Volume 15, Number 21 - May 22, 2006 Archives - Page 2 of 3

Lakeview Technology Opens Office in the United Kingdom

May 22, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last October, high availability clustering software provider Lakeview Technology set up a new sales area that encompassed the United Kingdom, Ireland, and South Africa, and put an executive in charge of chasing down business in this new area. And now, to better go after business, Lakeview has gone all the way and opened up a dedicated office in the United Kingdom.

Weir is now in charge of the United Kingdom office, which will support local customers and business partners. “Opening another European location gives everyone easier access to our rapidly expanding line of information availability products and services,” said Weir

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3i Infotech Partners with ASNA to Extend OS/400 Apps

May 22, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If we have learned anything in the past decade, it is that there are many ways for companies to get their applications to the Web. While the technologies have become more sophisticated, the idea that OS/400 shops would abandon their RPG applications has by and large been proven wrong by history.

And so has the idea that everyone would just move to Java and live in this monolithic world created by Sun Microsystems and its partners in Java. Most OS/400 shops companies want to leave their core RPG applications more or less alone and continue to leverage their RPG skills

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IBM Allows Online Upgrades for i5/OS Licensed Programs, Finally

May 22, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

After a certain amount of complaining from OS/400 shops, IBM is finally allowing customers to update their OS/400 licensed programs electronically.

Back in 1988, the AS/400 was unique in the midrange for offering electronic customer support to all customers. ECS, which worked over a modem line, allowed IBM techies to dial into your server and see what was wrong; it also allowed an AS/400 to call IBM if a component was about to fail so it could do pre-emptive maintenance on the machine. Somewhere along the way, all of the other platform providers got more sophisticated about delivering patches for

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BCD Attains ServerProven Status with Clover

May 22, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Application development tool maker and middleware software supplier Business Computer Design said late last week that its new Clover iSeries and System i5 query and reporting tool has received IBM‘s ServerProven blessing, which means that companies that deploy this solution in conjunction with a new System i5 machine are entitled to substantial rebates.

A systems program or application with ServerProven status means that it has been certified on IBM’s latest System i5 hardware and i5/OS V5R4 software and is running in at least one real account. After attaining ServerProven status, IBM and a product vendor enter into a co-marketing

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Sun Microsystems Begins Taking Java Open Source

May 22, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

“I get a lot of flack about being a software guy and for giving away a lot of free stuff,” explained Jonathan Schwartz, the new chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems at the JavaOne 2006 show in San Francisco last week in his keynote address. Having taken its Solaris Unix, Java Enterprise System middleware, and T1 Sparc processor open source, there is one significant piece of software technology that has remained closed: Java. That, after long last, is finally changing.

During his keynote at JavaOne, Schwartz, who ran Sun’s software business and was its chief Java evangelist before he was

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Mad Dog 21/21: Patent Depending

May 22, 2006 Hesh Wiener

When you think of rights granted by law, such as the right to express your opinion, you usually think in positive terms. Positive rights guarantee freedom of action. If you’re willing to obey some rules and follow some procedures, you can own some property, you can drive a car, you can publish an article about patents that includes controversial opinions. Patent rights are different. They are negative rights. They allow you to restrict the activity of others. There are other negative rights in the law, of course, such as the right to exclude others from your home. But few negative

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Business Continuity Planning: Are OS/400 Shops Ready for Disaster?

May 22, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

None of us, even those who live a good distance from Hurricane Alley, will soon forget the devastation caused by Katrina and Rita in the summer of 2005. These names, now infamous, have joined and even surpassed the likes of Andrew and Charley and Hugo in our collective memory. But, having presumably learned from experience–or at least been awakened from our slumber–are we ready for Alberto, Isaac, Leslie, and Oscar? The odds are a few of these names will make headlines in the 2006 hurricane season.

Last week, AccuWeather released its 2006 hurricane forecast, and it isn’t pretty. “An

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Next Up on the System i: Native .NET

May 22, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

For all of the benefits that the File Serving IOP, the Integrated PC Server, and the Integrated xSeries Server have given to OS/400 shops since they were introduced in 1994, the very idea of a server co-processor is somewhat in conflict with the integrated nature of the AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 platforms. Windows, which has always been the dominant operating system installed on this co-processor, gets bolted onto the side of the OS/400 server, but is not woven into its fabric in the same way that Linux and AIX are today though the advent of mature, dynamic, and sophisticated

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