• Back To The Future With A New IBM i Logo

  April 12, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Brands only matter if a product survives in the market. And once a product does find its natural niche and has some longevity, there is an immediate tension between preserving that brand because it is what people are familiar with and updating that brand because of changes in the market or artistic taste or new media or just because the marketing people want to change stuff all the time sometimes because, well, that is what they do.

  No one has to tell customers of the System/38, er, System/36, er, AS/400, er, AS/400e, er iSeries, er System i, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 14

  April 12, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Apologies to all in the IBM i community for being late for putting together the IBM i PTF Guide last week. Sometimes real life interferes with business life, as you all know well. So this is a catch up issue of the Guide, with everything back on track with an update to get current coming out in this Wednesday’s issue of The Four Hundred.

  Editor’s Note: It goes without saying that we all owe a big hearty thanks to Doug Bidwell for his tireless efforts over many decades in keeping track of the patches for the firmware, operating …

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• When Cloud Meets DevOps on IBM i

  April 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  We’re witnessing multiple macro trends play out in the IT industry, with the rise of cloud computing and managed services being one of the most compelling storylines in 2021. How software is developed is changing too, with DevOps tools and agile methodologies rapidly becoming the norm. When these two trends converge in our little neck of the woods, it can leave IBM i customers wondering where to go. With their recently formed partnership, ARCAD Software and Connectria have mapped out one path.

  A decade ago, companies were still unsure of the cloud. They would dabble with adding development, test, and …

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• JD Edwards Roadmap Reveals Decisions To Be Made

  April 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  SAP isn’t the only ERP vendor that wants to move on-prem customers to its cloud-based option. Its top rival, Oracle, appears to have similar aims. The company has made public commitments to continue supporting its JD Edwards customers for years to come, so there is no immediate reason to panic. But considering the investments that customers make in their ERP environments, JD Edwards customers should pay close attention to what comes next.

  When Oracle bought PeopleSoft in 2004 for $10.3 billion, it also acquired the JD Edwards portfolio. That includes the World line, which only runs on IBM i, and …

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• IBM Completes Migration of Knowledge Center to IBM Documentation

  April 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  For years, the IBM Knowledge Center has been the go-to place to get technical information about how things work in IBM i. Got a question about RPG opcodes or ALLOBJ authority? The Knowledge Center was the place for you. As part of its broader overhaul of its online resources and properties, IBM recently completed the migration of its Knowledge Center to the new site, called IBM Documentation.

  IBM i professionals can find all of the content they have grown accustomed to finding at the Knowledge Center on the new IBM Documentation site, which can be found at www.ibm.com/docs/en. There …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 7

  April 7, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  Survive. Adapt. Thrive. Yes, that’s our tagline here in the IT Jungle. But it could also be the three best words to describe this last year since the beginning of the Great Pandemic. As parts of the U.S. and the world begin to re-open, much of the IT industry-related news is focusing on lessons learned and the changes organizations are their employees are making to keep everyone healthy and safe. The post-pandemic world is likely changed forever, with remote and in-person options becoming part of the norm. COMMON, for instance, is diving into this hybrid approach next month with its …

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• Crazy Idea Number 615: Variable Priced Power Systems Partitions

  April 5, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you stare down the blank page as much as I have in my career, you learn to not be afraid of that blank page. If you look at it long enough – usually for only a few minutes – ideas flip into existence like quantum particles spinning their curlicues. Most of them are silly, some are utterly useless, but eventually you get one that is worth following to see where it might go.

  So it is with an idea that popped into my head, which was a daydream about IBM creating variable priced partitions on the Power Systems machines. …

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• Do The Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting For Cost Savings

  April 5, 2021 Matt Paterini

  COVID-19 has accelerated certain business trends that were already gaining strength prior to the start of the pandemic. E-commerce, telehealth, and video conferencing are some of the most obvious examples. One example that may not be as obvious to the general public but has a profound impact on business is the shift in strategy of IBM i infrastructure from traditional, on-premises environments to some form of remote configuration. These remote configurations and all of their variations are broadly referred to in the community as IBM i hosting.

  “Hosting” in this context can mean different things to different people, and in …

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• Guru: Web Services, DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN, Part 1

  April 5, 2021 Jon Paris

  Many of the “Can you help me with. . . ” communications that cross my desk these days include reference to JSON. Sometimes the questioner is receiving JSON in a file, or has to retrieve it from a web service, or needs to generate JSON in response to a query. While there are many ways to handle these requirements, RPG’s built-in DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and are quite simple once you understand the basics.

  In this series of tips, I am going to start with a basic example that uses both …

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• Oracle Versus Rimini Slogs On In Second Decade

  April 5, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The lawsuit that keeps on giving, Oracle Versus Rimini Street, is generating news again, as the two companies continue to duke it out in federal court. But the battle spilled out into the streets with a pair of dueling press releases issued April 1 that had us wondering if it was all a joke. It wasn’t.

  The last time we visited Oracle Versus Rimini Street was two years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of Rimini on the issue of costs. After a jury decided that Rimini was violating Oracle’s copyright in its third-party software support business …

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