The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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Hans said: "I've always wanted to get one of those gadgets, but so far, I haven't been able to justify it. In the past few years since I've had my digital camera, I've never come close to filling my 1G CF card." I take photos of my daughter's varsity basketball team. I can take 200 pictures in a night which will be close to 1 gig. Fortunately, I have a 2 gig card. I do a web site for the team and put tons of photos on it. About 3,000 photos per year make it through the delete process. That's about 1/2 of all of the pictures that I actually take. I also have one of the Wolverine devices with a 80 gig drive that can suck all of the photos off of a chip onto the drive. Where I find this very handy is to get photos from others. They can hand me their chip and I hand it back to them in a few minutes unharmed. I have a copy of all their photos that can also be published to the web site. (We use Smugmug which gives us unlimeted space for photos at full resolution.)

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The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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Peter asked: "How many times has a non iSeries person asked you what you do for a living and you tell them you work on the AS/400, iSeries, i5... whatever? A lot? How many times has that topic lasted more than 1 minute? Hmmm, not very often? Enough said?" Since it's not the only platform I manage, I never answer the way you do. It doesn't really matter. No matter what you say the second they find out you work with computers they start asking questions about Windows or their PC hardware.

[R.Daugherty]

The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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FYI, I was reading the slashdot thread on another major software disaster, Kaiser Permanente's new custom healthcare ERP system. (Yes, I know that major systems often are failures, but they nearly all are in this era of dot com buzzwords.) At least one guy knows what the problem is. And there were slashdotters who agreed, rating it Insightful. That's cool. rd # Citrix? (Score:4, Insightful) by McNihil (612243) Alter Relationship on Thursday November 16, @01:30PM (#16872718) Don't send a boy to make a mans job. AS/400!

[R.Daugherty]

The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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reply from another slashdot poster: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/16/181219 Re:Citrix? by ACMENEWSLLC (940904) Alter Relationship on Thursday November 16, @02:49PM (#16874228) Don't send a boy to make a mans job. AS/400! My thoughts exactly. Drop in an AS/400 cluster and use DB2/400 for the database, then use something like OpenText (aka Gauss and Magellan) for imaging system. Of course, any major system /could/ work if proper planning is done. You can split up the Citrix farms so that a local server outage doesn't take down everyone. You can split up the systems so that certain databases (aka systems) are on one cluster of servers, while another system is on another cluster. Sounds like they tried to combine too many things into one pot. You need to take baby steps towards your goal. Implement one system and stabilize it, then move on to the next.

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The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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I totally agree, Chuck. Just mention that you work with computers and everyone or anyone will ask you how to do "something" on their home PC.

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The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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Folks, I have said it many times and I still continue to long for it - a laptop with OS/400 will give us the best of both the worlds. Yes, the numbers are against us, the market is not big enough. However, there are enough clever people to prepare an USB device with OS/400 on it ...

[David Abramowitz]

The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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This was almost done several years back. IBM produced an iSeries model P10 and P20. These models were no larger than the laptops of their day. They were discontinued for lack of interest. The lack of interest may have been due to the lack of IBM marketing support. Dave

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The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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Hi Dave, I mean a true existing laptop, for example the Thinkpad I am using now; not those old heavy black boxes. I would connect the device through one of the USB ports to add OS/400 functionalities on top of everything that is already available on the laptop. And that would be cool.

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The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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64-bit since 1995 - cool. Domino that can restart itself without rebooting the entire server - way cool - and on i5 that seems to rarely happen Java and C programming support - just as cool as what's available on M$ platforms. USB memory on i5 - do we really want programmers backing up their code to a flash drive (hey - who has the most recent source code to program x?), instead of being encouraged to work offline in WDSCi? Multi-OS capability - major cool. High CPU processor utilization without the 'VM/virtual whatever' flavor of the day sales pitch which claims to use 'all' the processor you paid for. I still think IBM knows that i5 is the coolest box on the planet but refuses to acknowlege that fact since doing so could really impact the sales of their other 'cool' products. IBM is in business to sell hardware and services but the i5 doesn't serve that business model since it takes less resources to administer both the hardware and all of the services the i5 offers. Now what would be really cool is i5 'on a stick' similar to what Domino just announced as Lotus Notes on a stick.

