• Mobile Developers Battle Complexity, Deployment Time

  December 3, 2012 Dan Burger

  It is a simple and irreversible fact that application development teams are consumed by mobile computing. Smartphones and tablets have put the pressure on companies in the IBM midrange community (users of IBM i on Power Systems, i5/OS on iSeries, and OS/400 on AS/400s), where it is not far-fetched to say 50 percent are still dependent on the green-screen interface. A reluctance to convert at least some of their applications to a graphical interface is coming around to haunt them. Meanwhile, there are businesses, particularly start-ups, that recognize the power of the graphical user interface and that the need to

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• As I See It: How IT Decided The Election

  December 3, 2012 Victor Rozek

  In retrospect, analyzing wars to determine the exact tipping point for the victorious side is tricky business. There are multiple battles and often multiple fronts. Strategic decision making, tactical challenges, advantages in weaponry, motivation of the fighting force, and a hundred other factors all play a part. As, sometimes, does chance. Just deciding if divine favoritism played a part would be a subject of testy debate, although that advantage is usually claimed by the winner. The aftermath of elections loosely resembles the aftermath of wars, at least in the extensive postmortem analysis. Where victory and defeat are concerned, both sides

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• Excepting X86 Iron, Server Sales Continue To Slip In Q3

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It might be better for all parties concerned in the server racket if they didn’t stagger their new processor releases over the course of a year. But server processors are an increasingly complex thing to develop, the fabrication plants that make them are increasingly more expensive, and vendors have to slow down, get it right, and milk each chip generation for all it is worth. When the economy is running a little cool and chip makers are all in the middle of processor transitions, it is generally not going to cause server sales to go up. The late summer and

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• IBM To Charge For Lapsed Hardware Maintenance

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many years now, IBM has charged a maintenance after license fee if you have a bit of its software that you have let fall off Software Maintenance. This after license fee is basically back maintenance that IBM thinks it is entitled to because you didn’t help pay for the support costs for a period of time, but now you want all of the cumulative benefits of Software Maintenance again. Now, IBM is going to do a similar thing with hardware maintenance, and it is called a “reestablishment fee,” hyphen not included. As you can see in announcement letter 612-042

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• A BI On IBM i Partnership Blooms

  December 3, 2012 Dan Burger

  Executives love the idea of business intelligence. The promise is that it can quickly provide dividends, but that rarely happens. Why is that? In IBM midrange shops, the situation is no different than anywhere else. IT departments are understaffed and overworked. It doesn’t take a genius to see that when new projects are added someone has to have the time to implement them. The path to completed projects is often paved by service companies. The recent partnership between Coglin Mill and GEMKO is a good example. Coglin Mill is has an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool called RODIN for

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• IBM Extends And Tweaks Power Systems Deal In Europe

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has made a number of tweaks to a long-running deal that has been effect on Power Systems iron in Europe. Actually, it made a bunch of tweaks in the past several months, but they were just not obvious to us here at The Four Hundred up here in the Big Apple. (That would be me alone. Ah-hem.) In announcement letter ENUSZA12-1003, you can see all of the changes in the 2012 Power Trade In Program, which was extended to run until December 31 of this year back in July when the PowerLinux 7R2 machine was added

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• Going Mobile With Power Systems Feeds And Speeds

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to get your hands on the slots and watts and feeds and speeds of the Power Systems line, it turns out that there’s an app for that. And it doesn’t run on just Apple smartphones, either. It is called the Power Systems Quick Reference mobile app, and it was created by Velti, a mobile marketing company founded in 2000 in Greece. The Power Systems quick reference app comes in three versions: One for the Blackberry, one for the Apple iOS smartphone, and one for Android smartphones. I downloaded the app from the Google Play app catalog

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• You Have The Right To Remain Online

  December 3, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” . . . And access to the Internet. We should probably cut our Founding Fathers some slack on not including our right to surf the Web in the Declaration of Independence, but according to a new survey conducted by the Internet Society, access to the Internet should be considered a basic human right. The Global Internet User Survey gathered responses from more than 10,000

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• Write Your Own SCANRPL Built-In Function

  November 28, 2012 Bob Cozzi

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Until IBM i v7.1 has made a pervasive appearance on virtually all IBM systems, the cool new v7.1 updates to RPG IV are out of reach for many RPG developers. Fortunately, with IBM i v7.1, IBM has finally stopped “point release” updates to the RPG compiler, giving us the ability to use anything implemented on (for example) technology refresh 5 all the way back to TR1. Life is good for RPG developers today. If you’re a software developer or, like me, consulting with clients that have everything from

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• Glenn Wants To Know More Facts About Special Values

  November 28, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I found your article 10 Facts You Should Know about Special Values very interesting. I have a few questions related to a command I am writing. –Glenn I owe Glenn an apology. He is one of the many people whose email I never responded to. I’m sorry, Glenn. Sometimes life presents too many opportunities. Here’s Glenn’s first question: 1. If a user specifies *ALL for a parameter, how do you prevent the user from typing in other values? Fair enough. Define *ALL in the Single Value (SNGVAL) keyword, not in the Special Value (SPCVAL) keyword. CMD PROMPT('Do it') PARM KWD(RPTTYPE)

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