• IT Spending Projections Revised A Smidgen Upward

  April 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The prognosticators at Gartner keep a constant eye on the state of the global economy and revenues each quarter at all of the publicly traded IT suppliers. So they are constantly adjusting their projections for IT spending, and last week, the company did it again. Luckily for all of us, the news is thumbs up instead of thumbs down. According to the IT spending models developed under the guidance of Richard Gordon, managing vice president at the company, global IT spending as measured in U.S. dollars will rise by 3.2 percent to $3.771 trillion. This is a tad bit higher

  …

  Read more

• As I See It: Ned Ludd Has Left the Building

  April 7, 2014 Victor Rozek

  Although historians are much too stuffy to admit such things, it was the desire for sex that launched the Industrial Revolution. And contrary to accepted thinking, it all started about 200 years earlier than the dry retelling of history would have us believe. As earth-shaking occurrences go, it was surely unintended, a solution to a private problem that, one could say, went viral. And although the event has been relegated to historic footnote status, it is worth recounting because it also spawned a notable oddity: a Luddite of royal lineage. The year was 1589 and the Reverend William Lee was

  …

  Read more

• Investment In Skills Lacks Incentives

  April 7, 2014 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s Global Skills Initiative, a plan to transition the training and education associated with IBM hardware and software to a select group of IBM business partners, was launched last July with four partners and a goal of tripling the number of people receiving IBM training by the end of 2015. Since that time, the global rollout has one geography, Latin America, that is yet to be onboard, and the original four partners, Arrow Electronics, Avnet, Global Knowledge, and LearnQuest, has grown to five with the addition of Ingram Micro. IBM only added Ingram Micro

  …

  Read more

• GlobalFoundries Is The Front Runner To Buy IBM Chip Biz

  April 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the rumor mill is correct–and stories with concrete details that appear in the Wall Street Journal usually are–then it looks like IBM is one step closer to selling off its chip manufacturing business. And it looks like GlobalFoundries, the former chip-making arm of Advanced Micro Devices that is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, is the front-runner to acquire the business. According to a report in the WSJ last week, Intel and GlobalFoundries are in discussions with Big Blue to acquire its chip making unit, IBM Microelectronics, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, which is another

  …

  Read more

• A Mixed Bag For IT In The Latest Jobs Report

  April 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The economy in the United States is plugging along but not really zooming ahead if job creation is any measure of a real recovery. In March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the part of the Department of Labor that tracks employment statistics and comes up with the official unemployment rate, reckons that the economy added 192,000 net new workers. That is just shy of the 200,000 to 250,000 workers that the economy has to create to keep up with population growth. According to the latest report from the BLS, the number of people who were unemployed in the United

  …

  Read more

• Penton Media’s IBM i Sites Cease Publication

  April 7, 2014 Dan Burger

  Penton Media has discontinued its two digital publications for the IBM i community–iProDeveloper and Power IT Pro. iProDeveloper was a website with technical content for developers on the IBM midrange systems known as the IBM i, System i, iSeries, and AS/400. Prior to the digital version of iProDeveloper, there was a printed magazine version previously titled System iNews, iSeries News, and News/400. Power IT Pro was a website that expanded the IBM i technical content to include the Power Systems family that includes AIX and PureSystems. Contributors to the two publications were informed of

  …

  Read more

• Engage The Brain At Toronto IBM i Tech Conference

  April 7, 2014 Dan Burger

  There are IBM midrange companies that strategize and even prioritize plans for strengthening their IT workforces with the intention of improving business processes and solving business problems. If you attend an event like the Toronto User Group‘s annual two-day technical conference April 24 and 25, you find people who work for those companies learning to use IBM i and Power Systems like its 2014 instead of 1994. If you are sitting on the sidelines, 20 years of IT innovation is a long time to be out of the game. We all recognize the challenges presented by budget cuts, diminished

  …

  Read more

• IBM Names 11 Fellows As Analytics Dominates Discussion

  April 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM unveiled its latest crop of Fellows last week, eight men and three women who’s technical achievement brought them the honor. None of the newly minted Fellows worked directly with IBM i, Power Systems, or the Rochester, Minnesota lab, as many of the this year’s Fellows are leaders in analytics and related fields. Thomas Watson created the IBM Fellows program 51 years ago to reward the exceptional achievement of scientists, engineers, and developers. Over that time, only 257 IBMers have received the distinction, and just 87 of them are still with the company. This year’s banner crop of Fellows has

  …

  Read more

• Embedded SQL Exception/Error Handling

  April 2, 2014 Paul Tuohy

  At times, I wish embedded SQL would act more like RPG. A case in point is with exception/error handling. Embedded SQL assumes you are using SQLCODE or SQLSTATE to check whether or not each statement worked. In RPG, the equivalent would be have an E extender on every file operation code and checking the %error() after the operation code. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get embedded SQL to cause the program to fail if it gets an unexpected error–just like RPG? Well, you can, just by adding one line of code after each SQL statement. Figure 1 shows

  …

  Read more

• Search Source Members For Two Or More Strings

  April 2, 2014 Hey, Ted

  I have used option 25 of the Work with Members Using PDM (WRKMBRPDM) for years to look for character strings in source physical file members. Is there a way to search for two or more strings at once? –T. It’s not possible with that option. You might want to use option -e of Qshell’s grep utility. Let’s say you want to find all instances of invnbr and invoicenumber in source physical file SRC in library TST. Here’s the command you would need to use: $ grep -in -e 'invnbr > invoicenumber > ' /qsys.lib/tst.lib/src.file/* The first, third, and fifth lines

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles