• The Performance Impact Of Spectre And Meltdown

  March 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting to see what impact on performance the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution patches, which plug some security vulnerability holes that search engine giant Google discovered last summer and made public in early January, would have on Power Systems iron running the IBM i operating system.

  Now that Big Blue has published the first edition of the Power Systems Performance Report that includes the new “ZZ” Power 9-based systems, we not only get a sense of the relative performance of the “Nimbus” Power9 chip for entry servers. We also can figure out the performance impact of the …

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• Guru: Use SQL To Find Duplicate Source Code

  March 12, 2018 Ted Holt

  According to Brian Tracy, “good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with; bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with. The habits you have and the habits that have you will determine almost everything you achieve or fail to achieve.” This is as true in programming as in anything else we may do.

  Unfortunately, even those of us who strive for good work habits often have to follow the work of people who did not. One bad habit I come across occasionally is known in software engineering as WET solutions. WET stands for “write …

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• As I See It: Homo Digitalis

  March 12, 2018 Victor Rozek

  The African continent, perhaps more than any other, has been blessed with abundant resources and cursed by relentless exploitation. From ivory to slavery, oil to diamonds, foreign powers rushed in to strip the continent of its wealth. Over the last three centuries, arguably not a single African nation escaped some form of colonialism.

  The first wave of exploitation was decidedly European. Germany, England, France, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, and Italy carved up the continent. America was the central buyer in the slave trade, and remained to become the principal seller in the arms trade. Today, the United States maintains a military …

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• Proprietary Innovation: An IBM i Ace In The Hole

  March 12, 2018 Dan Burger

  You may know a business executive who has been thrown off balance by the overwhelmingly positive reports of the superior technical advantages of startups compared to legacy businesses that have invested in modernizing or refactoring their existing systems. Well, consider that startup advantage to be a snowball in Phoenix. Organizations with the best opportunities to be powerful within their market segments are the ones that are smart about leveraging their data and increasing the skills of their employees.

  Remember this term: proprietary innovation. Just when you thought proprietary and innovation would never appear in the same sentence, get ready to …

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• Squeeze Your ERP A Little Harder Before Ditching It

  March 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The pressure to migrate to newer ERP systems and cloud-based applications can be heavy, particularly if you’re using perceived “legacy” platforms like the IBM i server. However, the urge to replace one technology with another should be resisted, especially if your business challenges aren’t rooted in technology.

  That’s the gist of a conversation with Eric Kimberling, the founder and managing director of Panorama Consulting Solutions, which functions as a neutral third-party adviser for customers’ ERP-related decisions. Panorama recently published a report poking holes in the widely held notion that newer ERP and cloud systems are better for business.

  “First …

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• Domino Users: Can You Hear Me Now?

  March 7, 2018 Dan Burger

  IBM Domino/Notes users finally seem to be getting attention. They’ve only been screaming and pounding on the wall for five or six years, so it’s about time they’re being heard. IBM pretty much forgot about them and things only got better since IBM handed over the development and marketing chores to a company called HCL Technologies. What a difference that made.

  During a webcast last week, the tone was noticeably upbeat. Progress on the development side, investments on the financial side, and a passion for reviving a product line at the end of its rope were on display. There’s a …

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• Unicom Unleashes Code Management With Mobile UIs

  March 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Organizations using the IBM i change management and help desk tools from Unicom Global will see some big changes to the products. Thanks to a new mobile-first initiative, users can now access code management functions from smartphones and tablets, in addition to PCs. SoftLanding’s Turnover, Unicom’s change management tool for IBM i, also received some new core features.

  Unicom Global announced that it has added new user interfaces to two IBM i products, including Turnover, the change management product originally developed by SoftLanding Systems (which Unicom now runs as a subsidiary), and Expressdesk, a help desk package that provides incident …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 7

  March 7, 2018 Dan Burger

  RPG ILE has been enhanced with the addition of DATA-INTO functionality, which will become available March 16. DATO-INTO supports the parsing of multiple states types — JSON being the most important. It imports data from a data document into a data structure. For those familiar with XML-INTO and RPG Open Access, DATA-INTO can be grasped quite easily. Those needing a little help can look inside Monitor.

  Also inside Monitor this week, you’ll discover why system admins should be watching the open source news for helpful features, and you’ll be scrutinizing what AI (hello Watson) has in store for developers …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 9

  March 7, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  More Breaking News! Yes, it is Spectre and Meltdown update time once again. The firmware issued for certain systems causes V6R1M1 to have an IPL failure. Check the worksheet in the IBM i PTF Guide and see this link.

  The V7R2 recommended fixes for Temporary Disk Space have something worth looking at, which is MF64483 and which was released on March 1. Apparently, this has to do with tracking and curbing temporary disk space growth.

  One last thing. the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities have been classified by IBM’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) as having …

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• The Deal On Power9 Memory For Entry Servers

  March 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of changes that come with any new Power Systems platform. But perhaps the biggest change – and one that will in some ways make the Power9 platform more competitive with X86 and ARM servers and in others less competitive – is the way IBM is shifting from buffered DDR3 and DDR4 main memory used in Power8 iron to plain vanilla registered DDR4 memory that is commonly used in all servers these days.

  Buffered memory had its heyday on high-end NUMA systems, and was necessary to try to balance the needs of memory bandwidth against ever-increasing compute …

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