• Survey Points To 3 Percent Raise For IT Pros In 2013

  January 28, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IT workers in the United States can expect to receive a 3.0 percent increase in pay this year compared to the amount they received last year, according to a recent survey by Computer Economics. While the boost isn’t enough to break out the bubbly, it beats the venerable poke in the eye socket. The market research firm also found that more businesses expect to add IT staff than those expecting lay offs. In its IT Salary Report 2013, Computer Economics found that organizations are budgeting for a 3.0 percent increase in pay for IT workers. The 3.0 percent

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• As I See It: Gadfly

  January 28, 2013 Victor Rozek

  A young man died recently, by his own hand. He had the tussled good looks that women like and men envy, and an exceptional mind capable of contributing to the general welfare. He was, in the estimation of admirers, a digital Robin Hood, robbing the establishment of its data and sharing it without condition or hope of profit; dispensing the King’s venison to hungry men. The King, however, was not pleased, and although the young man did not pose an actual danger to anyone, he was, by all accounts, becoming a royal nuisance. In the end, though, what may have

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• Simple Business Intelligence: Fact Or Phantom?

  January 28, 2013 Dan Burger

  With the requests for getting more information from existing data piling up like snow drifts in downtown Erie, Pennsylvania, IBM midrange shops are studying their query, reporting, and so-called business intelligence software options in hopes of finding the shovel that can dig them out. In doing so, discoveries are made that show that IBM i and its DB2 for i database has both tremendous capabilities and the potential for some disappointing outcomes. For all of its limitations, the primordial Query/400 continues to be the favorite tool in shops that have otherwise regularly upgraded their hardware and software since the early

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• IBM Mainframes Jump, Power Systems Drop Ahead Of Power7+ Rollout

  January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If IBM could control the situation its way, it would probably never launch new Power Systems and System z mainframe systems anywhere even close to on the same cycle because keeping them spaced would allow its Systems and Technology Group to operate more like a multi-cylinder engine, running smoothly, rather than a pile driver, sometimes up and sometimes down. But managing chip designs and system rollouts is complex–being late is normal and being on time is unusual–and companies still think on annual cycles. I continue to believe that IBM intended to ship the Power7+ chips back in October 2011, which

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• Coming Soon: Entry And Midrange Power7+ Servers

  January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The long-awaited upgrade to the Power7+ processors for entry and midrange rack and tower servers looks to be on the horizon and moving toward us fast. IBM is gearing up for its next Smarter Computing launch event, which will be on February 5. And the circumstantial evidence and the word on the street both point to a Power Systems launch. This is not exactly a surprise to anyone, of course. I was able to ferret out plenty of details about the Power7+ processors months ahead of when Big Blue started talking about them at the Hot Chips 24 semiconductor conference

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• New Java Vulnerabilities No Threat To IBM i

  January 23, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The Java vulnerabilities that hackers have been exploiting on computers around the world do not exist on the implementation of Java that IBM runs on its IBM i platform, IBM officials confirmed last week. “IBM has confirmed that the IBM Java Software Development Kit (SDK) and IBM Java Runtime Environment (JRE) are not vulnerable to this reported exploit,” spokesperson Kristin Bryson, of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, told IT Jungle via email. “The IBM version of Java (which is used on IBM i) has been tested for this issue and it is not in the IBM version of Java.” The

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• Micro Focus Refreshes RUMBA Emulator, Delivers iPad Client

  January 23, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Micro Focus last week unveiled its latest iteration of the RUMBA terminal emulation suite, which is heavily used by IBM i shops around the world. RUMBA 9.0 introduces a new way to modernize 5250 and 3270 green-screen interfaces into GUI equivalents. The company also introduced three new clients as part of its “RUMBA+” brand, including Windows, Web, and iPad interfaces. Android and Microsoft Surface clients are expected in a few months, company officials say. With RUMBA 9.0 and RUMBA+, Micro Focus is giving customers new tools to modernize their 5250 and 3270 green screens into richer and easier-to-use graphical interfaces.

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• Stopping Unauthorized Users From FTPing To Your IBM i

  January 23, 2013 Hey, Joe

  My programmers keep setting up automatic FTP downloads from the network using the wrong user profile. For security reasons, they are only supposed to use a special FTP download user profile, but they keep using their own profiles and I have no way to stop this. How can I lock down FTP so that they can only use an authorized user FTP profile for their client FTP sessions? –Bob You can easily use an FTP exit point to prevent unauthorized users from starting an FTP session on your IBM i partition. An IBM i exit point is a specific point

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• Easily Create Help Text For Commands

  January 23, 2013 Ted Holt

  Extending IBM i by writing one’s own commands is empowering and gratifying, but a command without help text is like scrambled eggs without salsa. Fortunately, generating help text for a command is easy, thanks to a technique I learned from a very talented programmer named Chris Wages. Let me show you how it’s done. First, you must have a command, of course. Here’s the source code for command DOIT. CMD PROMPT('Do it') PARM KWD(HOW) TYPE(*CHAR) LEN(7) RSTD(*YES) + DFT(*WELL) + VALUES(*WELL *BETTER *BEST) + EXPR(*YES) + PROMPT('How should I do it?') PARM KWD(WHEN) TYPE(*CHAR) LEN(8) RSTD(*YES) + DFT(*MORNING) + VALUES(*MORNING

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• Dealing With Library Lists In RSE/RDP

  January 23, 2013 Susan Gantner

  I’m happy to say that I’m hearing from more and more people who are beginning to finally break away from SEU to use Remote Systems Explorer (RSE) in Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP). Perhaps the fact that IBM finally stopped updating SEU for new language features as of V7.1 has caused more shops to consider the move. I heard from one newbie RSE user the other day with fairly common issue; he wanted to know how to deal with library lists in the RSE environment? In his case, he has a few different library lists due to various packages

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