Volume 16, Number 11 - March 19, 2007 Archives - Page 2 of 3

Notes/Domino 8 Beta Reveals UnLotus-Like Improvements

March 19, 2007 Dan Burger

What could be more fun than getting your hands on the IBM‘s Lotus Notes and Domino 8 beta release? Bamboo splints under your fingernails might be one of the more popular responses, based on the experiences of long-time users of this e-mail and collaboration software with the not-so-user-friendly reputation. Things change, though, and IBM is legitimately thrilled to be introducing a beta version of Notes/Domino 8 with a redesigned interface, handy e-mail conveniences, no-cost productivity editors, and greatly expanded search capabilities.

In other words, IBM has made some serious, and long overdue, efforts to bring Notes/Domino up the ease

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Red Hat Delivers Enterprise Linux 5 At Long Last

March 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last Wednesday, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced its virtualized and improved Enterprise Linux 5 operating system. The main benefit of RHEL 5 is integrated support for the open source Xen server virtualization hypervisor from XenSource, as well as a new Linux kernel and integrated global file systems and high availability clustering software.

Like RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 before it, RHEL 5 is, of course, supported on IBM‘s Power-based servers–that’s iSeries and System i machines and pSeries and System p boxes–as well as its mainframes, the product is sold mostly on X64 machines at this point and

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Transaction Processing Council Launches TPC-E Benchmark

March 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Transaction Processing Council, the well-known industry consortium that is nearly two decades old and creates and audits a series of online transaction processing benchmarks on behalf of server, operating system, and database software makers, has finally got an updated transaction processing test to market. The TPC-E test, which becomes available today, has been ratified by the member companies and will be the first test with standardized code that will be freely available to anyone in the IT community to use to gauge the performance of systems.

That latter bit, it may turn out, could be the most important

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Study Attempts to Quantify IT’s Effects on the Economy

March 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in the days of data processing, just replacing people with computers seemed to be enough of a good reason for business managers to spend relatively large sums of money on mainframes and minicomputers. But as the use of computing ballooned in the following decades, weaving itself into the very fabric of the economy and our lives, we ironically seem to not know exactly how much all of this information technology–which is more about linking people and companies than it is about doing bookkeeping in the back office–is helping or hurting the mature economies of the world.

According to a

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IBM Pays for System i5 Video Viral Marketing

March 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, the AS/400, iSeries, and System i community have been asking IBM to more widely distribute some of the wacky video marketing campaigns that it comes up with–and which are usually only shown at user group meetings to the OS/400 and i5/OS faithful–and it looks like last week Big Blue finally listened. The company launched a “viral video” marketing campaign for the System i5–well, sort of–on Google‘s YouTube site and is using that company’s AdSense automated advertising distribution system to place the four videos on Web sites.

Before I got the email from IBM public relations last week informing

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Mad Dog 21/21: The China Spin Drone

March 19, 2007 Hesh Wiener

At 3 p.m. on February 27, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was falling in sympathy with a meltdown on the Shanghai exchange, seemed to drop off a cliff. What actually happened is that the computer behind the average was falling behind, so Dow switched to a backup system, which caught up very quickly, bringing the day to a miserable end. The Dow incident is an example of the Roadrunner Effect, where the Coyote runs past the edge of the cliff but doesn’t fall until he looks down. A similar thing might be happening in the computer industry right

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It Was Inevitable: IBM Jacks Maintenance Fees on Midrange Gear

March 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With System i5 sales off for the past few quarters and many customers sitting tight on vintage AS/400 and iSeries gear that works just fine, thank you very much, it comes as no surprise that IBM increased maintenance prices on many auxiliary pieces of equipment relating to AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 boxes last week. The System i division has to make its numbers and it has to encourage customers to upgrade at the same time, and raising maintenance prices is one of the standard sticks in the computer racket when carrots are not working.

IBM changed prices on two

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System i Shops Plenty Annoyed About Missing WDSc Features

March 19, 2007 Bruce Guetzkow and Timothy Prickett Morgan

To say that developers who work on the iSeries and System i5 platform were annoyed that IBM has removed two key features–Screen Designer and Application Diagram–from the Standard Edition of its new WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc) Version 7.0 tool would be an understatement. Readers of The Four Hundred reacted with predictable and understandable frustration at last week’s story by Bruce Guetzkow explaining that it was a bad idea to only include these features in the Advanced Edition of the product.

Programmers at IT shops do not often get a lot of respect from IT vendors, since they do not

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