Are humans so in love with technology that our family trees may someday include computers?

In addition, Big Blue has crafted several System i offerings for customers with other interests.

About two or three times a year, IBM dedicates a day to releasing a small yet significant series of System i announcements. It just so happens that last Tuesday was one of those days.

Ever hear "They don't make those anymore!" when trying to get something fixed?

The IBM Academic Initiative for System i is building System i skills, enhancing IT programs at colleges and universities, and helping to improve students' lives.

If your outlook on the future of System i ever sours and you feel disheartened as a result, talk to students taking System i courses in colleges and universities. Speak also to recent graduates now working in System i shops. And talk as well to educators teaching a System i–based curriculum. The conversations will brighten your outlook and your day.

Technology's charms can lull even the most ardent technophobe into a state of apathy, but it won't last long.

Sometimes, bad things happen to technophobes for good reason.

Cruising through life in relative comfort and happiness in an unwitting truce with technology for weeks at a time is no way for a guy like me to live. After all, I've got a potent grudge to nurture against technology's insidious influence, and a man who is—of all things—content can't possibly cultivate fear and loathing within himself. Fear and loathing are muscles; they must be exercised.

IT staffers can survive SOX or other audits—unscathed—even when the business of IT is to run the business.

An impending audit—whether internal or external—arouses visceral reactions (or overreactions) in company employees not unlike the mass hysteria that grips the lemurs in DreamWorks' Madagascar when they are faced with the threat of the dreaded foosa.

A tempest has been brewing for Lotus and Domino 8's support for DB2. It's time to put this tempest back in the teapot. 

Several weeks ago, when Domino 8 began to ship, a System i reporter noticed that Domino 8 permits the storage of Notes/Domino data in the format of the DB2 Universal Database (sometimes marketed as DB2 UDB). Evidently, this reporter had expected Lotus to extend this capability to System i DB2 and found this "failure" to be an interesting and controversial topic for a broadside against Lotus. In his report, he claimed that System i DB2 was getting shorted with Domino 8, and he searched in vain for an answer from IBM Software.