• Tight Credit Squeezes IT Equipment Leases

  November 10, 2008 Dan Burger

  IT equipment leasing, a favorite method used by hardware suppliers that garner revenue from places they never could crack otherwise, is feeling the woozy effects of the stormy economic seas. It’s not just IT equipment leases that are taking on water. All types of equipment leasing are in the same boat. The name on that boat is the S.S. Default. It’s much too early, however, to say the boat is sinking. When the living is good and the credit is easy, there seems to be no brakes on who can finance equipment or how they can pay it off. Just

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• Wherefore Art Though, O Power Blade Services for i?

  November 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As many iSeries and System i shops have found out, the move to Power6-based blade servers and the Virtual I/O server that is required to support the i 6.1 operating system is a bit tricky compared to the OS/400 installation and migration procedures that they are accustomed to. That’s one reason why I was a bit surprised by a recent IBM Power Systems announcement. The announcement, which is a set of implementation services for Power Systems JS12 and JS22 blade servers running AIX 6.1 or Linux, did not include the other operating system supported on the blades. That being the

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• Former IBMer Blocked from Taking Job at Apple

  November 10, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A Federal Court judge on Friday granted a temporary injunction preventing Mark Papermaster, the former IBM executive who helped build the Power processor architecture, from joining Apple, where he had taken a job leading the hardware engineering teams working on the iPhone and the iPod. IBM filed a lawsuit against Papermaster in late October to prevent him from joining Apple, which it claimed would violate the non-compete clause Papermaster signed in 2006. As its “top expert” on the Power architecture, head of the blade server unit, and a member of an elite group of IBMers that set strategic goals

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• Web 2.0 Internet Apps: Spyware, Malware, and Trojans Galore

  November 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While IT departments are understandably excited about the possibilities of so-called Web 2.0-style online applications and how they might be used within their organizations, these same IT shops are equally perplexed about how they are going to control and secure the use of these online applications among their end users. In a way, this is an echo of how the commercialized Internet first entered corporations in the mid-1990s. And it did not enter from the data center, but from the end user desktops. And ditto for the wide use of PCs in the mid-1980s and then graphical user environments in

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• Agilysys Touts Cost Cutting Ahead of Financials

  November 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s been a rough couple of months for the U.S. economy, and it has also been tough on i platform reseller and application software developer Agilysys, which four weeks ago said it wasn’t going to make its numbers in the quarter and then two weeks ago did a management shakeup that saw four top executives leave the company. Last week, Agilysys wanted to let everyone know it is getting its financial house in order–and fast. The company, which is publicly traded, will report its second quarter of fiscal 209 results on November 20, but wanted to let everyone know

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• IBS Under Pressure in Q3, Divests Brasilian Unit

  November 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As readers of The Four Hundred are aware, Swedish ERP software maker International Business Systems, has been rejiggering its management and business model in an attempt to get its midrange hardware and application software revenues growing again. The third quarter ended in September proved difficult for IBS, as it was for most companies thanks to the economic crisis. In the quarter ended in September, software license sales fell at IBS by 12 percent to 89.4 million Swedish krona. (SEK is the accepted abbreviation for this currency, which is valued at about 13 cents as we go to press on

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• OPNQRYF Has No “If” But You Can Fake It

  November 5, 2008 Hey, Ted

  We recently started adding Web customers to our customer master file, in which a customer ID is a field of seven characters. The ID’s of Web customers consist of the letter “W” followed by six digits. Is there any way using OPNQRYF to change only the customer IDs that start with “W” to the customer number “5000000” for reporting purposes? Doing so would allow us to keep a lot of existing programs running without a lot of modification. –John OPNQRYF does not have conditional logic, John, but in your case, you can fake it out. Here’s the type of OPNQRYF

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• Embed PJL Statements in a Workstation Customizing Object

  November 5, 2008 Michael Sansoterra

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Modern day printers are fabulous in all that they do. In addition to accepting basic ASCII text streams, modern general purpose laser printers usually process either postscript (PS) or printer command language (PCL) streams to generate ornate printouts. So what about using these printers with the IBM i? If the printer understands PCL (or a few other data streams such as IBM’s PPDS or Epson FX/LQ), then there is no problem because IBM’s host print transform functionality magically converts SCS/AFP spool files into one of the aforementioned data

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• Admin Alert: Avoiding Restoration Problems with Remote Output Queues

  November 5, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  i5/OS remote output queues are used to send spooled files to printers attached to remote systems. They are commonly created with two objects: the remote output queue itself; and a virtual printer device that allows the queue to function as a locally attached printer device. However, this configuration has some issues when it is restored from backup media, but those problems are easily fixed if you know the right tricks. Anatomy of a Remote Output Queue Remote output queues (remote OUTQ) are a special type of i5/OS writer that communicates with and sends spooled file output to a printer located

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• Seagull Unveils New LegaSuite Reporting Tool

  November 4, 2008 Alex Woodie

  System i integration experts Seagull Software last month unveiled a new reporting tool that enables organizations to develop reports and dashboards based on data held in a variety of back-end systems. The new tool is called LegaSuite Reporting, and Seagull says it features a code-less development studio based on Eclipse. There is no shortage of business intelligence tools on the market these days. That’s a good thing, because the gigabytes of collected data continue to pile up, which challenges BI software developers to come up with new and clever ways to help customers dig out from the data avalanche

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