The IT Jungle

Reader Feedback On As I See It: Poisoning The Well

December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Victor:

Warning: Many generalities, and complaining, follow.

I agree that complaining is not always the best way to deal with a problem.

But if one thinks that there are situations that involve someone like the Pointy Haired Boss in Dilbert (and I do), and if you feel stuck in that situation for any number of reasons, then some complaining may be a way of seeking sympathy from others who have similar feelings.

Maybe the point of your article is that this is not a good thing, but sometimes “letting off steam” let’s you get back to work.

If you feel

The Q3 Server Market And IBM’s Place In It

December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The figures are out for server shipments and revenues for the third quarter from Gartner, and they shed a little more light on what is going on in the IBM customer base and in the market at large. A number of different factors are making it tough on Big Blue and these have short-term and long-term ramifications for IBM i shops and indeed any customers who are deploying Power-based systems.

The most important thing to realize is that while server shipments are continuing to grow, revenues are not and I suspect that profit margins have fallen even faster than

Mad Dog 21/21: Pilots Of The Carob Bean

December 9, 2013 Hesh Wiener

Since biblical times, Mediterranean people have cultivated the carob tree. Its seeds, called carats, are remarkably consistent in mass, about 200 milligrams each. For ages, the carat weight has been a measure of gemstones and other valuable items. The Roman pure gold solidus coin weighed 24 carats; it was the original 24-carat gold. Mobile device displays may soon be described in carats along with pixels and inches. This is because Apple is getting into the sapphire sheet business.

It might make a monkey of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, because wherever Apple leads, the rest of the technology world usually

The Word Of The Day Is

December 9, 2013 Dan Burger

Modern–Spread The Word

Have you noticed IBM i executives are everywhere you look these days? I haven’t seen any of them on magazine covers at the grocery store checkout area, but it won’t surprise me when it happens. Steve Will, Alison Butterill, Tim Rowe, Barbara Morris and others seem to be more actively evangelizing. Conferences and local user group meetings are benefiting, many of them are blogging, but where it has picked up even more is their participation in vendor webinars.

Last week, I listened in to webinar that co-starred Rowe and Morris and was hosted by looksoftware.

RPG And Java At The Crossroads

December 9, 2013 Dan Burger

The IT director of an IBM i shop somewhere in the Midwest was walking down the street wondering about where he was going to get several programmers with modern RPG skills along with Web and mobile skills. He walks by an employment agency with a sign in the window that says “brains for sale.” So he goes inside. The first thing he sees is another sign that says “CEO brains $8 per pound.” Next to that what he sees . . .

. . . is another sign that says, “CFO brains $12 per pound.” Beyond that were signs that

IBM i Installed Base Dominated By Vintage Iron

December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If the IBM i-Power Systems platform was up for an award for longevity, it would actually have to be given two awards. One trophy would be for persevering as the last platform standing from the Minicomputer Revolution back in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. And the second medal would be for machines that stay in the field for an incredibly, almost unbelievably, long time.

We all know this instinctively and anecdotally, having heard many of the legends of the AS/400 and its progeny out in the field. Stories of machines being sheet-rocked behind a wall or stacked over

Help/Systems Teams with DSI to Sell VTLs

December 4, 2013 Alex Woodie

Help/Systems last week announced it formed a partnership with Dynamic Solutions International that will see DSI selling Help/Systems backup software for IBM i into its installed base.

DSI is an Englewood, Colorado-based company that sells a range of storage solutions, including disk-based VTLs; LTO tape drives, autoloaders, and libraries; and storage management software. The company has close to 40 years of experience and counts about 2,000 organizations as customers.

The IBM i market opportunity and the partnership with Help/Systems came about as a result of DSI’s work with IBM‘s System z mainframe customers, says Leo Salvaggio, vice president of

Admin Alert: Four Ways To Move An IBM i Partition, Part 1

December 4, 2013 Joe Hertvik

I’m currently working with a client to migrate three IBM i partitions to new Power 7+ machines located in two data centers in different states. While there are several ways to approach migration, over the next two issues I’ll discuss four specific techniques for moving an IBM i partition to a new location and the different tasks you have to perform for each technique.

Four Ways To Move An IBM i

In general, there are four techniques for moving an IBM i partition to a different machine:

Restore the partition in place or to a new location using the same

Three Powerful SQL Words

December 4, 2013 Ted Holt

Louisa May Alcott said, “I like good strong words that mean something.” So do I, especially when they’re good strong SQL words. It gives me great pleasure today to share three powerful SQL words with you.

Consider the following summary query:

select d.ItemNumber,
       sum(d.Quantity) as Qty,
       sum(d.Quantity * d.Price) as Extended
  from InvoiceLines as d
 group by d.ItemNumber
 order by 1

Here’s the result set:

ITEMNUMBER      QTY      EXTENDED
  A-1             8         88.00
  A-3             7         35.00
  A-7             7         52.00
  B-1            26         51.25
  Z-3             2         18.00

Standard stuff, yet very powerful. It beats writing an RPG program to read a file, check

End-Of-Year Feedback

December 4, 2013 Hey, Esteemed IBM i Professional

I hope 2013 was a good year for you. It was my best year in a while. I left a dysfunctional bureaucracy for a company where I can make a difference. I renewed several old acquaintances. And I found out from LinkedIn that I know someone who knows someone who knows Haynes Brooke, the guy who plays the sun in the Jimmy Dean sausage commercials. Let’s close out the year with some of the feedback you’ve been kind enough to send to me.

Hey, Ted:

In Alan’s Easy Method For Building A CSV File From A Report, you

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