• Arrow Boosts ECS Sales Despite System Slowdown In Q3

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite an expected and somewhat abrupt drop off in server sales in the third quarter that most IT suppliers experienced, master reseller Arrow Electronics was nonetheless able to boost its sales of software and storage to compensate and post growth in its Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) group in the third quarter. However, overall revenues took a hit and profits took an even bigger dive in the quarter thanks to falling margins in ECS and components and falling revenues in components. In the quarter ended in September, Arrow had $4.96 billion in revenues, down 4.3 percent. Net income at the company

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• Agilysys Makes Dough From Hospitality And Services

  November 5, 2012 Dan Burger

  Led by an economic exclamation point in its hospitality business dominated by hotels and casinos, Agilysys found a way to make some revenue gains during the second quarter of its fiscal 2013 year ended in September. Agilysys reported a 9 percent year-over-year gain in its hospitality segment, which allowed the company to post a net revenue gain of 3 percent. A retail segment that was off 1 percent from the same quarter one year ago was a bit of drag total revenue, which inched ahead to $54.2 million. A summary of the first six months of 2013 shows the hospitality

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• IBM Pushes Moore’s Law Limits With Carbon Nanotube Transistors

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Silicon-based chip etching technologies are going to reach the lower limits of the atomic scale at some point, and chip equipment and chip designers are all looking out ahead into the future to try to come up with new technologies that will extend or replace current silicon-based chips so out electronics will get faster, more capacious, and less expensive over time, tracking with Moore’s Law. Scientists working at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, offer one possible tweak to current technology, having come up with a technique that will create chips based on carbon nanotubes, which offer better performance

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• Paging Doctor Watson

  November 5, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Last week, we told you about IBM‘s Watson supercomputer heading to college, and now comes news that Watson has aspirations in the medical field. While it is unlikely that Watson will be seeing patients any time soon, IBM researchers want to focus on Watson’s question answering technology, which enables the Jeopardy! champ to analyze the meaning and context of human language and quickly find important correlations between facts buried within huge volumes of data, ultimately assisting healthcare workers to make better decisions about patient care. Performing differential diagnosis–the kind of thing that House MD does with a mean

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• Running IBM i Access 7.1 and Windows 8

  October 31, 2012 Michael Sansoterra

  With the newly released Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, I wanted to test drive Windows 8 and use it on my primary computer if possible. However, I knew a potential stumbling block would be getting IBM i Access for Windows to function. So I set out to load IBM i Access 7.1 on Windows 8. While doing my research, I didn’t find anything on the IBM i Access for Windows website indicating general compatibility with Windows 8. In the past, the newest version of Windows has generally been a “no-go” until a Windows specific service pack is released. But,

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• Data Structures Make Good Status Parameters

  October 31, 2012 Ted Holt

  When a good program goes bad, someone must fix it. Sometimes that someone is me. As for the “when,” it’s never a good time. It’s important to me that the failing program give me as much information as possible to help me pinpoint the cause of the error as quickly as possible. There are two ways a program can inform its caller that it could not complete normally. One way is by sending a message. (I have written about this topic before; see the Related Stories at the end of this article.) The other way is to use a status

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• Changing Sub Tree Authorities In An IFS Folder

  October 31, 2012 Hey, Joe

  I need to change access authority for all the objects in a specific AS/400 Integrated File System (AS/400 IFS) folder and all its sub-folders. What’ the best way to do this? I’m running IBM i 6.1. –Pete Changing authorities for an IFS folder and its entire sub tree (objects and sub-folders) is a relatively easy task to accomplish. You just have to remember three things when updating this authority. You must change the folder’s authorities using the green-screen Change Authority (CHGAUT) command. I haven’t been able to find any way to change sub tree authorities in Systems i Navigator V7R1M

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• Thanks For The (Higher Priced) Memories?

  October 29, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM likes to talk sometimes about the convergence of the System i product line (running what was then i5/OS) and the System p product line as a relatively recent development, and dates the official name change to Power Systems back in April 2008. But we have longer memories than that here at The Four Hundred and we know that the first converged server was actually a “Northstar” server that came out in 1997 and that the convergence plans date from before then. I have nothing against convergence, even though I have been annoyed over the past decade and a half

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• Knowledge Is Power When Assessing Your IBM i Legacy

  October 29, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i platform can be both a blessing and a curse to you, the IBM i customer. While its integrated nature and reliability insulates you from tasks and expenses commonly faced by users of mainstream platforms, the “black box” and its longevity also tends to mask problems that may be lurking in your RPG code. So it’s not surprising that when you evaluate how to modernize your IT system, the lack of visibility into the inner workings of your system can lead to fear, panic, and, ultimately, uninformed decisions. It is interesting to note how the IBM i platform’s

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• Server Sales Hiccup Stalls Avnet In September Quarter, December Sobering Up

  October 29, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  System and component sales at master reseller Avnet took a pause in the fiscal quarter ended in September, catching the company’s top brass a bit unawares as the declines were larger than expected. You can blame the U.S. presidential election and the uncertainty surrounding that as well as the uncertainty in certain debt-laden countries in Europe, if that makes you feel better. IBM had some software sales slip in the third quarter in its emerging markets that made its numbers worse than expected, as The Four Hundred previously reported, but at the same time Big Blue’s System x, Power

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