System iNetwork

May 2005

May 7, 2005 1:00 AM

IBM Jobs announcement in Europe.

IBM this week have announced 13,000 job losses throughout Europe. Obviously, there are many contributory factors to this announcement but I sometimes wonder if their advertising campaigns do not help.

In the Computer press here in the UK, for months now, there have been a series of ‘Middleware is Everywhere’ adverts. These appear to be pan-European adverts, rather than country specific - you can tell because the cars in the outdoor pictures are driving on the right side of the road, not the left. One of the most irritating of these adverts shows the inside of a posh hotel – the sort of place that would cost a weeks wages or more to stay the night. But, to me, it says nothing.

Where are the adverts that show a real person, using IBM products or services to solve a real issue. The sort of advert that says ‘I am Joe Bloggs and by using an iSeries I cut my support costs by half’ or ‘I installed an iSeries and I have yet to have it compromised by a hack attack or virus’. Something that makes people notice.

Then I remember I have seen some adverts along this line. Pictures of real looking people (or models that look like real people, not models in expensive clothes looking like models) standing up and saying things about managing their infrastructure with one Active directory.

And how many people are Microsoft laying off this month...?

Posted by on May 7, 2005 at 1:00 AM | Comments (22)

May 4, 2005 9:14 AM

Free-format D-specs are LONG overdue!

IBM needs to deliver free-format D-specs (and P-specs) for ILE RPG, and SOON!

If we're worried about i5 image and productivity, a top priority should be the application "lingua franca" of the system.

Can you imagine Windows Server and .NET offering a language that still requires fixed-format, positional entries?

As a practical matter, free-format D-specs don't need to include all the esoteric options that have been added since the days of the "cycle."

Instead, a free-format D-apec should allow declarations of normal scalar and structure types. For example:

Dcl TRUE         Lgl  Const( '1' );
Dcl CurItemPrice Dec( 9 : 3 );

Dcl Structure ItemInfo  Qualified;
  Dcl ItemNbr    Integer;
  Dcl ItemPrice  Like( CurItemPrice );
  ...
  Dcl ItemDesc   String(100);
End Structure;

Positional declarations are a stone-age idea anyway, but this syntax is especially cumbersome with:

-- Long identifiers (requiring "..."). This really torques me on procedure interfaces, prototypes, and P-specs!

-- Within subprocedures, where you have to repeatedly bracket code with /Free /End-Free

Hopefully, it won't take IBM another decade to fix this critical deficiency in RPG.

-- Paul

Posted by on May 4, 2005 at 9:14 AM | Comments (91)