• Mad Dog 21/21: Potlatch Season

  December 8, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  Ask any old Kwakiutl or young Kwakwaka’wakw, as these Native Americans of the Northwest are now called, and you will find that winter was the favored season for a potlatch. A potlatch is a ceremony that includes a variety of rituals, some involving the redistribution of wealth and others the destruction of wealth. It’s a bit like what is going on around the world as governments try to keep us warm and loyal during a severe economic winter. It’s a bit like what liquidators say is going on in the server business, too. A potlatch was a huge party thrown

  …

  Read more

• Server Sales Decline in the Third Quarter

  December 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, it didn’t take much of a crystal ball to figure out that this was going to happen. With the torrent of bad news coming out of the financial, banking, manufacturing, and retail sectors of the North American and European economies, and stock markets around the world freaking out, it will come as no surprise to most of us that server sales were off a bit in the third quarter as vendors slashed prices to try to move boxes. The box counters at Gartner and IDC released their stats for server sales and shipments for the third quarter last week,

  …

  Read more

• IT Staffing Will Be Stable for Q1, Projects Robert Half

  December 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a lot of bad economic news out there, and it is easy to despair in it sometimes. But, there is some good news if you are on the IT staff here in the United States. According to Robert Half Technology‘s latest survey, which asks CIOs and IT managers about their staffing plans for the first quarter of 2009, the vast majority of companies are planning to keep the staff they have, with only a slightly larger number of shops saying they would be making layoffs compared to a year ago. RHT is an IT headhunter and employment

  …

  Read more

• JDA and i2 Call the Whole Thing Off

  December 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Only a little over a month ago, retail and supply chain management software maker JDA Software was pretty proud of the fact that its business managed to grow in the third quarter, hitting record profit and sales levels, and was looking ahead to boosting its business through its impending $346 million acquisition of i2 Technologies. What a difference an economic meltdown makes in a company’s life. i2 announced last week that it had terminated the acquisition agreement with JDA because the latter company was finding it difficult to raise the $450 million in cash it wanted to get from

  …

  Read more

• IBM Adds 1 TB Disk to the BladeCenter S Chassis

  December 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, like when you are supporting online transaction processing, you need lots of little, fast disk drives with lots of arms chasing random bits of data spread across those drives. Sometimes, when you are storing big wonking media files, you want a single, fat disk, and the rotational speed is not nearly as important as the raw, cheap capacity. The latter reason is why IBM has put a new 1 TB drive in its BladeCenter S blade server chassis for small businesses. The disk, which goes by the product number 42D0547, isn’t fast, spinning at 7.2K RPM as it does

  …

  Read more

• Slate of Candidates Put Forth for the COMMON Board

  December 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  COMMON, formerly the AS/400 and successor user group and now billing itself as a Power Systems user group, is getting ready to elect a new board of directors. As November was coming to a close, the user group announced a slate of candidates for the COMMON board, with five candidates chasing three open positions on the board. COMMON members will get to vote on the candidates between March 30, 2009, and April 28, 2009; people will also be able to vote on site at the beginning of the annual COMMON meeting, which is being hosted in Reno, Nevada, from

  …

  Read more

• Former IBM Chairman Argues for Radical Education Reform

  December 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having long since turned in the reins at IBM and presumably keeping himself plenty busy as chairman of private equity player Carlyle Group, Louis Gerstner still has time to think and lecture about the state of the educational system in America. And last week, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Gerstner did just that. If you have access to the WSJ, you can read Gerstner’s prescription for what amounts to the nationalization of our schools at this link. Gerstner said that he had “realized rather glumly” that he had personally been advocating for

  …

  Read more

• There’s Power in Edit Words

  December 3, 2008 Hey, Ted

  I am trying to use an edit word to insert hyphens into an account number. I must be doing something wrong, because leading zeros don’t show up. I’ve used edit codes for years, but rarely edit words. Can you help? –Laurie You’re not doing anything wrong. That’s the way edit words work, Laurie. The system blanks out everything before the first non-zero digit, including editing characters. The good news is there’s a way around it. Let’s illustrate with an example that many of your fellow readers will be familiar with: those nine-digit Social Security numbers without which Americans can’t do

  …

  Read more

• SQL and Conversion Strategies

  December 3, 2008 Hey, Ted

  I just read your article Common Table Expressions Ease System Conversion. Instead of changing each SQL statement to add a common table expression, I’d suggest you create permanent views that join the new files. Give the views the same names and the same column names as the original file. Because a view doesn’t have a key, you can have as many views as you want without any performance decrease. A permanent view can also be used for Query/400. In this way queries do not have to be changed. –Birgitta Hauser I am always delighted to find mail from Birgitta

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Tuning i5/OS Storage Pools for Performance

  December 3, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  Most i5/OS administrators know about setting up automated performance tuning and they also know how to assign individual storage pools to different subsystems. But many people don’t know that they can also tune storage pools for more efficient system processing. This week, I’ll cover some of the finer points of storage pool configuration and how a little extra tuning can make a big difference in memory performance. Two Ways To Tune Pools Individual storage pools adjustments can be made by using the green-screen Work with Storage Pools (WRKSHRPOOL) command or by using iSeries Navigator (OpsNav). The key is to tweak

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles