• Mertens Takes the Wheel at Sirius as Najim Steps Down

  August 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Harvey Najim has stepped down as CEO of Sirius Computer Solutions, the server reseller that he founded 31 years ago. Najim’s right-hand man, Joe Mertens, is now leading the $1.2 billion company, which started out as an AS/400-only reseller but has grown into IBM‘s largest solutions provider. Mertens plans no great changes for Sirius and sees continued growth through providing superior technical and managed services, and as well as more channel consolidation. The powerhouse that became Sirius started in 1980, when the ex-IBMer Najim founded Star Data Systems. The San Antonio, Texas-based company initially was focused exclusively on

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• Reader Feedback on Lean Mean Green Screens

  August 15, 2011 Hey, TPM

  I really enjoyed your latest posting about the Lean Mean Green Screen. It took me back to the days when I was doing a lot of development for these and really strove to provide the best and easiest interface possible to the users I supported. Your article made me wonder if the green screen or other similar interfaces weren’t the best thing for the most productivity. Web and Windows interfaces are certainly pretty, but too many times the developers clutter the screens with a lot of pretty little trinkets that only serve to distract the user and slow down

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• Temp Workers Remain An IT Hiring Favorite

  August 15, 2011 Dan Burger

  The IT job market continues to favor the temporary worker over the full-time employee, a trend that is most often tied to the weak economy, but may also signal a trend that will not reverse itself even after the economy picks up some long overdue momentum. Based on a quarterly survey of IT leaders, four out of 10 IT managers and executives expect to increase IT staffing using temporary workers during the next three months. “Continued economic uncertainty makes contract workers more appealing,” says TEKsystems market research manager, Tania Lavin. “IT leaders would rather hire consultants on a project-to-project basis

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• As I See It: Piling On

  August 15, 2011 Victor Rozek

  There’s a phenomenon that takes place in extreme mountaineering that is perhaps illustrative of human nature. Teams ascending the highest peaks like Everest and K2 will often come upon a solo climber from another group who is clearly in trouble and in imminent danger of death. The nearer the summit, the more likely that person will be left behind. Granted, the margins at altitudes well over 20,000 feet are small, and the choices limited. But there is a “me first, me at any price” ethic that essentially says: I paid for this, I trained for this; this may be the

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• Resurrect Dead Blue Waters Power7 Supercomputer As IBM iCloud

  August 15, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You need a supercomputer to predict the future, and unfortunately when you are trying to predict the kind of supercomputer you might need to build the supercomputer to predict that future, you can’t have as much knowledge of the future to easily make the predictions. And therefore, sometimes a supercomputer project backed by governments and key IT players gets taken out behind the barn and given the Old Yeller treatment. Such is the case with the technically impressive “Blue Waters” massively parallel machine that was to be built this year by IBM for the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA)

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• Proprietary Machines Prop Up Avnet, Arrow Server Sales

  August 15, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The hardware refresh cycle in the wake of the Great Recession and acquisitions have been good for the two master resellers of IT gear, Avnet and Arrow Electronics. Both companies did well in their most recent quarters, but also expressed some concern about downstream customers made jumpy and cautious about a jittery global economy. Avnet finished up its fiscal 2011 year in the first week of July, and in the fourth quarter the company had $6.91 billion in sales, up 32.6 percent compared to the year ago period, and brought $238.8 million to the bottom line, an increase of

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• The IBM PC Turns 30

  August 15, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The data center started getting diverse in the late 1970s and has been increasingly heterogeneous for decades. And as the IBM PC turns 30, it is not just ironic, but expected, that the proliferation of processors of all types fronted by pretty little screens and wireless communication chips have not only made our personal computers more numerous, they have put the desktop back in its place: in the office or home office. Toss in compute and storage clouds and we can say that we have finally entered the era of personal computing. For those of you in the System/3X and

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• Admin Alert: An Alternate Way to Port Image Catalogs Between Systems: QFileSrv.400

  August 10, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  In a recent article, I presented a technique for porting image catalog files between Power i systems. Afterward, a reader contacted me with an equally valid ways of moving image catalogs around that may even work better than my technique. This week, I’ll look at his suggestion and see how it can make life easier when porting optical media to remote systems. My Solution My original solution to porting an image catalog and its associated files from a source to a target machine consisted of the following steps: Create a virtual optical device that can be used to read

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• ILE: Decisions, Decisions, Part 2

  August 10, 2011 Susan Gantner

  In an earlier tip, I explored questions I often hear about binding directories. In this tip, I’ll explore another commonly asked ILE question and give you my perspective. Question: How many service programs should I have and how big should they be? Answer: It depends. Don’t you hate that answer? But in this case, I do think it is completely application dependent. Often when I am asked this question, the emphasis seems to be related to performance. But I don’t think the decision on the “what” or “how much” to put into a service program should be made based

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• Adobe Flash Builder for the iSeries Programmer, Part 1

  August 10, 2011 Shannon O'Donnell

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “The AS/400 is a legacy system with character-based data that is good for nothing but running batch programs.” That sentiment drives me right up the wall. In all fairness, however, the traditional iSeries/RPG programmer has done very little to prove these nay-sayers wrong. Sure, every once in a while you will see an RPG programmer throw some nice colors on a display file or maybe even use a message subfile, but while those were pretty cool tricks

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