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Four Hundred Monitor, March 6
March 6, 2023 Jenny Thomas
The topic of artificial intelligence has really heated up in recent weeks. ChatGPT took over the news cycle recently, and not just because it has teachers pulling their hair out as they try to contend with how to prevent students from plagiarizing essays. We’re seeing AI make headlines in our industry this week, which isn’t as surprising, but we must admit the story of a giant 3-D printer building a neighborhood in Texas did catch our attention. (You can find that one in the Top Stories below.) And another reminder to check out all that is available to you on …
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Four Hundred Monitor, February 15
February 15, 2023 Jenny Thomas
It’s been a wild week around the world. While we can’t promise you the possibility of extraterrestrial activity – as was implied might be happening over the skies of the United States – we can promise the relevant news and resources of the week. Granted, not as exciting as little green men, but still of interest for our IBM i ecosystem. Our calendar is a one-stop shop of webinars and events from the industry. This week we have added a ton to our Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings, so be sure to take a look at all the …
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Four Hundred Monitor, January 25
January 25, 2023 Jenny Thomas
Have you noticed there is national day for just about everything? Just in the month of January, we have national chocolate-covered cherry day, national bean day, national houseplant appreciation day, and national dress up your pet day, to name just a few. As it turns out, we are now in the middle of a week that our industry should probably be celebrating a little bit louder. Data privacy week, which runs from January 22 through 28, was created by the National Cybersecurity Alliance to help spread awareness about online privacy, and educates citizens on how to manage personal information, and …
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2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 1
January 16, 2023 Alex Woodie
What will happen in the IBM i world in 2023? Your guess is as good as ours, which is why we have corralled some of the most respected names in the industry to gaze into their crystal balls and give their prognostication for the year to come.
Donnie MacColl, the senior director of technical support and GDPR data protection officer at Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), kicks off this year’s batch of predictions with an expectation of more automation, thanks to a lack of skilled employees.
“Automated operations will accelerate along with migration to the cloud,” MacColl tells us. “Automation is key …
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Four Hundred Monitor, January 11
January 11, 2023 Jenny Thomas
Happy New Year! It’s been a few weeks since we last published Monitor, and we hope you enjoyed some downtime over the holidays. (We certainly were grateful for the break.) Breaktime is officially over, however, and we are happy to be back at it this week. It seems like we aren’t the only ones who are charging full steam ahead into 2023. There are lots of new items on the Calendar below for you to review, plus some recent news and resources to peruse along the way. We are looking forward to another year of keeping you informed, so let’s …
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2022: An IBM i Year In Review: Part 2
December 19, 2022 Alex Woodie
In part one of this now annual recap of the IBM i world that we do here at IT Jungle, we reminisced on the biggest stories of the first six months of the year. There was quite a bit going on, with the launch of IBM i 7.5 and more. But getting into the last half of the year – now that’s where the real action began.
July
The first full month of summer started off with a bang when IBM, after much anticipation, unveiled the long-awaited scale-out Power10 machines. The Power10 rollout included the S1014, with …
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Top 5 New IBM i Features to Check Out Now That Fall TRs Are GA
December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie
All of the new features that IBM unveiled earlier this fall with the Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 (as well as another stealth “non-TR” TR for 7.3) are now generally available. Some of them shipped before December 2, but pretty much all of them are now GA. With so much enterprise computing goodness ready to download, what will you adopt first?
We know it’s not Christmas yet. But with so many new features, it can be hard to figure out what to do first. While everybody has their own computing priorities, we have our own ideas for …
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Merlin Development Framework Now Supports IBM i 7.3
July 12, 2022 Alex Woodie
Big Blue has decided to support IBM i version 7.3 with Merlin, the new application development framework that was introduced in May as part of the IBM i 7.5 launch. The decision should help widen the potential user base for Merlin, even while discouraging operating system upgrades.
Merlin is a new software package from IBM designed to enable IBM i developers to create new ILE programs from scratch or to modernize existing ones. The software, which is officially called Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, is based on a mix of open source and proprietary tools from IBM, Red Hat, …
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IBM Looking To Open Up Debugging On IBM i
June 8, 2022 Alex Woodie
Things are moving quickly now in the IBM i development world, particularly when it comes to lightweight, Web-based IDEs, such as IBM’s new Merlin. However, the need to debug programs and the lack of a debugger for these IDEs is causing a bit of a roadblock to developer productivity with these newer IDEs. That’s why IBM is seeking a way to get IBM i debugging capabilities into more people’s hands.
The official IBM i Debugger product is bundled as a JAR file with IBM Toolbox for Java, and is directly integrated with Rational Developer for i (RDi), IBM’s flagship …
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Evading the Big Blue Name Police
June 8, 2022 Alex Woodie
The name “Merlin” conjures up an image of a magical place where wizards cast spells against evil spirits and fairies fly through the air. In other words, the exact opposite of the button-down image of business computing that IBM tries its best to exude. That’s what makes the story of how the newest member of the IBM i product lineup got its name so unlikely.
Twenty-two months ago, the folks at the IBM Rochester had an idea for a new product that would help to modernize development and operations processes on IBM i. In addition to Web-based IDE based on …
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