• Mad Dog 21/21: Oy, Cloudy Us!

  October 19, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  Enterprising folk whose livelihood is derived from the applications of hydroponics technology to cannabis farming will find some excellent clues to opportunity in the October 10 New York Times or right on IBM’s own Website. In both places, IBM makes its pitch for what it calls smart cities. One featured burg is Dubuque, Iowa, where electronic gadgets will soon replace all the municipal employees who read power and water meters. Jump those meters and nobody’s going to stumble onto your skunk farm. IBM calls this brainstorm Smart Cities, and does it so deftly that even a good reporter who

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• IBM Slashes i Compiler and Rational Tool Prices

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like IBM‘s Software Group has finally figured out that pricing on compiler software that used to come bundled on AS/400s in the operating system is a sticking point for customers who want to upgrade to modern Power Systems i machinery and the i 6.1 operating system. And to boost sales in the fourth quarter, Big Blue is giving shops a pretty good rebate on the i compiler sets, provided they agree to also take some Rational Developer for i companion tools as part of the deal. With the Rational Developer for i and WebSphere Development Studio for

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• Reader Feedback on Sundry Recent Stories

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We got some more feedback on the core, thread, and parallelism issue that I brought up in The Four Hundred, which I thought I would share with you. I don’t claim to have all the angles covered, and readers seem to understand that I was just bringing up a potential problem I see on the horizon as the Power7 chips are packed with lots of threads and cores. We also got some feedback on the iManifest effort in the United States and Big Blue’s big bet on the mainframe in April 1964. Feedback on Moore’s Law and the Performance

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• MCS Buys Barsa Distribution Systems

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Maximum Computer Systems has announced that it has acquired the Power Systems and System x server and application and systems software distribution business of Barsa Consulting. Barsa Consulting is, of course, the Purchase, New York, AS/400 consulting and distribution business founded by Al Barsa, who passed away in April 2008 while at the COMMON midrange trade show. Since that time, Barsa Consulting has continued to operate, with Al’s wife, Sue Barsa, serving as president. Being a privately held company, Barsa Consulting was pretty quiet about its own business, but in a statement put out by MCS, which has acquired

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• Big Blue Pushes for Patent Law Reforms

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in August 2006, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, chairman of the Intellectual Property Subcommittee, proposed a sweeping and supposedly bipartisan patent reform bill. And this past April, after years of wrangling by industry giants and their lobbyists, that bill was voted on by the committee and approved by a vote of 15 to 4. And now it is stalled in the Senate, and last week IBM tried to kick start it again. The original Senate bill, S1145, which you can read about

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• IBM’s Server GM Caught in Insider Trading Net

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You can really tell who hasn’t watched The Wire. You just can’t use communication technology if you want to get away with a crime, and you really can’t trust anyone. The problem is, technology becomes invisible, and sometimes people forget they are using it. This is one of the reasons why Bob Moffat, senior vice president and general manager of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group, has been caught up in a stunning insider trading scandal centered around one hedge fund and another equity fund. He was implicated through the use of wiretaps as part of an FBI investigation.

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• Rocket Software Raises $91.9 Million Through Equity Sale

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like Rocket Software is building up a war chest to do more acquisitions. According to a filing last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Rocket Software sold a $91.9 million equity stake into itself. And according to the filing, Rocket Software is saying that under rule 506 of the SEC rules, it does not have to disclose who it sold equity to. This rule allows a company to issue securities with no upper limit in their value to up to 35 “unsophisticated investors” plus an unlimited number of “accredited investors.” (What a strange rule. Do whatever you

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• Gartner Ranks the Managed File Transfer Products

  October 16, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Organizations looking to buy and implement a managed file transfer (MFT) product to drive better security and governance of file transfer activities may want to consult the recent Gartner report on the product category. In its September Magic Quadrant, the analyst group sliced and diced nearly four dozen vendors and their MFT offerings. As expected, the vendors that Gartner considers leaders, including Axway and Proginet, touted their place in the rankings. MFT refers to a relatively new class of products that are designed to manage, secure, centralize, and automate the transfer of files inside and outside of an organization.

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• Getting the Message, Part 1

  October 14, 2009 Paul Tuohy

  When we look at modernizing (or writing new) applications, one of the basic principles is to tier the application, i.e., separate the interface, the business logic, and the database processing. The concept is that any of the components can be changed without affecting the others and, more importantly, you can have multiple interfaces making use of the same business logic and database routines. That’s all well and good, but there are a couple of minor hiccups that have to be handled. What happens when a business logic or database routine hits an error? How does it notify the interface that

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• How Do I Find What’s Not There?

  October 14, 2009 Hey, Ted

  Our inventory items are assigned seven-digit numbers. When we accept an order for a custom product, we assign it a number, build the product, ship it, and retire the number. After a few years, the system automatically purges these numbers, which means we are free to reuse these numbers. Is there a way to make an SQL query find the numbers within a range that are not assigned to items? –Tim I’ll give you a method that works at V5R4 or above, Tim. Let’s say your database file is IBM‘s famous QIWS/QCUSTCDT, and that you want to find available

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