• Who’s the Fool When it Comes to Training?

  February 9, 2009 Dan Burger

  Is it true that the biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one’s self a fool? I asked Susan Gantner and Jon Paris what they thought. Their combination of experiences when presenting IBM System i and RPG programming topics at local user group meetings, for in-house training at businesses around the world, and on the speakers list at nearly all the major technical conferences tops just about everyone in this field. They also play a major role in the System i Developer team that organizes and presents the RPG and DB2 Summit. Creating a learning environment, it seems to

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• Google’s Love Affair with IBM’s Offspring

  February 9, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  Imagine what would happen if Google and IBM wanted to help you build your Web site. Now suppose the Googlers and IBMers created free site development tools that were aggressively open, capable of running on just about any platform, and able to build Webs that could be used by clients as small as a mobile phone or as large as an engineering workstation. Now imagine that all this has been around a few years and you’ve pretty much missed it, or at least not appreciated it. Maybe it’s time to say “Hello, World” to the Google Web Toolkit and Eclipse.

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• As I See It: If I Were Wise Enough, I Might Say. . .

  February 9, 2009 Victor Rozek

  Watching the reawakening of the human spirit, manifesting in the guise of an inauguration, a National Public Radio commentator said it seemed that the new millennium had finally arrived. Truly, there was something Narnian about the event, as if we had parted the coats and walked through the back of the wardrobe emerging in a wholly different world. Solemn and festive, the 1.8 million freezing celebrants enjoyed and endured a day of firsts. It was as if after eight years of walking down a long, dark, dirty alley, they suddenly turned the corner to find themselves on a brightly-lit, tree-lined

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• Web Site Vulnerabilities Continue Unabated, IBM X-Force Says

  February 9, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Hackers last year continued to compromise commercial Web sites using well-known techniques like SQL injection, putting corporate data in danger, but also raising the likelihood that businesses will infect their own customers with Trojan horses and malware. This was the warning issued by security researchers at IBM‘s Internet Security Systems subsidiary, which published its security report for 2008 last week. One of the bright spots: spam decreased slightly following the shut down of a major distributor. In years past, the vast majority of security-related news and attention was related to Web browsers. Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer (IE), with a

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• Deconstructing and Rebuilding IBM’s Q4 Server Sales

  February 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, it seems that I am not the only one who plays around with the limited amount of information that IBM gives to Wall Street analysts. As I said last week, when I tore apart IBM’s numbers from the fourth quarter and then tried to put them together as revenue streams, not percent changes, this game is more fun when lots of people play. Maybe we can use Newton’s Method of Approximation across a large group of people making estimates as a means of getting to the truth. (The wisdom of crowds, after all, can guess the number

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• Avnet Hit By Economic Downturn in Fiscal Q2

  February 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As one of the two master resellers of IBM‘s Power Systems machinery in the world, the rise and fall of sales and profits of Avnet provide some insight on what is going on out there in the midrange channel. But because Avnet is such a large company with a diverse product set, you have to dig for clues. In its second quarter of fiscal 2009 ended in December, Avnet’s sales fell by 10.2 percent, to $4.27 billion; currency effects accounted for 3.8 percent of that decline, as the strengthening dollar made sales overseas balloon by less than they have

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• SAP Launches Business Suite 7, Reports 2008 Financials, and Cuts Jobs

  February 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application software giant SAP has had a busy time of late. Last week, the German company, which is the largest seller of application software on the planet, announced that it had upgraded its flagship ERP suite, Business Suite, to a brand, spanking new version 7. The company also braced Wall Street for some bad financial news a few days earlier and announced the ubiquitous layoffs that are hitting the IT industry as the economic meltdown works its way into the data centers of the world. The upgrade to Business Suite 7, which sports what SAP calls a new modular design

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• Demand for BI is High Says, HiT Software

  February 9, 2009 Dan Burger

  Making better business decisions is the goal. Building better business intelligence into information systems is the means to reach that goal. According to surveys by respected analyst firms such as Gartner, BI ranks at the top of most companies’ priority lists. Apparently that’s true in AS/400 shops as well. Last week, a press release from HiT Software noted a one-year, 400 percent increase in the number of product evaluations for its software that supports projects related to business intelligence, data warehouses, data marts, database synchronization, and database migration efforts. HiT’s accounting of a notable spurt in database integration was

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• IBM Cuts Price of BladeCenter S SAS Module in Half

  February 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you haven’t gotten the message, small and medium businesses, IBM really wants you to use its entry BladeCenter S chassis as your entire data center and stop buying rack and tower servers and other gear. Now that the BladeCenter S has disk expansion thanks to a new SAS module, this is possible. But it is still pricey. And so, IBM has announced a special promotion, available for customers who buy directly from Big Blue’s online store, a 50 percent discount off the BladeCenter S SAS RAID controller module. The discount went live on February 3, and will be

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• A Bevy of BIFs: Look Up to %LookUp

  February 4, 2009 Susan Gantner

  The %LookUp built-in function is more than just a simple replacement for the LOOKUP operation code to allow use in /Free format logic. It offers the option of supercharging the performance of an array search operation. Let’s cover the basics first. %LOOKUP( searchfor : array {: startindex {: numelems}}) The first parameter is the argument you’re searching for, and the second parameter the name of the array where you’re looking; i.e., what would have been specified in Factor 1 and 2 of the LOOKUP op code, respectively. The optional third parameter is the starting index for the search, i.e., what

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