• The Power Of Community At LISUG

  February 26, 2024 Steven Wolk

  Running an IBM i user group is hard work these days, but the team at the Long Island Systems User Group makes it look easy. Despite having seen their sister groups in New York and Connecticut fold and cease operations since COVID, LISUG not only stands as the last remaining group in the tri-state area – that is New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut – but has been growing and there’s no shortage of exciting initiatives underway.

  What’s their secret? It’s the same basic formula, with a few twists – but it all starts with showcasing top quality speakers. In …

  Read more

• As I See It: Doctor AI

  February 26, 2024 Victor Rozek

  AI has been getting a lot of press and chatter lately, its vast potential for good and ill spawning prodigious debate. It’s not surprising that a technology predicted to impact 40 million jobs engenders a wide range of possible outcomes. But whether the future tilts toward transformational or apocalyptic depends, in part, on which profession is doing the assessment.

  One of the more ardent transformationalists is Eric Topol. To say Topol is over-accomplished would be an understatement. He is a cardiologist, a scientist, and an author. In his spare time he became the founder and director of the Scripps Research …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 8

  February 26, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  It is a rare week when there is not some sort of security bulletin that affects all of the major operating systems, and this week is not one of those rare weeks. There are three security vulnerabilities affecting the current IBM i releases as well as a group of security patches for the vintage IBM i 7.2 release. Let’s get started with the security vulnerabilities, as is our common practice.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: Multiple Vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK affect IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty due to January 2024 CPU, which you can …

  Read more

• Lots Of Unanswered Questions On IBM i Subscriptions

  February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like all of you, we have been watching with great interest as Big Blue transitions the IBM i software stack and Power10 hardware to cloud-like, utility-style subscription pricing. We have watched how each part of the IBM i stack has been transformed from the perpetual (and sometimes user) license pricing scheme with Software Maintenance to a subscription.

  As far as we know, and as we reported back in September 2023 when the subscription pricing for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was revealed, March 26, 2024, is supposed to be the last day you will be able to …

  Read more

• IBM i In The Cloud: A Beginner’s Guide to Taking Your First Step

  February 19, 2024 Tom Horan

  The cloud isn’t just for startups anymore. Businesses of all sizes and industries, including those reliant on IBM i systems, are recognizing the transformative power of cloud computing. Modernization is key to staying competitive, and that often means embarking on a cloud migration journey. While the concept may seem daunting, it doesn’t have to be.

  This guide empowers IBM i beginners to understand the process, address common concerns, and navigate a successful migration with the help of experts.

  From Apprehension To Excitement

  For IBM i users, questions and anxieties regarding cloud migration are natural. Security remains a top concern, with …

  Read more

• Guru: Procedure Driven RPG And Adopting The Pillars Of Object-Oriented Programming

  February 19, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  The four pillars of object-oriented programming (OOP): abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, were not created at a single point in time. They evolved gradually over several years, with contributions from various researchers and programmers. Here’s a brief overview of their evolution:

  1. Abstraction:

  • Alan Kay is credited with introducing the concept of abstraction in the 1960s with his work on Simula.
  • Abstraction gained further traction with the development of Smalltalk in the 1970s.

  2. Encapsulation:

  • David Parnas, in his 1972 paper “On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules,” laid the groundwork for encapsulation by emphasizing the importance of

  … Read more

• IBM: A Brand Is Not Everything, But It Is Important To Have A Good One

  February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to trace the roots of Big Blue back to the beginning, you start with Herman Hollerith at Columbia University and the punch card tabulating machines he created and that were ultimately used in their first big commercial application to do the calculating for the US Census in 1890.

  Back then, mainframes were made of wood, copper, and paper, and in 1911, Hollerith’s punch card machine business, known as the Tabulating Machine Co, were united with the Dayton Counter Scales, Dayton Industrial Scales, and International Time Recorder machines that were part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution. The …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 7

  February 19, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  Aside from two new security vulnerabilities, it has been a pretty quiet week in IBM i PTF Land. There are some updates for the current releases of IBM i – that would be IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 that are both on standard support and IBM i 7.3 that is on extended support – and of course there are some new defective PTFs that Big Blue needs to make you aware of, as often happens because all modern platforms are complex and all of them sometimes have patches that have unintended consequences.

  Let’s start with the security issues, …

  Read more

• Gird Yourself for Digital Transformation Failures in 2024

  February 14, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Spring is still more than a month away in the Northern Hemisphere, but change is already in the air when it comes to enterprise IT departments in 2024, who are under the gun to accelerate digital transformation initiatives, particularly those involving artificial intelligence and the cloud. Rosy predictions of business bliss typically accompany the start of these projects, but the reality is most of them are likely to go off the rails and end in IT failures.

  That’s the informed opinion of Eric Kimberling, the CEO of Third Stage Consulting and a grizzled veteran of ERP implementations and digital transformation …

  Read more

• Hybrid Release Management Means Creating An Application Schema

  February 14, 2024 Marc Dallas

  In a hybrid computing world, no application is an island and similarly no system running those applications and the databases underpinning those applications can be an island, either. And yet, many IBM i shops still behave as if they can be islands when it comes to application release management.

  Despite this, based on our own experience and the anecdotal evidence we gather from IBM i shops like yours, there is a clear separation between release deployment in the IBM i world and the “other” release deployments in the enterprise. We need to talk about this.

  First of all, application deployment …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles