• IBM Keeps Low Profile While Reaction To ‘Resource Action’ Boils

  April 4, 2016 Dan Burger

  The boiling pot that is IBM‘s workforce reduction plan continues to spill over and let off steam. After a report was released last month from the financial analyst firm Bernstein estimated 14,000 IBM workers would be losing their jobs, the reaction was explosive. Last week, on the Watching IBM website, survey results from a fraction of IBM workers added some context to what’s happening. “The survey results show what people have been saying for quite a few years. That there is age discrimination going on in the job cuts and the IBM employee evaluation system is seriously flawed. It

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Wintel Overture

  April 4, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  In 1981, IBM caused a tectonic shift in computing by announcing its PC. IBM ultimately failed in the PC business, but it spawned an industry segment that still stands on the PC’s two pillars: Intel chips and Microsoft software. Thirty-five years later, however, most clients are mobile, with ARM chips and ‘nix variant software. Meanwhile, enterprise Wintel and Lintel have been enlisted by Microsoft for a fresh assault on the glass house archipelago. To avoid a debacle, IBM must reinvent its Power and mainframe platforms on the ground and in the cloud. IBM appears vulnerable, adding to customers’

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• MariaDB Dropping In On IBM i To Replace MySQL

  April 4, 2016 Alex Woodie

  When Oracle dropped support for IBM i with its MySQL database five years ago, it effectively slammed the door shut on a promising path to rejuvenate the IBM i ecosystem with an open source of applications. But soon that door will re-open via MariaDB, a fork of MySQL that is a drop-in replacement for Oracle’s open database. Zend‘s PHP-on-IBM i guru Mike Pavlak gives IT Jungle the scoop on what’s about to happen. According to Pavlak, work is under way to get MariaDB running on IBM i, which it will do in the same manner that MySQL came

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• IBM i Shops Behind The Customized ERP Eight Ball

  April 4, 2016 Dan Burger

  We are not sheep. What we do with our ERP software is our own business and our widget business is not going to be run like all other widget businesses. And we don’t all jump when the ERP software vendor says jump. Most IBM midrange shops are running packaged ERP software and quite a few have customized them to get what they really want. Until it’s time to upgrade, that is. Software upgrades, even when the software is not customized, can be a pain in the patootie. Whether that’s a dull pain or a sharp pain is often related to

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• X Marks The Spot

  April 4, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just because IBM sold off its System x X86 server business to Lenovo Group does not mean magically that X86 servers are no longer relevant to Power Systems customers. As far as we can tell, Big Blue’s exit from this business has had no measurable impact on the use of X86 iron at IBM i shops, although the brand of machines that IBM i customers might choose in their next X86 upgrade cycle might change if they had not already been using gear from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise or Dell, the dominant suppliers of X86 gear in the datacenter. Last week,

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• Finders, Keepers: Long Lost RSE Keyboard Shortcuts

  March 29, 2016 Susan Gantner

  If you have read many of my past Four Hundred Guru tips, you’ll remember that I write a lot about RSE (a.k.a. RDi) and particularly I write a lot about keyboard shortcuts. I’ve even created my own card with my favorite keyboard shortcuts. This tip is to confess that I’ve recently realized that I’ve been missing out on a set of shortcuts that I should have been using and including on my shortcut cards all along. I published a tip about a year ago about Playing with Blocks and I included an edited version of that tip on the back

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• Ease the Burden of Overloading

  March 29, 2016 Ted Holt

  A while back I said that function overloading is marvelous. I haven’t changed my mind. The same is true of overloaded stored procedures. The only negatives to overloading are a couple of annoyances that the system requires to maintain order. Fortunately, those annoyances are easily circumvented. Here’s what and how. Assume a table of items. Each item is identified by a five-digit ID code for internal use only. Customers use an alternate catalog ID to refer to items. create table Items ( ID dec (5,0), Catalog_ID char(6), MaterialThisLevel dec (5,2), LaborThisLevel dec (5,2), OverheadThisLevel dec (5,2), MaterialLowerLevels dec (5,2), LaborLowerLevels

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• Installing PHP on Your Laptop

  March 29, 2016 Chris Ringer

  In my introductory article I walked you through a crash course in PHP. Now I will show you how obtain a free PHP development environment on your laptop in two easy installations of XAMPP and Netbeans. This allows you the freedom to configure PHP and test your scripts as you choose without affecting a production website or needing management approval. However, if you need to manage PHP scripts on an IBM i, you will want to alternatively explore using Zend Studio. This full-featured IDE integrates directly with the IBM i and allows you to write and

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• Healthcare Tech Trends Shape Industry And IBM i

  March 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  The future of IBM i won’t be found in any crystal balls. And references to omens always seem so ominous, mostly because they are connected to end of the world scenarios. Predictions, in my opinion, have a greater chance of coming true when based on real world observations. What’s happening in the IBM midrange is the best indicator, but what’s happening includes all kinds of things–some good and some bad. Here’s an example. MEDHOST provides enterprise and departmental healthcare-related software to more than 1,000 hospitals. Along with traditional licensed software, it offers software as a service (SaaS), managed services for

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Her Master’s Voice

  March 28, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  Someday there may be a portrait of Siri, the invisible aide of Apple’s users; an image of Google’s nameless virtual servant; an illustration of Amazon Echo’s helpful Alexa; or a graphic depicting Cortana, Microsoft’s attentive assistant. By contrast, IBM’s Watson, which talked to Bob Dylan, has an icon: a Haringesque homosexual planet. None of these characters has achieved the immortality of Nipper the terrier, its attention drawn before 1900 by the recorded voice of its master. A four-ton statue of the duped pooch still adorns the Arnoff Building in Albany, New York. His

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