TFH Volume: 30 Issue: 22 Archives

Big Blue Changes Gears Slightly With IBM i TR Plan

April 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

The coronavirus has infected over a million people around the globe and forced hundreds of millions of employees to work from home. But it won’t stop IBM from announcing the next batch of Technology Refreshes, ostensibly IBM i version 7.4 TR2 and IBM i version 7.3 TR8, sometime in the next couple of weeks. Its plans for sharing the information, however, have changed.

IBM has essentially shuttered its lab in Rochester, Minnesota, which falls under that state’s social distancing orders to help prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. More than 80 percent of the United States is …
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The IT Sector Could Weather The Pandemic Storm

April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has been a rough couple of weeks for absorbing exponential data. It is astounding has fast the Great Infection, my term for the combination of the coronavirus outbreak and the reprise of the Great Recession that it looks like it is causing, is upon us. Nearly 10 million people have lost their jobs in two weeks, and my guess is that will more than double again next week and keep building from there, perhaps quadruple until we go from 3.5 percent unemployment in the United States to maybe 15 percent or so.

The hope is that this is temporary, …
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Guru: SQL Checks For Control Breaks

April 6, 2020 Ted Holt

A control break occurs when the combined value of one or more fields changes from one row (record) to the next when reading a data set sequentially. I used to write RPG programs with control breaks often. Now that reports are less common, I write them less often, but that’s not to say I never write a program with control breaks.

When I first learned to handle control breaks in RPG, I used the L1 through L9 level indicators. These worked wonderfully and fed my family for several years. When I moved from the System/36 world to the S/38 (and …
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Unperspective: To Which Side Do You Belong?

April 6, 2020 Trevor Perry

I recently presented one of my motivational life/work balance keynote sessions to a small group. If you’ve attended one of my sessions, you’ll know I hand out crayons and paper for audiences. We use these to engage the audience in drawing and writing (poetry), with a simple premise – now you are an artist and a writer. You came to my session with fewer skills than when you left.

Of course, there are many audience members who grumble about the concept of being “forced” to use a crayon – after all, crayons are for kids. It’s an opportunity to point …
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Final IBM i Software Maintenance Price Increases Released

April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in early March, we told you that Big Blue was getting set to raise the prices it charges for Software Maintenance, short-handed down to SWMA and pronounced “swamma.” We had some estimated pricing, and on March 30, in an updated announcement letter 320-089, IBM released the updated price increases.

They are a bit different from the pricing that we saw in IBM’s initial presentations warning customers about the price increase, and the updated announcement has a spreadsheet that shows all of the different SKUs for SWMA for the P05, P10, P20, P30, P40, P50, and P60 software tiers. …
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Big Blue Changes Gears Slightly With IBM i TR Plan

The IT Sector Could Weather The Pandemic Storm

Guru: SQL Checks For Control Breaks

Unperspective: To Which Side Do You Belong?

Final IBM i Software Maintenance Price Increases Released

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