• Four Hundred Monitor, October 2

  October 2, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  Each week, it seems like we point to far too many articles about data breaches and other types of cybercrime. So this week it is nice to be able to direct your attention to some positive news on the cybercrime front. IBM has launched a program to help cities learn how to protect citizens and businesses from those criminals lurking in the interweb. In the first article below, you can read more about a new project IBM has started with the City of Los Angeles better prepare and defend against cyberattacks. It’s a step in the right direction for getting …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 39

  October 2, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  First up in this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, there is a new Security Bulletin for multiple vulnerabilities in Node.js that affect the IBM i operating system. See this link here for details. There are not PTFs for these vulnerabilities as yet, so just install the latest RPM of Node.js as a precaution.

  What else is new this week? We have added a “Prtr Links” tab to guide, so check it out. Our thanks to Bryce out in Portland for this recommendation.

  New (or Updated) Links this week:

  • JAVA: Using WRKJVMJOB to Dump JVM Data on the IBM i

  …

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• Power9 Prime Previews Future Power10 Memory Boost

  September 30, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Customers who are deploying Linux on Power Systems iron from Big Blue are about to get a very substantial boost in memory bandwidth as IBM is getting ready to launch the Power9’ (that’s a prime symbol, not an apostrophe or a typo, after the 9) processor. As we previewed back in March 2018, the Power9’ chip will feature a substantially upgraded memory subsystem that has a new, faster SERDES signaling technology, normally used for various kinds of system and accelerator interconnect, that has been tweaked to support memory buffers and therefore DDR4 and future memories.

  There is no technical …

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• IBM i Startup Tackles “Awkward” Git Integration

  September 30, 2019 Alex Woodie

  If you have ever felt that working with Git on the IBM i platform was a little awkward and could be refined to fit your native IBM i development experience on RDi or SEU just a bit better, then you might be interested in learning about a new utility called iForGit that was recently released by IBM midrange veteran Richard Schoen and his new startup, MobiGoGo.

  Git came to the IBM i three years ago, and there’s no denying that it has been a hit. Since Linux developer Linus Torvalds released it nearly a decade-and-a-half ago, the open source …

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• Guru: MERGE, Chicken, And Eggs

  September 30, 2019 Ted Holt

  Which came first: the chicken or the egg? I don’t have time to ponder such trivialities. However, I am glad to know that SQL has a way to help me with chicken-and-egg database updates, i.e., when two statements need to run but each politely needs for the other to go first.

  Suppose you support an IBM i system that keeps up with inventory. It has an item master table (physical file) that stores general information such as a description, the standard cost, and the list price of an item.

  create table ItemMaster
    (ItemNumber     char(6),
     Revision       dec(3),
     Description    char(20),
     Cost           dec(5,2),
     

  …

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• As I See It: De-Meritocracy

  September 30, 2019 Victor Rozek

  I don’t recall high school being a particularly joyous experience, but it wasn’t debilitating either. It was mostly leaden, with an occasional splash of color, spiced with alternating doses of bravado, awkwardness, and frustration. It wasn’t optimal, but it seems remarkably benign compared to today’s reality. A recent study of kids in an affluent Silicon Valley high school “found that 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.”

  Beyond the very real anxiety-inducing possibility of getting shot in the classroom, Daniel Markovits has another explanation for the …

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• Hyperconverged Takes The Mantle Of Integrated Systems

  September 30, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes IBM sets the trends in the midrange, and sometimes it bucks them. The AS/400 was, in many respects, an integrated system and a hyperconverged system long before those words were ever used, but the way its storage and networking is architected, you could argue that the platform that it has fallen outside of these definitions. But as many expected, integrated systems in many different flavors have found favor in the datacenters of the world, and predominately at what in the past would have been midrange shops running proprietary minicomputers.

  According to the latest research by IDC, sales of converged …

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• VAI Keeps Rolling with ERP Update, Cloud and SaaS Sales

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  “Scintillating growth” may not be the best words to describe the market for IBM i-based ERP software these days. But don’t tell that to the folks at VAI, who continue to develop compelling ERP software and grow its installed base, particularly on the cloud and software as a service (SaaS).

  For decades, VAI has been one of the go-to ERP providers for midsize firms in manufacturing, distribution, retail, and services. Its IBM i-based suite of software, S2K Enterprise, is trusted by hundreds of companies around North America. While many of its competitors on the platform have folded or been snapped …

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• What’s New With IBM i Customer Support

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM is making big changes to its support program that will have a major impact on how IBM i customers interact with Big Blue, for both software and hardware support. Two weeks ago it announced that IBM i customers would be switched over from the old IBM Service Request tool to the new IBM My Support site. IBM is also expanding support for open source software on IBM i.

  IBM has been testing the new IBM Support site, www.ibm.com/mysupport, for over a year for various customer groups and geographies. On September 14, the company announced that it was cutting …

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• ARCAD Unveils GUI Modernization Tool

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  ARCAD Software is getting deeper into the application modernization business with the launch of iNow, a new tool designed to help IBM i users create compelling graphical user interfaces (GUI) that run across Windows, Web, and mobile form factors. The new offering, which is based on Microsoft .NET and utilizes Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) technology, is being sold as part of a new suite called ARCAD for IBM i Modernization.

  IBM i shops have been adapting their applications to Windows interfaces for the better part of 30 years, to the Web for about 20 years, and to mobile interfaces for …

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