The Four Hundred Archives - Page 1053 of 1513

Mad Dog 21/21: Plane’s Peeking

March 3, 2008 Hesh Wiener

In computing, even the industry leaders can get hit with surprises coming from angles they never dreamed of. Sometimes these new ideas substantially change or extend the world of computing. These disruptive developments add new dimensions to information processing. And it’s often very hard for the established leaders to understand what is emerging before their eyes. This is a situation much like the one at the heart of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a short, witty novel about mathematics and Victorian society written by Edwin A. Abbott, a theologian and scholar. Ballmer, Palmisano, and you ought to

…

MetaRAM Quadruples DDR2 Memory Capacity in Servers

March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are a lot of different ways to skin a system design, but the one that has been favored by processor and system designers alike for the past three decades is to boost the clock speed on the processor as high as possible, make each clock do more work, and add layers and layers of progressively faster main memory to the box to keep those faster processors fed. There are a number of problems with this approach, and they have caused a performance and capacity gap between central processors and memory subsystems that is still not being properly addressed. But

…

IBM Readies Some Sort of System i Announcements at COMMON

March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The now annual COMMON midrange system user conference and vendor exposition will be held at the end of March and into early April in Nashville, Tennessee, and the user group wants people to stick around beyond April Fool’s Day for a big announcement from key executives within IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group.

Specifically, the notice up on the COMMON Web site says that Mark Shearer, currently vice president of marketing and offerings for the Business Systems division, and Ross Mauri, general manager of the Power Systems division, will jointly host a special town hall meeting on the morning April

…

Magic Software Continues Financial Turnaround in Q4

March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

System i application tool maker Magic Software Enterprises is continuing to get itself on a firmer financial footing as its ramps up product and services sales. Sales were up smartly in the fourth quarter, the company swung to a solid profit thanks to its sale of an application subsidiary.

In the fourth quarter ended December 31, Magic Software booked sales of $15.7 million, an increase of 13.8 percent from the year-ago period. In the fourth quarter of last year, Magic Software had an operating loss of $500,000 and managed to pull itself up to breakeven after a major restructuring as

…

Austrian Software Maker Sells Off i5/OS HR Applications

March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

An Austrian software development firm that dates back to 1968 and that was one of the innovators in the human resources application software market, Personal and Informatik, last week said that it has divested itself of its OS/400 and i5/OS human resources application, LOGA/400. Viennese IT services company Infoniqa Group will be taking over support for the product.

The mainframe and midrange application ecosystems used to be quite diverse and are quite old, and many of us outside of Austria, Switzerland, and Germany have probably never heard of P&I AG or its LOGA/400 HR applications. P&I has a complex

…

BluePhoenix Adds AS/400 Experience to Business Partner Program

March 3, 2008 Dan Burger

The business partner and strategic alliance program at BluePhoenix has added a heavy hitter to the lineup. Alan Zwiren, a former IBM channel executive responsible for worldwide information management channel sales has taken the position of vice president of partners and strategic alliance sales for the application modernization tools and services company. Zwiren is no stranger to the System i, which figures to be a positive factor for ASNA, the System i application tools vendor that was acquired by BluePhoenix in August 2007.

Zwiren is coming off seven years at Big Blue and is a 20-year veteran of the

…

IBM Ponies Up Another $15 Billion for Share Buybacks

March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Go ahead, call me stupid. Or old-fashioned. Or just plain Puritan. But I will never in a zillion years understand the logic of share buybacks–and especially those on a massive scale like IBM has undertaken since the mid-1990s. And last week, IBM’s board of directors authorized the company to shell out another $15 billion to buy back shares on the open market.

As IBM itself pointed out in its announcement of the share repurchase authorization, the company has bought back a staggering $94 billion in its own stock from 1995 through 2007 inclusive. IBM still has $400 million in buybacks

…

XAMPP: The PHP Developer’s Dream

February 27, 2008 Brian Kelly

This is the final installment in a series of four articles by Brian Kelly on PHP.

Regardless of whether your production server is a System i or a System p, or if you run x-Series servers, z-series mainframes, Solaris, or HP, your dream development machine for building dynamic PHP applications needs to have XAMPP from Apache Friends. XAMPP is a phenomenal integration package for the development components that just about every modern day Web developer requires, regardless of platform they work on.

The “X” in XAMPP stands for “operating system.” The rest of the acronym is: Apache, MySQL, PHP, and

…

Programmatically Retrieve Defined System i Names

February 27, 2008 Michael Sansoterra

In recent tips, I have discussed some of the useful client side tools that IBM has given to developers in the iSeries Access programmer’s toolkit for Windows. In this tip, I’d like to discuss how a Windows script or program can access all of the system names defined within iSeries Navigator (soon to be renamed System i Navigator).

In these days of multiple System i systems and LPARs, it is increasingly common to see multiple systems defined within iSeries Navigator. There are several scenarios where it would be useful to harvest this information for use within a program.

For example,

…

Admin Alert: Five Minutes to Moving System i Objects Between Partitions

February 27, 2008 Joe Hertvik

Administrators in multiple System i environments are frequently called upon to save and restore files from one i5/OS machine to another. Because you may not always remember the exact steps involved in performing a transfer, this week I’m presenting a five-minute cheat sheet that details every step you need to perform in order to easily save an object and move it to a companion machine via FTP.

The Basic Game Plan

When moving objects between System i partitions, there are five critical steps that you need to follow.