider of third-party support services for JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel ERP and CRM software a legal victory in the nation’s highest court.

  It’s not often that lawsuits involving enterprise software and services make their way up to the Supreme Court. In this case, the nine justices were asked to rule on a relatively narrow disagreement between the two parties over what legal costs can be recovered. Oracle already prevailed in its copyright infringement case against Rimini Street, which …

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• Five Acquisitions You May Have Missed

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The New Year has started off with some wheeling and dealing, as some software company owners look to bulk up while others look to hand off responsibility to somebody else. Those operating in the IBM i marketplace aren’t alone in making acquisitions. Here are five under-the-radar deals in the midrange that you may have missed.

  Attunity‘s line of real-time data integration software will now be sold through Qlik, which acquired the publicly traded company in a $560-million in late February. It was a natural enough move for Qlik, the well-regarded BI vendor that was acquired by private equity …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 13

  March 13, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  This week, our own ITJ editor extraordinaire Alex Woodie takes on the omnipresent dinosaur perception that, even with so much new and exciting tech happening, the IBM i just can’t shake. It all began with a story about the city of San Francisco and the tax property assessment tool it run on “a Cobol-based system called AS-400.” That quote might make you cringe, but Alex points out “the problem isn’t so much the platform, but the applications that run on it.” You can find the links to both articles below and have your own debate, as well as find links …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 10

  March 13, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  All you people looking for some PTF action, you have some stuff to keep you busy this week. So grab the coffee and let’s get going. First of all, there are new HIPERs for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3, as well as Database group PTFs for IBM i 7.3. And don’t forget to check the defectives below.

  As for new links in the IBM i PTF Guide sheet this week, try these on for size:

  • System: IBM Administration Runtime Expert (ARE) for i
  • PTF: Temporary Storage PTFs – All Releases

  And now, for your weekly tip: Before there …

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• Fifty Years Of Operating IBM Systems

  March 11, 2019 Bill Hansen

  The world is celebrating some important 50th anniversaries this year. My interests in aerospace and music led me to recall four events from 1969. The most famous event was the first manned moon landing in July, which occurred the same week that I turned 21. Two months before that was the first flight of the Concorde supersonic transport. I mark the beginning of the “summer of love” with the Woodstock concert, and its end with the tragic concert at Altamont Speedway. (Who knew that Hell’s Angels would not make great security guards?)

  For me, all of this pales in comparison …

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• The 1980s Were Great, Just Not for Business Computers, Apparently

  March 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Looking back, it’s plainly obvious that the 1980s were nothing short of awesome. It gave us the Space Shuttle, Van Halen, the fall of Communism, and the Dodge Caravan. The Internet went global, Star Wars went viral, and Super Mario introduced a generation of Generation Xers to video games. But apparently, when it comes to business computers, the decade was nothing sort of dreadful.

  At least that’s what we’re to believe from a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article titled America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the 1980s, published February 28. The story laments the travails of the City (and …

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• Guru: Manage Filters in RDi

  March 11, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  The longer you have been using Rational Developer for i (RDi), the longer the list of filters you are trying to manage. Maybe you have started to get clever with the naming of filters and/or you spend a lot of time using drag and drop to try and keep your filters in some kind of order.

  The good news is that RDi does provide a means of grouping filters — Filter Pools.

  This is a (very) cut down example of filters in my Remote Systems view. Let’s see how we can use Filter Pools to make this list more manageable. …

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• As I See It: The Corporate Perp Walk

  March 11, 2019 Victor Rozek

  Ever do the corporate perp walk? No, not the one with the handcuffs and the coat thrown over the wrists. That’s reserved for guys with lawyers who think the coat will distract us from the reality that their client is getting arrested. I mean the one reserved for the little guys where they give you a cardboard box for your stuff, 10 minutes to pack it, take your badge, and have security escort you in a walk of shame through the building while your colleagues pretend not to notice. Then they dump you at the curb like yesterday’s garbage, left …

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