The Four Hundred Archives - Page 925 of 1515

As I See It: Expectations of Immediacy

May 26, 2009 Victor Rozek

In 1860, a revolutionary multi-species information delivery system was unveiled in St. Joseph, Missouri. Its creators were honest enough to name their enterprise after the harder-working species in the joint venture and called it the Pony Express. The system included 190 stations spaced approximately 10 miles apart–about as far as a horse could run at full gallop–and spanned some 2,000 miles between Missouri and California.

Some 183 riders and 400 horses carried mail between St. Joseph and Sacramento, capturing the imagination of a nation eager for more immediate news from its western frontier. Immediacy, however, is contextual and at that

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Bad Economy Means No Vacation for Many Americans

May 26, 2009 Alex Woodie

Yesterday was Memorial Day, the unofficial kick-off for the summer season. But that doesn’t mean everybody will be “going on holiday” this year, as the Europeans like to put it. In the United States, the poor economy is putting the kibosh on many American families’ vacation plans. Some simply can’t afford vacations, some are worried their jobs won’t be there when they return, while still others could go but go but are electing not to because of a newly discovered malady called Guilty Vacation Syndrome (GVS), according to surveys.

Every year, Internet job site CareerBuilder conducts a public opinion survey

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Energy Star Ratings for Servers, Release 1.0

May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past several years, the Environmental Protection Agency has been working with the server makers of the world to come up with Energy Star ratings–you know, those yellow tags that help you figure out which appliances are energy efficient and therefore save you money over the long run–for servers.

Last week, the EPA rolled out the release 1.0 of the Energy Star for Servers specification, which is the first serious step on the long road to doing green analysis on the gear that goes into data centers. As readers of The Four Hundred well know, I am big on

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IBM Does More Deals to Move Iron

May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The price cutting and tweaking on hardware by IBM for gear relating to its Power Systems boxes continued last week.

Most importantly, Big Blue cut the prices it charges on selected feature conversions in its Power 595 line, and some of the price cuts were pretty dramatic, obviously intended to make it more likely that customers with these big iron boxes spend a little money rather than waiting for the next budget cycle. Here’s the details on the price changes, complete with the feature conversion descriptions that IBM never gives in its announcement letters:

Machine

From

List Price

Price

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Distributors Arrow and Avnet Deal with the Meltdown

May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The server makers of the world have all been slammed by the economic downturn, and by definition that means that their distributor partners are having a tough time, too. But all things considered, they seem to be holding up pretty well.

IBM‘s two master resellers, and the ones who do the selling downstream to myriad resellers who in turn interface with customers, are Arrow Electronics and Avnet. Let’s take at look at their most recent financials in alphabetical order so there’s no fighting here on the pages of The Four Hundred between these fierce and long-time rivals.

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Ready for an Attitude Adjustment? Visit YiPs Sandbox and Try webERP

May 26, 2009 Dan Burger

You don’t hear people dismissing open source software as a fad, a farce, or an IT freak of nature so much these days. Open source used to be a topic that enterprise systems administrators would joke about. It’s not so funny, and it’s not so freakish, anymore. And that’s not to say the switch to open source software has been flipped to the ON position. This is an evolutionary process and it has evolved to the point that acceptability is much more widespread than it was even a year ago, let alone three or four years ago.

A week ago,

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COMMON Europe Needs Your Input on Top i Concerns

May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back on April 27, just as the COMMON midrange conference and expo was underway in Reno, Nevada, I told you that COMMON Europe, its European counterpart, was undertaking two surveys to try to gather up input from the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i community to try to influence the decisions that IBM is making about the i platform.

You can–and should–take the i Top Concerns survey of AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i shops, which is open to all i shops, not just those located in Europe; the online form is here in Deutsch,

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Faster Fetching

May 20, 2009 Hey, Ted

When using embedded SQL to read data, I have the option of retrieving one row or multiple rows with one fetch. Does fetching more than one row at a time improve program performance?

–Neil

I’d like to think it does, Neil. It seems to me it should. Here are the comments of John, a reader who claims that a multiple-row fetch is appreciably faster.

I have used fetch with multiple-occurrence data structures in order to read multiple records at once and minimize the use of FETCH in the program. The execution of a FETCH is quite resource intensive and slow.

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A Bevy of BIFs: %Dec to the Rescue

May 20, 2009 Susan Gantner

More and more in RPG applications these days, it seems we need to process data that comes from “the dark side.” Translation: from a non-i system. This data could be coming from a browser screen via an RPG CGI program, from a CSV (comma-separated values) flat file, from an XML document, or myriad other ways. One thing these dark sources often have in common is that data that should be numeric often isn’t–at least not by RPG’s definition. So common is the issue of invalid numeric data that one of the recommendations from IBM on using the XML-INTO operation code

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Admin Alert: Four Ways to Encrypt i5/OS Backups, Part 2

May 20, 2009 Joe Hertvik

In the last Admin Alert, I started discussing four techniques for encrypting i5/OS backups for greater protection and to satisfy auditors and government agencies. Last week, I focused on software techniques. This week, I’ll turn my attention to hardware-based encryption techniques. I’ll look at what options are available when you purchase specific hardware for your system and how those devices affect your backup strategies.

What Hath Come Before

As I explained last week, you generally have four options to encrypt backup media from your i5/OS systems.