• IBM i In The Land Of The Rising Sun

  November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It took Europe and Japan a long time to rebuild after the devastation of World War II, but it is absolutely no coincidence that the United States alone or in combination with its NATO allies invested an enormous amount of money in the rebuilding of both of these nations. Not only was it good business, providing American manufacturers new markets into which to sell their products, it was also a good kind of cultural exchange.

  The predecessor of IBM, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, sold its first punch card machine into the Japanese market back in 1925 at Nippon Pottery – yes, …

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• Cloud Provider Connectria In Major Partnership Push

  November 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i cloud market is quite fragmented, with dozens of companies angling to deliver IBM i hosting services, often to a geographic or industrial niche. Now one of the biggest fish in this little pond, Connectria, is looking to solidify its foothold in IBM i cloud hosting by building a network of VARs, software vendors, and other companies that share its vision.

  In May, IBM i chief architect Steve Will teased us about Google getting into the IBM i hosting business. While IBM and the Alphabet subsidiary work together with the OpenPower consortium, there’s still no indication that Google …

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• Guru: More About Merge

  November 5, 2018 Ted Holt

  I often read back through articles that have appeared in this august publication to look for errors and omissions. Such an expedition recently made me aware that I have not told you as much as I would like to about the SQL MERGE statement. Today I am pleased to provide more information.

  First I want to be sure that everybody understands is that you can add conditions to the WHEN MATCHED and WHEN NOT MATCHED expressions. That means that you do not have to treat all matched or unmatched rows in the same way. Look at this example:

  merge . 

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• As I See It: Rethinking Retirement

  November 5, 2018 Victor Rozek

  As all evangelists before and since have been compelled to do, 19th century preacher Dwight Moody gave some advice to the young. “Preparation for old age should begin not later than one’s teens,” he said. “A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.”

  The start-early portion of Moody’s advice is well intended but wildly unrealistic. Teenagers have no more comprehension of life after retirement than elephants have of space travel. Besides, when life’s essentials are steadily provided for you, there’s little to suggest that someday they might cease to be. Regardless, the …

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• I Dare You To Keep Track Of Power Systems Memory Prices

  November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the great things about IBM is that, thanks to a series of antitrust lawsuits that it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division – after much, much legal grief and heaven only knows how much expense – back in the 1960s and 1980s, the company has created systems that tell customers about its products, how they change an evolve, and what they cost at any given time.

  All vendors should be required by law to publish list prices, because they provide a ceiling to the negotiations. A point above which you know a vendor is not …

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• The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat

  October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.

  Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …

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• Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to run Microsoft .NET can now do so through the Mono middleware, which was officially ported to IBM i and AIX earlier this year by the Mono community. While the port is not feature complete, Mono can now run on IBM i 7.1 and higher via the PASE AIX runtime. It’s not a native port, but it’s better than nothing.

  Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, including a C# compiler and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), that allow .NET applications to run on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, various flavors …

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• Serving Up Fast, Fresche Interfaces for IBM i

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  “Time is money,” as Benjamin Franklin once said. With enough of either, IBM i shops could accomplish all of their modernization goals. But of course, both time and money are limited, which is why tactical tools like the Presto modernization tool from Fresche are gaining traction.

  Fresche’s Presto is an IBM i modernization tool that takes 5250 output from applications and converts it on the fly into HTML that can be rendered in a standard Web browser. The software can also work with the RPG Open Access handler from IBM to power GUIs that have RPG-based back ends but …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 31

  October 31, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  Double, double, toil and trouble… if we had the predictive powers of the three witches from Macbeth, we might have seen the big move by IBM to acquire Red Hat coming. Fortunately we have Monitor to round up the top stories of the week and keep you in the loop in case your crystal ball is on the fritz. Although we have a bone to pick with whomever decided that Halloween should fall on a work day, to stay in the spirit on the job today, check out the link below for a preview of IBM’s upcoming movie featuring aliens …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 43

  October 31, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  What’s new this week? Well, everybody is talking about IBM buying Red Hat, which we talk about elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred. We shall see what IBM does with its systems software now.

  I would like to give a big “Thank You” to John for finding a typo in the Spectre-Meltdown tab and phoning it in! We have cleaned it up for this edition of the IBM i PTF Guide.

  This week, the Backup and Recovery Group is new for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3

  The Guide at a glance: There are no new defectives …

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