• Four Hundred Monitor, August 22

  August 22, 2018 Dan Burger

  Power9 continues to grab headlines this week, inside and outside the Jungle, as the number crunchers continue to wonder if IBM’s latest release will result in continued good fortune (and good revenue reporting) for Big Blue. AI also stays on the hot topic list, bringing up some interesting (and maybe scary) theories for the future. But using data to your advantage can pay off big dividends and recruiters are starting to look for new ways to find the right talent for the job (think: Moneyball). Surprisingly COBOL popped up on our news radar this week with a refreshing look at …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 33

  August 22, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  This week in IBM i PTF Land is sponsored by snakes. Pythons to be specific. To be more precise, there are vulnerabilities in Python that make it susceptible to denial of service attacks.

  Here are the fixes to take care of that. Release 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 have the same number PTF applicable for all three OS releases:

  • 5733OPS Option 2 SI68164
  • 5733OPS Option 4 SI67937

  Release 7.2 and 7.3 support Python version 2.7/3.6 in the RPM format. You can find out more at this link.

  New links this week in the IBM i PTF Guide:

  • Cannot Save

  …

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• Drilling Down Into The Power E980

  August 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On August 7, IBM announced the two machines that are based on the “Cumulus” scale-up versions of the Power9 processors – the Power E950 midrange box that scales up to four sockets and the Power E980 big iron machine that scales up to 16 sockets. The IBM i platform is not available on the Power E950, so IBM i customers who need more than a two-socket Power9 machine to support their workloads have to make a jump to a single-node implementation of the Power E980.

  This is the same situation that customers faced during the Power8 era, so it is …

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• In Support Of IBM i Technical Competence

  August 20, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The lack of IBM i skills in the midrange community has been debated at great length, in this publication and other venues. Whether there’s a critical shortage of IBM i skills or not, nobody will argue with the fact that it’s important to keep one’s technical abilities up-to-date, which is the focus of a new educational outfit calling itself IBM i Competence that’s holding its first official event this week in Scandinavia.

  IBM i Competence was founded by Power Systems Champion Torbjörn Appehl earlier this year with the goal of providing targeted educational sessions on specific IBM i topics for …

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• Guru: Make It Easy On Someone Else

  August 20, 2018 Ted Holt

  “Make it easy on yourself,” warbled Dionne Warwick when I was just a pup. That may be good advice when severing a romantic relationship, but not when programming computers. Instead of making it easy on ourselves, we who develop and support applications need to make it easy on the people we serve.

  Recently I worked on a project in which users had to enter time values into various Web pages. The original specifications stated that users would enter time values in a format we commonly use in the United States: two-digit hour, a colon, two-digit minute, a space, …

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• GDPR Compliance On IBM i A Work In Progress, Survey Finds

  August 20, 2018 Alex Woodie

  About 50 percent of IBM i shops say they’re compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to a recent survey by SoftLanding Systems. However, about a quarter of survey respondents say they have a way to go before they’re confident in their GDPR preparedness, the IBM i vendor says.

  GDPR, which went into effect on May 25, made big changes to laws governing how companies and other organizations are allowed to collect, process, and store data about European Union citizens. While not every American firm is required to adhere to GDPR, those that do business with …

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• Address Those Fears And Move Your IBM i Workloads To The Cloud

  August 20, 2018 Clayton Weise

  You know the facts. Managing IBM i installations takes specialized skills and knowledge. In fact, many companies keep IBM i experts on staff, even though the amount of IBM i work they have may be sporadic. At the same time, the workforce capable of managing IBM i installations has been shrinking.

  For these reasons, and many others, moving IBM i workloads to a cloud environment managed by specialized talent has become an attractive option. The aggravation savings alone can make it worthwhile, and that’s before adding in the other benefits of the cloud, like cost savings, security, and scalability.

  Yet, …

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• IBM i Gets The Big Power9 Iron, But Not The Midrange

  August 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  First of all, let me apologize for not getting to this story last week, but I had a bunch of personal stuff going on and frankly, it is still going on. To eliminate the mystery, I will tell you the big part, which is that I was preparing to get married, then got married, and then tried to take a short honeymoon out in the mountains, and I did not expect for IBM to try to announce the last of the Power9 servers smack dab in the middle of all that.

  But on August 7, IBM did just that. For …

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• Latest IBM i TRs To Ship Next Month

  August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM unveiled a pair of out-of-bound technology refreshes (TRs) for the IBM i operating system last week. In addition to supporting the new Power Systems E980 server, IBM i 7.3 TR5 and 7.2 TR9 bring a set of enhancements to the platform’s database, development tools, and the administrative interface.

  The IBM i installed base has grown accustomed to seeing operating system updates in the spring and the fall. This twice-a-year pattern has been with us, more or less, since IBM shifted to the TR approach several years ago. But IBM broke with that tradition last week when it announced that …

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• Visual LANSA Goes Low-Code With High Tech Update

  August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  As one of the original advocates of fourth-generation language (4GLs), LANSA knows a thing or two about the value of abstraction layers. While the hype around 4GLs has long since passed, LANSA continues to build on its foundation with new features aimed at keeping customers ahead of the technology curve. That work is on display with the recent update to its “low-code” environment, Visual LANSA version 14 SP2.

  Visual LANSA is LANSA‘s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for creating modern graphical applications. The IDE employs numerous techniques to minimize the amount of Rapid Development and Maintenance Language (RDML, its …

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