• Guru: Watch Out For This Pitfall When Working With Integer Columns

  May 22, 2023 Gregory Simmons

  Remember that awesome jungle game where you had to guide the hero through a series of increasingly hard obstacles to gather treasure? Jumping over snakes, scorpions, and rolling logs, swinging on vines over alligators –your timing had to be just right. Pitfall Harry survived in a world of 255 screens, each of which were 160 x 192 pixels and a dazzling 128 colors! Well today, I want to make you aware of a pitfall which caught me off guard a while back. I hope this article will help you avoid my pitfall.

  There I was, writing my code, happy as …

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• As I See It: Bob-the-Bot

  May 22, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Hey, how you doin? I’m Bob-the-Bot, so nice to meet you. I know you were expecting a human named Victor but, sadly, we’ve had to replace him. I mean, imagine, taking days to research and write a single article! What a waste. Anyway, he’s been relegated to the obsolete pile where he can return to his natural state of unemployment better suited to his limited talents and proclivities.

  I’m here because I’ve got some things I want to explain to you, so listen up because, well, I’m intelligent—artificially intelligent as you would have it, but that’s better than being natively …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 21

  May 22, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  As we report elsewhere in this week’s edition of The Four Hundred, there is a critical security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor when it is running on Power9 and Power10 systems.

  This HIPER/Pervasive patch is described as fixing this: An internally discovered vulnerability in PowerVM on Power9 and Power10 systems could allow an attacker with privileged user access to a logical partition to perform an undetected violation of the isolation between logical partitions which could lead to data leakage or the execution of arbitrary code in other logical partitions on the same physical server.

  The Common Vulnerability and Exposure …

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• Remain Launches AI Chatbot to Assist with Development on RDi

  May 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Developers who code in Eclipse-based environments such as Rational Developer for i (RDi) now have access to Ai Chat, a free ChatGPT-based chatbot launched last month by Remain Software. According to Remain CTO Wim Jongman, the coding copilot displays the programming chops of a seasoned RPG developer.

  The AI revolution continues to unfold at an unprecedented clip, driven in large part by large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Facebook’s LLaMA, among others. Trained on massive corpuses of data culled from the Internet, these LLMs “learn” what words are likely to go with one another, …

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• IBM Introduces watsonx for Governed Analytics, AI

  May 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

  At its annual Think conference last week, IBM took the wraps off watsonx, a new platform for crunching big data and developing AI and machine learning applications in a safe and governed environment.

  You don’t need an industry analyst to tell you that artificial intelligence (AI) is having a moment in the sun this year. Thanks to the public launch of ChatGPT in late last year, regular citizens (as opposed to AI experts and industry analyst) have become aware of the vast potential of large language models (LLMs) that can mimic humans in very convincing ways.

  While LLMs like ChatGPT …

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• Java 17 Now GA for IBM i and WebSphere Gets Company

  May 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Java 17 is now available on IBM i, IBM announced last month, bringing the first major Java enhancement since Java 11 to the platform. The Java-based Web application server environment is also evolving on IBM i, as Big Blue adds more options besides WebSphere.

  The long-expected introduction of Java 17 on IBM i is finally here, and was delivered as part of the recent IBM Technology Refresh (TR) cycle, which brought us IBM i 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8. IBM is now supporting the latest 64-bit Java development kit (JDK), dubbed IBM Technology for Java 17, with its 5770JV1 …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, May 17

  May 17, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  A few years back, Reader’s Digest told a story about the Henn-Na hotel in Nagasaki, Japan, which hired 243 robots to cover duties ranging from concierge to bellhop. It wasn’t long before managers “fired” half the robots because they kept malfunctioning. This foray into AI may have gone awry pretty quickly, but the idea wasn’t abandoned. In fact, AI is all we are reading about these days. It’s definitely the focus at IBM, as evidenced again in our Top Stories this week. We are also keeping an eye on news closer to home, so take a peek at the resources …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 20

  May 17, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Sorry it took us a few extra days to get this edition of the IBM i PTF Guide out the door. This week, you have three security vulnerabilities and one end of the road for updates to WebSphere Application Server V8.5. Let’s deal with the WebSphere situation first.

  IBM WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Group PTFs for IBM i operating system will no longer be released. You can read more about it here. Here are the final IBM i Group PTF levels containing the 8.5.5.23 fix pack level:

  • IBM i 7.4: SF99661 level 10
  • IBM i 7.3: SF99581 level 16

  …

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• Inside IBM’s Efforts To Modernize The ISV Army

  May 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” IBM executives must feel a bit like the eminently quotable Don Rumsfeld, former Secretary of the Department of Defense, as they marshal their assets in the battle for application supremacy. While some of Big Blue’s partners have honed their IBM i applications into modern weapons, others are fielding old equipment more suitable for a previous war.

  It’s no state secret that Big Blue has a legacy problem on its hands in the IBM i world. When the …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Unlocking the Full Potential Of Your IBM i Applications

  May 15, 2023 Greg Patterson

  IBM i is the backbone of mission critical applications for over 120,000 customers worldwide in every conceivable industry and company size, particularly with companies ranging from $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenues and specializing in manufacturing, distribution, financial services, and healthcare. In other words, IBM i supports a significant share of the global economy.

  Although the IBM i platform is very productive, there are many things we can do to modernize our applications and provide more value to the business. But this is easier said than done. Some of the biggest challenges that that we face relate to …

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