• Reader Feedback On As I See It: Going Silent

  September 19, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Victor, really good article on the need for and benefits of silence. Thank you! In Tai Chi, we say that “stillness is the master of unrest.” You’ve stated the same thing with regards to silence. Well done, sir. –Mike Thanks for another terrific article. I also enjoy backpacking in the mountains. . . . especially the Sierra, when I can get there from Rhode Island. –Ed Victor, I have enjoyed all your columns for some time but Going Silent, which struck a chord, prompted me to say thank you. Very much. –Tim I really enjoyed your article this week. I

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• Looking For i In All The Wrong Places

  September 19, 2011 Dan Burger

  For those of you who seldom find your way to the IBM i homepage, here’s a peek at an archived webinar you can find there under the title of Optimizing on Power Systems for Superior Economics. It co-stars Ian Jarman, IBM’s program director of global marketing for Power Systems, and Brad Day, an IT industry analyst and president of Enterprise Computing Advisors. I visit the IBM i site from time to time in search of new resources and information to pass along to IT Jungle readers. Last week, I decided to check out the Power Systems webinar. This

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Goodbye Kitty

  September 19, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  You may remember the movie Apotheker Now, or perhaps the novel on which it was based, Bartz of Darkness. The story, as you undoubtedly recall, concerns Fulton J. Wintel, sent into the wilderness by the greedy tyrant Leopold 2.0 to bring back whacko Kemeny Kurtz. Wintel finds Kurtz, who soon expires, muttering, “The oracle, the oracle.” The tale portrays the underside of Silicon Valley during the Doofus Era, when companies dexterously developing and exploiting new technologies overwhelmed those that slipped even once, or looked like they might have. It’s the whacko season. Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo are beset by

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• European Power Deal Tweaked, Zero Percent Financing Down Under

  September 19, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems business is humming along relative to other Unix and proprietary platforms, but success for IBM is measured relative to itself, quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year and at the bottom line. And thus Big Blue has doubled down on a Power Systems rebated deal designed to get European companies off old iron and onto new, as well as offering financing deals across its server and storage line in Australia and New Zealand to attract some business. Under the 2011 Power Trade In Program NE IOT, IBM is offering customers who have old RS64, PowerPC, Power2, Power3, Power4, Power4, Power5, Power5+,

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• IBM Refocuses Its Application Reputation

  September 19, 2011 Dan Burger

  The question is often asked, “What is IBM doing for the small to midsize businesses that run on the IBM i platform?” From a numbers standpoint, this is the largest segment of customers Big Blue can claim under a single brand, with 95 percent of the IBM i installed base being SMBs. IBM built the System/3X and AS/400 business over three decades, and it did so with application software. It has been in maintenance mode for more than a decade, and now the company has seen that to keep and expand this business, it needs application software. With this strategy,

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• Windows/400: Windows On Power Systems, Take Five

  September 19, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A moment of indignation on behalf of midrange shops that are up to their necks in both IBM i and Windows: Why on earth does the ARM architecture get a version of Windows ahead of the Power server platform? What’s more important: Hundreds of thousands of customers who spend billions of dollars on expensive systems, or tens of millions of consumers who spend billions of dollars on smartphones and tablets that have hardly any profit margin? Why is the latter billion better than the former, BillG? Way back when 20 years ago, when I still didn’t have very much hair

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• Ricoh Claims Breakthrough in PDF Processing

  September 14, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Companies that use Ricoh‘s automated document factory (ADF) offering will be able to do all kinds of new things with PDF files that were previously impossible to do without converting to a different format, the company claims. Ricoh’s Production Print Solutions unit (formerly InfoPrint Solutions Company, formerly the printing division of IBM) claimed several industry firsts with last week’s update to InfoPrint ProcessDirector, its PDF solution used by high-volume print operations. From the sound of it, Ricoh is squeezing management benefits from PDF documents that previously were the domain of the high-end advanced function presentation (AFP) document format.

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• Admin Alert: Three Common Problems with CBUs

  September 14, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  Power i Capacity BackUp (CBU) systems are complicated critters. Aside from the basic tasks of configuring, testing, and enabling a CBU for taking over processing from a production box, there are a lot of different problems that can occur with CBU configuration, and even when the CBU is running in replication mode. This week, let’s look at a few not-so-obvious CBU configuration issues that can hurt your CBU or production system setup. Issue #1: Problems with libraries that start with “Q” By default, many Power i replication packages do not replicate objects in libraries whose names start with “Q”, such

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• Now Where Did I Leave That Source Member?

  September 14, 2011 Bruce Guetzkow

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. During execution, programs rely strictly on their compiled objects. The source used to create the object is not used in any way for execution. There are, however, some instances where source is of value during processing. In a source member, one could store FTP commands to be used with the FTP (Start TCP/IP File Transfer) command, SQL statements to be used with the RUNSQLSTM (Run SQL Statements) command, or REXX statements to be used with the STRREXPRC (Start REXX Procedure) command. Knowing where the proper source exists is

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• Learn To Debug Authority Failures, Part 1

  September 14, 2011 Patrick Botz

  It is truly amazing how many IBM i administrators and programmers do not understand how to debug authority failures. When a user they support encounters an authority failure, many typically do one of two things: Give the user *ALLOBJ authority Or, if they can identify the object on which the authority failure occurred, they make sure *PUBLIC has *ALL authority to it Attacking authority failures in this way results in huge security holes. And this practice is almost certainly non-compliant with the organization’s written or unwritten security policy. Further, when the change happens to fix the authority failure, they

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