New York, NY - In the relatively modest confines of the Helen Mills Theater in New York City, Mike Daniels, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Technology Services, outlined IBM’s plan to save energy. As part of IBM’s Project Big Green, the services arm of IBM announced today that its 190,000 service technicians worldwide will be using the latest in green, zero-emissions, vehicles. The new service vehicle is called the “Smart Cart” and is produced by Smart GmbH, a subsidiary of Daimler AG of Germany, the same makers of the Smart Car.
This eco-friendly approach will reduce IBM’s overall carbon output by as much as 7,500 tons of carbon emissions per year and save IBM $145,600,000 in fuel costs. In addition to the benefits to the environment, it is estimated the average service technician will lose about 16 pounds, saving IBM an additional $56,000,000 in health care costs.
So that’s what IBM is up to. What’s your company doing today to help protect our environment?
There was a doctor, a civil engineer, and an RPG programmer sitting around late one evening, and they got to discussing which was the oldest profession.
The doctor pointed out that according to Biblical tradition, God created Eve from Adam’s rib. This obviously required surgery, so therefore that was the oldest profession in the world.
The engineer countered with an earlier passage in the Bible that stated that God created order from the chaos, and that was most certainly the biggest and best civil engineering example ever, and also proved that his profession was the oldest profession.
The RPG programmer leaned back in his chair, and with a sly smile responded, “Yes, but who do you think created the chaos?”
Rochester, MN - In order to better compete with the growing competition from PC Windows Servers, IBM plans to install a reset button on the newly announced Power Systems and change all IBM i operating system error message text to read “General Protection Fault – Press RESET.”
This new feature will give IBM customers the ability to compete head-to-head with Microsoft Windows servers. There is additional talk of adding another feature that will randomly cause the system to restart or lockup for no apparent reason. Because of the stable nature of the IBM i operating system it will be difficult to quickly implement this feature and therefore will have to come at a later date. However, with features like these it will give customers no reason to move to Wintel servers.
(Note: The AS/400 Geek originally wrote this piece as an April Fools joke in April of 1997 for a local AS/400 user group newsletter. Notice how close this humorous article has become reality. The text is exactly as published in 1997.)
When IBM recently announced that it was moving its Austin, Texas-based RS/6000 assembly operations to its 3.7 million square foot facility in Rochester, Minnesota, the same production line the AS/400 is built on, rumors flew about what this move meant. IBM publicly denied any convergence of the two machines and that the move was simply to consolidate manufacturing. But sources inside Rochester have confirmed there are AS/6000 machines running inside the IBM lab with the intent to produce them in the near future.
Because of recent advances in technology with the AS/400 and RS/6000, they both have PowerPC RISC processors and share the same DASD and tape subsystems. It finally became evident that the only difference between the two machines was the operating system.
The new AS/6000 will sport a new operating system named OS/6000 which can emulate either AIX or OS/400. When running in AIX mode the system requires 6 or 7 operators, a network manager, a security engineer, a database manager and four C programmers. When running in OS/400 mode the system requires a dark cool room to run in but may need a janitor or errand boy to change the backup tapes once in a while.
The percent of used disk space on my iSeries keeps creeping higher and higher. Is there a simple way I can clean up my disk drives to reduce this percent?
A: Yes, the system has a very simple command that will significantly reduce the amount of disk storage used. An example of the command is:
CLRLIB LIB(*ALL)
This command may take a while to process but gives you a real bang for the buck. It will free up a great deal of storage space on your system’s hard drives. Have a nice day!
Here you will find a humorous and irreverent look at the IBM Midrange world. If you have worked with the IBM AS/400, iSeries, i5, System i or i on Power, you will want to check out these pages. Welcome, explore and have fun.
