• As I See It: Luddites

  October 30, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Having enjoyed a life of relative plenty, it’s easy to give myself more credit for the abundance I take for granted than I actually deserve. I habitually forget that almost everything I own, eat, drive, and wear was produced by someone else, often at great cost.

  I had that thought recently as I looked at my iPhone, a miracle of technology, designed domestically, but assembled in foreign mega-factories by people whose range of choices is infinitely more limited than mine. I recalled something horrific that happened over a decade ago in a Chinese Apple assembly plant run by a Taiwanese …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 44

  October 30, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Last week was busy, and this week is quiet when it comes to PTFs. With the release of Technology Refreshes coming out starting to roll out next week, this stands to reason.

  Now, a note about the ESS Outage. Due to extensive infrastructure upgrades, the ESS website and all of its components, including Base Composer and Cloud Management Console functions, will be fully unavailable from November 3, 2023, at 11 a.m. UTC until November 6, 2023, at 3 a.m. UTC.

  Now, there is also a security vulnerability, which you can read about in Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable to …

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• RDi and RPG Enhancements in the 2023 Fall TRs

  October 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  RPG developers will see some compelling new features coming out of the recent Technology Refresh (TR) announcement from IBM, including enhancements to the RDi development environment as well as new capabilities in the RPG language itself.

  RPG is nearly 65 years old, but like old dogs, the programming language can learn new tricks. The enhancements that IBM has brought to its venerable language with IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9 continue a strong run of improvements, according to IBM i Product Manager Alison Butterill.

  “Every one of the TRs since we announced 7.5 has had at least some RPG …

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• Understanding The Power Of Power10

  October 25, 2023 Laurie LeBlanc

  The Power10 doesn’t disappoint when it comes to performance, reliability, availability, and security. But that’s not all it provides. With support for hybrid cloud, poised to support AI, and unmatched scalability, the Power10 will help you move into the future.

  We all know one of the best things about IBM Power running IBM i is that it is stable and reliable – so reliable that some companies keep their hardware for 10 years or more. While this could be viewed as a good thing for the business, there are many reasons to upgrade your hardware. Legacy hardware increases your risk …

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• Four Cybercrime Trends for Security Pros to Watch Now

  October 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  If you’re a cybercriminal, congratulations! You’ve selected a high-growth field that’s expected to generate $14 trillion in criminal value by 2028. But that growth in digital criminality is a problem for the rest of us, who must cope with increasingly sophisticated schemes.

  Cybercrime was relatively slow-growing industry, generating a mere $1.2 trillion in costs to society globally in 2019, according to Statista. But something snapped in the collective criminal mind in 2020, and cybercrime has been riding an elevated growth curve ever since. Between 2017 and 2028, Statista projects cybercrime will enjoy a 28 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 25

  October 25, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  Get ready to add a new column to your org chart. Artificial intelligence is growing at such a rapid rate that some organizations aren’t asking the existing CIO to wear another hat. Instead they are adding a new position. A chief AI officer, or CAIO. This position would have a lot of responsibilities, including staying on top of emerging AI technologies, develop an AI strategy, and make sure that AI implementations align with business goals. Sounds like a big job, doesn’t it? Based on what we’re seeing in the news cycles, it also seems like it’s becoming exceedingly necessary. Read …

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• Time Is Running Out To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  October 25, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  By now, you are no doubt getting a little tired of us asking you to take the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. It is beginning to sound a little bit too much like NPR and PBS during pledge drives. And for that, we truly apologize. But, we do want to have as many of you take the survey so we get the best sense of what is happening in the IBM i base that we can get.

  The results of this survey are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly true since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, …

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• The Plus Things Change, The Plus Things Stay The Same

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like nearly all of you, I have never read the autobiographical romance novels of Jean-Baptise Alphonse Karr, or read back issues of the satirical Le Figaro newspaper that were nearly two centuries old when Karr was editor of that paper, which is today aimed at the upper middle class and which is still one of the papers of record for France.

  But like nearly all of you, I am very familiar with one of the witticisms that came out of Karr’s pen: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Which translates into American as something akin to: …

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• Db2 Web Query Customers Left In The Lurch

  October 23, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The sudden collapse of the OEM agreement between IBM and TIBCO for Db2 Web Query has left users of the product in a difficult position. Where will they get technical support, updates, and fixes? Should they abandon the software? Can they sue somebody if something happens to their systems?

  These are some of the questions that IBM i shops who adopted Db2 Web Query are asking themselves in the wake of IBM’s stunning October 10 announcement to kill off the product. Effectively immediately, IBM stopped marketing and selling the IBM i product, which was an OEM version of Information …

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• Why Big Blue Is Simplifying The IBM i LPP Stack

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If only the paranoid survive, as legendary Intel co-founder Andy Grove once quipped, then we all would pretty much have to be paranoid pretty much all the time. And this, obviously, would not be healthy. But as legendary founder of The Four Hundred, the irreplaceable and irascible Hesh Wiener, once quipped, sometimes they really are out to get you.

  And so, we come to IBM’s recent “come to Bezos” moment starting late last year that it was going to be providing subscription pricing for hardware and systems software for the IBM i platform running on Power Systems. We fully …

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