• H-1B Visas Are No Solution To IT Skills Shortage

  March 11, 2013 Dan Burger

  There is more than one perspective on H-1B visas that connect foreign IT specialists with jobs in United States. However, the biggest stick is not carried by those who would argue that what counts most is filling U.S. jobs with U.S. citizens. Since the economy was sawed off at the knees, experienced business computing professionals have been discarded and less expensive substitutes have been sought as part of the corporate globalization rules of the game. It is bad now and it could get worse. One of the reasons it looks threatening goes by the name of the Immigration Innovation Act

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• As I See It: Darwin vs. Zuckerberg

  March 11, 2013 Victor Rozek

  Most of what I know about Mark Zuckerberg I learned from Aaron Sorkin. Which is to say I’ve seen a dramatized version of his life where selected events have been massaged, embellished, or possibly invented for theatrical effect. But I don’t much care. Social Network was entertaining, and not being a Facebook user or stockholder, I have nothing invested in Zuckerberg. I don’t care if he’s awkward with women. I don’t care if he stabs friends in the back or screws business associates. And I don’t much care that he’s rich or lonely or the most inventive geek since Mr.

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• Server Manufacturing Moved Out Of Rochester, Minnesota

  March 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many of us who follow the IBM systems business have been predicting this day might come for many years and then talking ourselves into thinking it would not happen. But the day finally came on March 5. That was when the top brass of Big Blue’s Systems and Technology Group held a meeting with employees of the Rochester, Minnesota, facility that gave birth to the System/3 in 1969 and successor technologies that culminated in the Power Systems and now PureSystems lines, telling them that they would no longer be making commercial systems at the legendary facility. It is not clear

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• If COBOL Is Too ‘Un-Cool’ For School, What’s That Make RPG?

  March 11, 2013 Alex Woodie

  A recent survey by COBOL tool provider Micro Focus found a decided lack of enthusiasm for COBOL at colleges and universities, with a large percentage of students viewing COBOL as un-cool, and even dead. COBOL’s little brother, RPG, faces a similar fate, as young IT students favor modern languages, like Java and C++, over what they think of as ridiculously boring business technologies used to run ancient IBM machines. Just because they think that doesn’t make it right. But unless IBM i leaders get real about the COBOL and RPG skills shortage, it could mean more businesses will migrate off

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• Entry Power7+ Servers: Counting The Costs Of CPUs, IBM i, And SWMA

  March 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you through the pricing of configured systems in the new Power7+ entry models that were announced on February 5. There are some interesting and useful comments on the data I put together showing the cost and performance of configured Power 710+, 720+, 730+, and 740+ boxes, which you can read about here. I only looked at hardware pricing in last week’s issue, and this week I want to give you a sense of what the new machines cost when you load up IBM i and Software Maintenance tech

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• Admin Alert: A Checklist For Moving Power i Partitions To A Different Location

  March 6, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  With corporate buy-outs, company spin-offs, and moving Power i servers to a centralized data center or a managed server provider, many shops are finding that they need to move their Power i partitions to a different network or a cloud provider. To that end, here’s a checklist I put together to help ensure that your Power i partitions can function without issue in a new environment. Why We Move There are many reasons you might need a playbook for moving a Power i partition from one location and network to another. Some of the more common situations include: Company sale

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• When Who Did What

  March 6, 2013 Ted Holt

  When you create a new database table (physical file), you should include those columns (fields) that are fully functionally dependent on the key fields. I would like to mention some additional columns that you might like to include also. The columns to which I refer are ones that store creation and change data. For example, you may want to be able to tell who inserted a row (added a record) and who last changed it. Such information may allow you to give a quick answer to a user’s conundrum. Look at this simple CREATE TABLE statement. Notice the last six

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• Journal Forensics 101

  March 6, 2013 Steven Wolk

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. A good friend of mine, who also happens to be president of our local user’s group, had been encouraging me to present a session at one of their meetings. I resisted for some time, but finally decided this was an exciting prospect. The topic I would choose became clear to me almost immediately. We use journaling in my shop for so many purposes that we simply couldn’t survive without it. I’ve always been very interested in journaling, especially in applications of the technology to forensics and recovery. It’s

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• OKI Data to Carry Brooks Print Converters

  March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie

  OKI Data Americas, the North American subsidiary of the Japanese printing and telecommunications giant, has inked a deal with Brooks Internet Software to carry the software company’s line of print protocol converters for IBM i, Unix, and mainframe servers. The co-marketing deal announced last month will ensure that organizations buying printers and other gear from OKI Data Americas will also have the opportunity to buy Brooks’ products, notably ExcelliPrint and RPM Remote Print Manager, as part of the deal. RPM Remote Print Manager is a Line Printer Daemon (LPD) print server designed to provide more flexibility in the management

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• Polaris Chooses IntelliChief for Office Automation

  March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Polaris Industries, the $3.2 billion maker of snowmobiles, has selected IntelliChief‘s eponymous software to help it streamline back-office business processes and eliminate paper. The initial IntelliChief implementation will target accounts payable (AP) processes, and will hook into Polaris’ IBM i-based Infor ERP XA application. IntelliChief is a Windows-based suite of software designed to help IBM i shops transition to electronic documents, or “paperless process management,” as IntelliChief calls it. In its basic configurations, the software provides a simple repository for storing and accessing e-documents. More advanced implementations involve the roll-out of sophisticated scanning and data capture solutions, direct integration

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