• 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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• Feedback on Renaissance System i App Framework

  March 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I was interested to see your article about our Renaissance product. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly things get around. I did have one question though; I wondered why you thought that Renaissance was not open source. I know that IBM does not want CGIDEV2 to be open source per se, but Renaissance is supposed to be. We opted against using the GNU GPL because it is not clear how such products can be implemented in a commercial application, but the MPL allows the intended spirit of open source and it is also clear about allowing

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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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