• Incentives For IBM’s Missouri Facility Scrutinized

  February 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM opened its state-of-the-art Information Technology Service Delivery Center in Columbia, Missouri, in October 2010. At that time, IBM publicized it would create up to 800 jobs by the end of 2012. That’s the kind of news any city would welcome these days. And these types of things just don’t drop out of the sky. Cities and states woo corporations to their locations with offers of tax incentives and real estate deals. Of course cities and states are working with public money. And the public expects transparency in how its money–many millions of dollars–is being spent and what is guaranteed

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• Sony Ditches Power For PlayStation 4, And This Matters To IBM i

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Consumer electronics maker Sony gave a sneak peek at its forthcoming PlayStation 4 game console, expected in time for Christmas shopping seven years after the release of the Power-based PlayStation 3. The company did not say much about the technology inside of the new game console, but one thing we know for sure: Power is out, and X86 processing and GPU graphics from Advanced Micro Devices is in. The feeds and speeds of the new PlayStation 4 are not all that impressive: an eight-core “Jaguar” processor with an integrated Radeon graphics chip from AMD, the kind of thing you might

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• Cisco And EMC Chase Midrange Customers With Smaller Converged Systems

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is not the only one chasing midrange shops with converged systems. Last week, the Virtual Computer Environment partnership between Cisco Systems and EMC rolled out a new line of Vblock converged systems that the companies hope with help is radically expand its channel and then its customer base. The VCE partnership, which also includes server virtualization juggernaut VMware (which is majority-owned by EMC and therefore no matter what anyone says, this is still an EMC-Cisco partnership), stacks up Cisco’s C Series rack servers and Catalyst 3750-X switches, EMC’s VNXe 3150 disk arrays, VMware’s vSphere Enterprise Plus server virtualization stack,

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• IBM Dives Head First Into Mobile

  February 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week unveiled an expansive new strategy to deliver mobile business solutions under MobileFirst, its new brand of software and services for delivering apps on smartphones and tablets. With MobileFirst, IBM seeks to bring together all of the elements required by an enterprise to successfully roll-out mobile solutions, including development, deployment, device management, and security tools. And, IBM being IBM, it also includes a healthy dose of professional services, but no apparent IBM i hooks at this time. MobileFirst is an umbrella brand that brings together many pieces of software that already existed in IBM’s portfolio, but it introduces

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• As I See It: The Man Who Would Be Kim

  February 25, 2013 Victor Rozek

  He was born in West Germany, the product of a German-Finish union, and for most of his life he bore the surname of Schmitz. From an early age he proved to be a poor model of German conformity, contemptuous of rules and indifferent to authority. But by the time he entered his teenage years, he had found a profession and a place of refuge from the pangs of conventionality: his refuge was the Internet; his profession, hacking. Although he never got beyond junior high school, Kim managed to engineer a thriving career breaking and entering into other people’s phone systems.

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• IBM Locks Down Licensed Internal Code On Power, Mainframe Systems

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we go again. Maybe. Or maybe not, if IBM‘s lawyers help it close the barn door before the horse escapes. Big Blue is tightening down the licensing of the machine code, often called licensed internal code or microcode, for selected high-end servers based on Power and System z processors. IBM has revised the terms and conditions to machine code on these machines, making it not only explicit that licenses to machine code cannot change hands, but that they may not do so without a customer signing on the dotted line a license acceptance agreement. IBM announced the new

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• Mobility Is The Motivator For Green-Screen Migrations

  February 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM i shops are moving to greener pastures. It’s a migration, but it’s not the one that demonstrates the platform is dead, like some folks have been claiming for longer than a generation of young programmers has been sleeping in their own beds. Those pastures are greener because green-screen applications are steadily being left behind. And the migration within the IBM midrange user base has quickened as a direct result of mobile computing. It is no more surprising than moving mountains. “The majority of customers we deal with have mobility as a significant part of their requirements going forward,” I

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• Big Blue Jacks Software Maintenance Prices For IBM i

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I hate to tell you I told you so. No, really, I do. I didn’t want to be right about this. And as is the case with all prognostication, I was only partially right, so really, I didn’t want to cop to only being partly right. Back in January, in the lead story for the first issue of this year, it was reasonable to expect a maintenance price hike in 2013 on vintage System i and not-so-shiny Power Systems iron. There has indeed been a maintenance price hike, but it was on IBM i software, not IBM hardware. See,

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• Getting Short-Term Maintenance For Your Power i Machine

  February 20, 2013 Hey, Joe

  I purchased a three-year maintenance contract when I bought my Power7 machine in 2010. The contract runs out in May but I need extended maintenance through July when I’m installing a new machine and returning the old machine to the leasing company. How do I extend my hardware/software maintenance for only two months without having to buy a one-year maintenance contract? –Jean This is a fairly common situation and one that IBM provides an out for in their maintenance contracts. Here’s how you can sign a one- or multi-year maintenance contract for your existing machine and then cancel the contract

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• New CL String-Handling Functions

  February 20, 2013 Ted Holt

  Note: The document accompanying this article is available for download here. I love it when IBM enhances CL. When I hear of a new feature, my first thought is, “What can I do with this?” My mind has been spinning since Guy Vig first told me about CL’s new string-handling functions a few weeks ago. Let me tell you about these functions and some of the uses for them that have already occurred to me. First, here are a few facts you need to be aware of: IBM delivered the new functions in two PTFs: SI49061 and SI48166.

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