• IBM Is Betting On The Power Of Cloud

  March 12, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  “Get your head into the clouds and get back to work!” If your boss has recently issued you this order, you are not alone. There was a time when being accused of having your head in the clouds meant you were spending too much time daydreaming and not enough time producing real work. But, according to a recent IBM study, the number of companies turning to cloud computing is expected to more than double in the next three years. The study, titled The Power of Cloud: Driving business model innovation, surveyed 572 business and technology executives worldwide. The goal

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• The New England Guide To IBM i

  March 12, 2012 Dan Burger

  The annual training and education event known as the Northeast User Groups Conference has been an IBM midrange tradition in New England. It draws primarily from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine. And it’s unique because it combines the several active local user groups from New England along with devoted volunteers from areas where local user groups no longer exist. This year’s conference is scheduled for April 2 through 4. As anyone who is connected with a local user group knows, it takes a group of dedicated volunteers to row the boat. In this case, they’ve been

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• Commenting Interactive Code

  March 7, 2012 Ted Holt

  The tips I regularly feature in this august publication deal with some aspect of source code syntax. Today I turn my attention to another part of the programming process. I want to talk about a work habit that you might find useful. I would say that everyone who writes any type of source code at all knows the importance of comments, but that would be incorrect. I have followed (and written) too much code that was inadequately commented. Effective comments in source code serve as a great boon to the humans who must read or modify source code. As Ashley

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• Interpreted CL Members

  March 7, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I am thinking of writing a program that will read a source member of CL commands, interpreting them and running them dynamically one at a time. I can think of several situations in which such a utility would be more suitable than compiled CL programs. Before I re-invent the wheel, I want to know if IBM i already has something like that. –Tom Yes, there’s something like that. You can do this sort of thing with input spooling. I’ve only used input spooling on occasion, so I’m not an expert, but I can show you how it works. Create a

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• Admin Alert: Getting Started With An i 6.1 Upgrade

  March 7, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  For the second time in two years, my organization is participating in a multi-partition/multi-machine i5/OS V5R4 operating system upgrade to i 6.1. The second time around is interesting because I can build on lessons from last year’s upgrades. In the hope that it can help you with your V5R4 to 6.1 upgrades, here are some of my notes for planning the upgrades. Deciding Between Upgrading To i 6.1 or i 7.1 With IBM dropping support for i5/OS V5R4 and the fact that Big Blue hasn’t released the i 8.x operating system yet, customers still have a choice whether to

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• Saddle Up, Pardner

  March 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It was almost a foregone conclusion, given its application-centric nature, that among all the various systems and servers that Big Blue has sold over the decades that the AS/400 and its progeny would be the platform most dependent on the reseller and software vendor communities that sprang up around it to sell it and create application software for it. IBM does not provide statistics about its Power Systems-IBM i business any more, but these business partners are still a key component of the ecosystem. Even if their several thousand numbers are dwarfed by the overall 121,000 business partners that IBM

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• Server Sales Slump A Little In Q4

  March 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Conspiracy theorists think that PC and server makers are making a little too much about the impact of the flooding in Thailand, which led to disk shortages and therefore lower than expected shipments of both PCs and servers in the waning months of 2011. But according to the analysts at Gartner, a shortage of disk drives was one of the contributing factors in a fourth quarter that was a little bit weaker than it might otherwise have been. Not that the situation was all that bad, particularly when measured up against the declines in server revenues and shipments during

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• RFID Looks Better Without The Hype

  March 5, 2012 Dan Burger

  As technology priorities go, RFID seems to be the cheese that slipped off the cracker. You may remember the projections for market adoption that were being tossed around five or six years ago that never came close to reality. As recently as two years ago, the marketing drums still beat loudly. Business focus on cost containment and risk avoidance put the double whammy on RFID. Didn’t kill it–activity can still be found in niches such as the apparel and electronics industries–but the drums are noticeably quieter. Maybe that’s a good thing, because it’s much easier to see the supply chain

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• As I See It: Unhappy Anniversary

  March 5, 2012 Victor Rozek

  There aren’t many days when I wake up deciding to annoy a lot of people. Nor is this one of them. But that’s the risk a writer takes when tackling any controversial subject: passions run high, tolerance runs low, and minds are usually made up before a single word is uttered. Over the years, few issues have been more polarizing than Affirmative Action, a program which is either: a) well-intended and successful, b) imperfect but still necessary, c) unfair and outdated, or d) outright racist, depending on your point of view. Like it or not, Affirmative Action has been part

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• SEC Investigation Weighs On JDA Software

  March 5, 2012 Alex Woodie

  An investigation into the revenue-recognition accounting practices of JDA Software caused the software company to miss the deadline for the filing of its annual report last week. JDA received a note of non-compliance from NASDAQ, which gave the software company 60 days to file the report. JDA disclosed that it was the subject of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a press release about its fiscal 2011 and fourth quarter financial results, which it posted in on January 31. The company says the SEC’s corporation finance and enforcement divisions are looking into JDA’s revenue recognition and

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