Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Monday, March 12, 2012 - 300 views
You’re probably familiar with IBM’s z Personal Development Tool Adapter, which allows users to develop mainframe software without a mainframe. In effect, users plug a very expensive memory stick into their PC and it acts like a mainframe.
But now, IBM has extended the idea by allowing users with the appropriate memory stick to load a cloud-hosted Windows or Linux operating system onto their PC – although they will need a Windows or Linux computer with a 64-bit processor. It’s called the Secure Enterprise Desktop (SED) and comes packaged as an extension to IBM’s Smart Business Desktop Cloud service.
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Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Saturday, March 3, 2012 - 323 views
IBM must dream of putting a new computer up for sale and selling out almost immediately – even when it restricts sales to one per customer. That’s what happened with the new Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi (since Android started this fascination with sweets and cakes, everyone seems to be at it) Model B is the size of a credit card and comes as a 45-gram open board that’s the size of a credit card. It comes with a variety of ports to allow users to plug in a keyboard and monitor (not supplied), and runs Open Source software developed by Seneca College in Toronto. It’s manufactured in China and distributed by UK-based organizations Premier Farnell and RS Components for $35 or £21.60.
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Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Saturday, February 25, 2012 - 371 views
There was a time when you had to go into the office to use the mainframe. Then, with SOA, we allowed people to access from browsers running on any devices anywhere. Nowadays, people are wanting additional flexibility and demanding that they can work using their preferred computing device, rather than one allocated to them by IT.
You can understand why. I know of a number of sites that still roll out XP laptops to staff because they didn’t like Vista. They have older software applications that stop them moving to Windows 7 and IE9. You can understand why their staff would be frustrated in that situation. People who own super whizzy iPads and Samsung Tabs, or top of the range smartphones that can do pretty much anything, find that going to the office is like going back in time – and they don’t want it. They want to use their own devices, which they’re familiar with and can carryout their own simple IT support on, to access their work applications. Hence the growth of BYOD – Bring Your Own Device.
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Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Sunday, February 19, 2012 - 337 views
For those of you who’ve been living on Mars, an e-book is a book that you can read using an e-reader, such as a Kindle or using the Kindle app on your smartphone or tablet. And the great thing is that anyone can publish an e-book. You don’t need to find a publisher, you just need a computer. On the other hand, the really bad thing about it is that anyone can publish a book, no matter how little merit it my have!
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Posted by Mike on Sunday, February 5, 2012 - 304 views
Linus Torvalds released Linux on 5 October 1991, and by 1998 IBM was experimenting with it. In 2000 it was properly available on mainframes – along with the specialty processor IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux). The rest, as they say, is history.
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Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Sunday, January 29, 2012 - 538 views
Over the years, Microsoft has controlled the Office market – with Word and Excel being used everyday by millions of people. Even schools are teaching children to copy and paste etc using the familiar Microsoft products that they most likely also use at home.
People may fondly remember WordPerfect or VisiCalc, or may have tried OpenOffice and other alternatives to Microsoft, but for most organizations, the de facto standard has been MS Office.
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Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Sunday, January 22, 2012 - 413 views
The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012 is now available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook12 – and it’s FREE. Each new Yearbook is always greeted with enthusiasm by mainframers everywhere because it is such a unique source of information. And each year, many people find the results of the user survey especially interesting. And this year, for the very first time, survey respondents indicated that, at their sites, more data was stored off mainframes than on.
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Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 412 views
Every year, about this time, mainframe users are excited to get their hands on the latest edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. What makes the Yearbook stand out is that it’s an excellent reference work for all IBM mainframe professionals – no matter how many years of experience they have.
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