[R.Daugherty]

The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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I've told IBM to stick it before, but that isn't exactly what I had in mind. I can't say I understand the laptop thing whatsoever. Output to the laptop screen would require a modification to OS/400 to display to the screen (or perhaps seen as port 0 0 console and maybe local TCP/IP address?), but any client software such as a browser would have to be a Java browser, would it not? Linux makes more sense. rd

[AppDesigner]

The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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Ralph said: ...Output to the laptop screen would require a modification to OS/400 to display to the screen (or perhaps seen as port 0 0 console and maybe local TCP/IP address?), but any client software such as a browser would have to be a Java browser, would it not? => Frank Soltis said in one presentation that his biggest regret with OS/400 was deciding against including a graphic user interface. Scott Klement has named it as the biggest "flaw" in our system. Of course now there's the browser window and HTML and XML and Java. It could be done easily enough but with lots of resources, but I don't think they're going to do it. They may be thinking about it for the Son of System i, though. Who knows? I've heard they still have some kind of plans for RPG, like a new name. It's about time! Alan

[OzzieH]

The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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I don't know of any actors who played such in the movies, but here's a related one: The character, Mandrake (Peter Sellers), in Dr. Strangelove. Although he was just a visitor from the UK and computers probably wasn't his primary function, there was some good shots of that circa. 1964 mainframe in that movie. Images like that is what attracted me to this field. Who knew that 40 years later, that these monster machines would become the size of a toaster, and we'd be on the bottom end of desirable vocations?

[R.Daugherty]

The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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If I'm not mistaken, computer programming was ranked #1 occupation recently. Of course they were obviously talking to employed programmers. rd

[S.ODonnell]

The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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I can only think of a handful of movies that had a computer programmer as a main or integral character: Sandra Bullock in the Net, which wasn't all that bad of a portrayal of a computer programmer Hugh Jackman in that god-awful movie, Swordfish, which portrayal of a computer programmer was totally stupid. Mathew Broderick in War Games which was actually a really good portrayal of computer programmers of that time period Ron Livingston in Office Space which was by far the most accurate (albeit slightly exaggerated) portrayal of real programmers. Face it, we have basically a boring occupation. The output from it, if you are a games programmer, is quite entertaining, but for all the rest of us business programmers, it's usually nothing but a big yawn fest when translated to the big screen.

[R.Daugherty]

The iSeries: How Uncool Is That?

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well, here's how they make it entertaining. Lots of visuals, blinking lights, rotating images, popup dialogues with informative text and images, sometimes even scrolling text. In Lawnmower Man, speed up the "baud rate" to soak in the accumulated knowledge of mankind from CD's, then somehow program yourself into a "neural" network. In Jurassic Park and many other movies, program a security system with visuals on perimeter status, flashing where there's a breach, rotating 3-D map showing building and grounds, checkpoints, etc. "Newman" is the mastermind computer programmer of this superpark holding in dinosaurs, and programs in a security gap so he can smuggle out dinosaur eggs to collect a fortune. Of course, he doesn't make it out of the park, and security went sort of haywire from there. Some programming situations in movies shows scrolling lines of code, usually Unix shell output, or scrolling numbers in cryptographic breaking situations. Lots of excitement with scrolling screens. In Terminator, scroll Basic code down Arnold's robot of the future face to simulate artificial intelligence at work. In Backtrack, runaway witness Jodie Foster is tracked by hitman Dennis Hopper who programs a computer to look for phone numbers being called in real time. You can do that if you're the NSA or if you can scroll phone numbers down a screen and say you were. He set up two PC's no less and had them both scrolling phone numbers, the better to visualize a matching program running, no doubt. In Smallville, Chloe isn't seen hacking PHP or Java, but she's obviously a good gal computer programmer super hacker, with exciting results as far as reflecting on what you can do with a computer if you're technical. Of course anyone attempting to duplicate her feats will be major league disappointed. I just got Office Space a couple of weeks ago, I'm going to watch it this weekend. I didn't know a main player in it was a programmer. rd