How many green screens are still out there in the world? Too many is the obvious smart-aleck answer to that question, and more than you would expect is probably closer to the real answer. I cut my teeth on Z80-based machines and then an Apple IIe and a handful of different machines with character-based interfaces long before I ever saw a Macintosh or a Unix workstation in college. After all these years, an IBM 3270 or 5250 green screen, or even a DEC VT terminal, are not shocking to me. They remind me of my youth and while I wouldn’t

The scarecrow got a brain, the tin man got a heart, the cowardly lion got courage, and the RPG developer community finally got a free trial version of Rational Open Access: RPG Edition. It took a lot of patience and a lot of suggestion box stuffing, but IBM did deliver. Whether this small but significant step will lead to a surge in modern RPG development is yet to be seen. But it is undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

Most importantly, it shows IBM’s support for RPG, one of the few programming languages created by Big Blue for business

The best use of an IT manager’s time is planning IT strategy. Many would say this sounds good on paper, but the reality of the job pushes this best practice down the priority list. There are many sickening symptoms that arise, not the least of which is a disease that affects the IT staff. It’s called skills atrophy. Its weakening effects may not be noticed in the early stages. Yet, one day, when business units call on IT to do some heavy lifting, the muscle isn’t there. The next sound you hear is the complaining of the business strategists.

Just

“You talkin’ to me?” That’s what Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, said, in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, as he practiced drawing his gun. His thin clients included characters played by Jodie Foster and Cybill Shepherd. Today every one of New York’s 13,087 yellow cabs has a thin client that isn’t as pretty as Foster or Shepherd. It is a mobile computer that includes a self-service payment terminal talking to banks in the cloud by cellular radio. Its screen displays videos so awful you wish for Bickle and his gun. And that’s just for starters.

When

IBM i high availability software rivals Maxava and Vision Solutions will be back in a Los Angeles courtroom today to hear a judge’s ruling on the discovery process in Maxava’s false advertising case against Vision. Disagreements over what documents should be admitted as evidence have delayed the case. The cut-off for discovery is slated to end Friday in preparation for a November 22 trial.

There is no sign that the false advertising case that New Zealand-based Maxava brought against its much larger Southern Californian competitor in December 2009 is any closer to an out-of-court settlement, as the vast majority of

If you have a job, no matter how much it might annoy you, it is a good thing. Having two, like I have to so the ends will meet somewhere not near the poorhouse (as if the world had those any more) is probably a better idea, if you have the energy or time. There are still 13.9 million unemployed people in the United States, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it doesn’t look like either they or those who dropped out of the statistics because they have stopped looking for work will find

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about hosted services in the IBM i market. Although there are many offerings, the only area where there’s a noticeable customer interest is in data backup and recovery. You can find plenty of vendors offering everything from exclusively backup to disaster recovery and high availability. Competition is good, but comparisons are not always easy. Services and prices vary and sometimes surprises are not pleasant.

The perception of managed service providers is pretty good overall. There are many more companies that are pleased than those that believe they were mistreated. One of the

In my analysis of the preliminary Top Concerns data coming out of a survey done by COMMON Europe, I noted that on the budgetary data, the European IBM i user group had mixed customer, business partner, and IBM survey response data together when what it should have done is just look at the customer data. They are the ones cutting the checks on Power Systems iron, after all.

As it turns out, taking out the IBM and business partner data did not change the budgetary picture all that much, which is a coincidence of unusual proportions. Take a look:

IBM has not done a lot of product announcements during the summer weeks relating to the Power Systems product family, but it usually sneaks out a thing or two when we are all trying to take vacation.

In announcement letter 311-103, IBM cut the price tag a bit on Rational Developer for i for SOA Construction V8.0. Specifically, it cut the price on feature 0003 of product number 5733-SOC by 16.5 percent, to $1,110. This is the per-user fee for this application development tool when bought with a Power Systems server and including one year of Software Maintenance bundled

SAP has had its struggles in recent years, but it is out to prove that you can’t keep a software giant down. After being forced to cut thousands of jobs in 2009 due to the economic downturn, and spending years battling in court with competitor Oracle, SAP seems to be in the midst of an accelerated financial turnaround.

Citing strong customer demand for IT and particularly business software, and helped by new mobile solutions and data analytics technology, specifically SAP’s new HANA in-memory acceleration appliance that we reported on back in May, SAP recently reported continued financial progress