• Mad Dog 21/21: The Maltese Logon

  December 12, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  If your apps all work through a web browser or are written in agnostic Java, relax. Don’t bother reading this. But if Windows grips some of your apps, as it does at most IBM i shops, there are things going on you had better watch. Until recently, Windows dominated client environments. Not anymore. ARM-based devices running iOS (the Apple operating system, not the IBM midrange one) or Android or BlackBerry OS outsell X86 machines running Windows. Windows on ARM won’t close the gap. Windows 9 might run mainly on cloud servers with island clients a second thought. When you say

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• As I See It: Looking Ahead

  December 12, 2011 Victor Rozek

  Twain and Corleone, the unsung duo of economic prognostication, aptly describe two probable scenarios for IT in the coming year. One prospect is hopeful and the other is cautionary. One provides reason for celebration, the other frustration. In one scenario, we are the masters of our fate, in the other, not so much. “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”–Mark Twain “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”–Michael Corleone First the good news. Who knew that Sam Clemens was a closet economist? Indeed, predictions of economic collapse appear to be premature. The

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• IBM Off To The Races With New Memory Tech

  December 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The chip heads at IBM‘s Research and Microelectronics divisions have had a busy week, showing off their new memory and computing toys at the IEEE’s International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington, D.C., last week. Some of the chip technology that Big Blue was showing off to its peers is far out into the future, but it could end up in systems sooner than you might think. As you old AS/400 shops are well aware, IBM used to make its own memory chips and disk drives for its systems and that memory was designed and fabbed in the same Rochester,

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• Tape Can Still Close The Backup Window

  December 12, 2011 Dan Burger

  Every aspect of your business is bombarded by the message that modernization is the key to happiness. IT is just one piece of the puzzle. And even that puzzle has dozens of pieces that require decisions on whether to replace or refurbish. Replacing may result in the biggest benefits, but often there are no guarantees, particularly if what’s in place is working. Finding what’s not working is the first step and then deciding if you can improve what you have without replacing investments in hardware and infrastructure is the next step. Let’s take storage for example. Disk-based backup is one

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• Get With The Program

  December 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I spend a lot of time thinking about hardware and systems software because, quite frankly, that is what I get paid to do in addition to being something that I am personally interested in given the fact that systems quite literally run the world. But a system, that magical combination of processors, storage, and the code necessary to make it usable by business logic encoded in higher-level languages, is perfectly useless without applications. It is not lost on any of you, I know full well, that the computer that this newsletter is dedicated to was launched as the Application System/400,

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• Admin Alert: More Information on Semi-Restricted State, Vendor Profiles, and Storage Pools

  December 7, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  As we approach year end, I usually clear out my Admin Alert mailbox to see if there’s any good additional information about recent articles that I can pass along to you. Good thing, too, as some readers sent over workable ideas about getting into semi-restricted state and how to handle vendor profiles for auditors. Here’s what they said. I hope this information helps you. On Semi-Restricted State TCP/IP, Suggestion #1 About my article on putting an IBM i system into semi-restricted state (where the system is down but TCP/IP is up), reader Richard Shearwood filled in some gaps about

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• SQL Finds a Delta

  December 7, 2011 Hey, Ted

  Is there a way using SQL to calculate the amount a numeric column changes from one row to the next? –Ken Yes. Here’s how it’s done. First, you need a table to use for an example. create table mydata ( Name char(8), Qty dec(3,0)) insert into mydata values ('Bob', 25), ('Bill', 85), ('Sue', 17), ('Bob', 28), ('Bob', 32), ('Bill', 105), ('Sue', 45) To pull this off, the data must be stored in the order in which it is to be retrieved. If necessary, create a temporary table to hold the sorted data. declare global temporary table SortedData as (select name,

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• Juggling With jQuery

  December 7, 2011 Paul Tuohy

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Way back in May 2009, I wrote about some of my experiences with Javascript. Well, time has moved on and I, hopefully, have become a more experienced Javascript programmer. Part of that experience has been in coming to grips with the many Javascript libraries and frameworks that are available for download. When it comes to Javascript, here is what has been happening to me. I came across a requirement for a feature on a Web page (e.g., a calendar to allow the selection of dates), so I did

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• Blade Servers Barely Nick IBM i Market

  December 6, 2011 Dan Burger

  After nearly four years of sales, IBM finds itself with a blade server for the IBM i-based Power Systems midmarket that is unwanted and as yet unable to build a following. Adjustments have been made, incentives have been provided, but this product still seems destined to be ignored by a large majority of users. Why? The answer is complex. This product is too complex compared to the servers the community is familiar with and has come to count on. I don’t believe this is simply a case of not enough IBM i shops with a forward-thinking approach to IT. There

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• SAP to Buy Cloud HCM Vendor for $3.4 Billion

  December 6, 2011 Alex Woodie

  SAP last week announced plans to buy SuccessFactors, a cloud-based provider of human capital management (HCM) software. The $3.4 billion deal is expected to close in early 2012, and provide a long-term boost to SAP’s cloud strategy. SuccessFactors is a major player in the cloud services arena, with a reported 15 million subscribers to its HCM services across 3,500 customers in 168 countries. The publicly traded company, which has more than 1,450 employees, recorded $206 million in revenue last year, and has recently seen quarterly revenues jump 77 percent. The San Mateo, California, company has not yet been profitable,

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