• Love – And Business – In The Time Of Coronavirus

  March 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are shaped by bad times as much as good ones. Maybe more.

  Some of my earliest memories as an aware young person are of the effects of recession on my parents when they were young people working in the factories of New Jersey. And when I say young, I mean we were all young at the time. Both of my parents lost their jobs in the recession of 1960 through 1970, and they lost them again during the much worse recession from 1973 through 1975. It was scary for me and my siblings, but obviously even scarier …

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• Coronavirus Takes Its Toll On The Midrange

  March 23, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i midrange community has lived through a lot: hurricanes, fires, global recessions, and even terrorist attacks. And now it can add “viral pandemic” to the list of external events impacting the day-to-day operations of IBM i shops around the world, not to mention the cancellation of nearly all in-person meetings and conferences for the next two months.

  As the national reels from the spread of the novel coronavirus and the pneumonia-like disease that it causes, the IBM i midrange community has been forced to make substantial changes to its daily operations. For many office workers, that means forgoing …

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• Guru: Maximum Number Of Jobs And Job Table Warning Customization

  March 23, 2020 Dawn May

  The QMAXJOB system value specifies the maximum number of jobs that can exist on your IBM i partition. The default value is 163,520, with the valid range being 32,000 through 970,000. If you reach the maximum number of jobs as defined by this system value, very bad things can happen to your system. You can always sign on to the console as the system reserves one job table entry for the console, but if you hit the limit on the maximum number of jobs, you will not be able to start any new jobs. In the worst case, it will …

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• COVID-19 Response: Fresche Donates Presto Licenses, Uncaps User Fees For Access To IBM i Apps

  March 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Web application development tools have suddenly become much more important in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, and Fresche Solutions, arguably the largest third-party software development tool provider in the IBM i market, wants to help companies with cope with remote workforces.

  Like other companies worldwide, Fresche has the majority of its employees working from home during the quarantines that are in effect to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and they are also capable of supporting customers whose end users, programmers, and system administrators are also working from home.

  But this is not enough, and Fresche knows this. To …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 12

  March 23, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  It is a quiet in IBM i PTF Land this week, and that is to be expected with the coronavirus outbreak finally – and very regretfully but not unexpectedly – making its way around the global. But we will continue to put out the IBM i PTF Guide like clockwork because keeping mission critical systems up to date and humming along is more important than ever, even if the volume of business for most companies is, at this point with few exceptions, hard to guess.

  We are here to help, and if you run into trouble on your systems because …

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• Inside The ISV Revitalization Initiative For IBM i

  March 16, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server’s strengths are well known: integration, ease of programming, ease of administration, security, resiliency, and a penchant for putting up with abuse. But aside from the platform’s attributes, another factor in IBM i’s favor is the community of independent software vendors (ISVs) who write business applications. To bolster this strength, IBM recently embarked upon an ISV revitalization initiative, and it wants IBM i ISVs to know all about it.

  In many ways, applications are the face of the platform. It was fairly common for companies to select a business application, such as MRP, ERP, supply chain execution, …

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• The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More

  March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …

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• Guru: SQL Can Generate A Series

  March 16, 2020 Ted Holt

  Most of my work is run-of-the-mill, same-old-same-old, more-of-the-same. I’m not complaining. Most of life is mundane and routine, and that’s as it should be. Too much icing ruins the cake. But sometimes I get a challenge, and when that happens, programming can be fun.

  Today’s article comes out of such an experience. I needed a table with a week’s worth of dates in it. I could have written an RPG program, but I knew that SQL could handle the task. Today I’ll show you a couple of methods that you can use to generate a series of whole numbers and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 16

  March 16, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  Social distancing isn’t a new concept for the staff of IT Jungle. We all work remote so we don’t get to spend time together in an office. (Don’t get me wrong. We like each other and wish we could see each other more often.) What is new for all of us is how to continue to operate as we shelter in place and wait to see what happens next. It might seem like our industry would be ideal for social distancing, but losing the opportunity to collaborate in the office or at a tradeshow or other event is sure to …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 11

  March 16, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  It is hard to say what effect the coronavirus outbreak will have on the release of PTFs for the several IBM i releases in the field, and the regular pattern of updates that customers are used to. But so far, things are operating as normal, and there have been some updates. This being software and not requiring travel by any parties – and indeed, systems could be remotely patched by administrators working from home if need be.

  And here is the rundown by IBM i release:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • SAP support required PTF list
  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0

  …

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