It would be tempting to say that things couldn’t have gotten much worse for COMMON following the dreadful conference in Reno this time last year, when the global economy was melting down. In reality, things could have gotten much, much worse for the 50-year-old user group. But thanks to a variety of reasons–including a better economic climate and the impressive announcements from IBM–the optimism was as obvious as the Florida humidity during last week’s show at the Orlando Hilton.

Before Y2K, COMMON routinely attracted more than 4,000 attendees to its bi-annual shows. For the next five years, attendance gradually

RPG is king. If you don’t believe it, go to COMMON. OK, it is the big fish in the small pond scenario if you’re looking at the entire IT universe, but these are IBM i enthusiasts and for the majority of them RPG rules. If you are curious about the reaction to the tool IBM calls the Rational Open Access RPG Edition and that everyone else calls RPG Open Access, you wouldn’t be the Lone Ranger.

Educational sessions presented by IBMers and sessions presented by ISVs such as Profound Logic and looksoftware were filled with interested programmers. In some

In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I created a slew of configured Power7-based blade systems, loading up i 7.1 and AIX 6.1 with two relational databases, and I said that the premium that IBM was charging was small enough to be a sign of progress. Surprising, even. What was even more surprising to me was finding out I made a big error configuring the Power System 701 blades and a small one setting up the AIX blades. And those errors make the i blades look downright awful compared to the AIX blades.

First, the big mistake. IBM

You might not think that corporate computer executives shop for servers the way canny bargain hunters shop for laundry detergent, but if that’s how you see things you are missing something. Business buyers aren’t ashamed of cashing in coupons. If anyone is shy about doing business this way, it’s IBM. But with Power box sales down sharply, IBM has to stifle all that smart planet folderol and cut to the chase. By one means or another, Big Blue has to get the attention of prospective customers who like to play Dell or No Dell.

The users who chase

Cloud, cloud, cloud. If you say it a hundred more times, will that make a product any more interesting or useful? No. But vendors, journalists, analysts, and other IT observers are addicted to the word cloud, so every move or product a vendor makes has to be cloudy, even if it really isn’t. Or even if cloud is just the fulfillment of the promise of flexible distributed computing Unix and then X64 server vendors sold us two decades ago. And so it is with IBM‘s acquisition of Cast Iron Systems last week.

Cast Iron is a venture-backed,

You have to look at iManifest as a never-ending struggle. Whether you think that it is IBM‘s battle to fight or not, the continued progress of the IBM i, System i, iSeries, AS/400, or whatever you like to call it depends on those who truly believe it is something special and should be more than IBM’s best kept secret.

It’s hard to argue with the strategy that employs strength in numbers, especially when building a groundswell of support. So while the iManifest U.S. organization looks to build its ranks from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it most assuredly gets

In the long run, I guess we are not only all dead, but temp workers in this fluid form of short-term thinking global capitalism that has evolved on Earth. Some people understand that, like Tim Ringo, who is a vice president in IBM’s human capital management consulting business. Others, like the rest of us who like our jobs and think we are contributing hard work in exchange for a commitment from our employers to be allowed to continue to evolve and change with them because life can’t be all uncertainty and discontinuity, apparently don’t.

Having done my fair share of

The i in iSeries, System i, and i 6.1/7.1 is supposed to stand for integration. And as IT Jungle reported with the launch of Zend Server concurrent with the i 7.1 launch on April 13, the new Zend Server, which replaces Zend Core for i, is a more native implementation of the Zend Engine for running PHP applications. A welcome change and one that should make it easier for PHP applications to be administered on Power Systems i boxes.

The change seems minor, but it means that OS/400 and i shops will not have to be mucking around with two

IBM has put its big midrange Power7 box, the Power Systems 780 server, through the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark paces, and to goose the performance while at the same time avoiding the high cost of disk drives needed to meet the strict requirements of the TPC-C test, Big Blue equipped the system with fat solid state disks made by SandForce.

Unlike many enterprise-class SSDs, which are based on single-level cell (SLC) flash memory technology, the SandForce SF-1500 SSD units (which it calls processors for some silly reason) are based on the cheaper multi-level cell (MLC) flash technology we

As far as I know, this is the first time in the 50-year history of COMMON that the organization, with IBM backing them up all the way, had to call the cops. The funny thing was that during the COMMON Annual Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida, it was the West Haven, Connecticut Police Department that got the call.

No guns were drawn. No sirens screamed. But when it was all over, there were congratulations for what the WHPD has accomplished using technology to help preserve the peace and add officer safety. Behind the thin blue line in this case