It's that time of the week again for you to catch up on your IBM i news. Let's start this edition off with IBM i's "exciting" announcement of IBM i 7.3 aka...

iNext Revealed As IBM i 7.3
by Dan Burger

• For those who are good at connecting the dots on IBM i roadmap graphics, however, you probably saw this coming: iNext is i 7.3.

• It's as close to a certainty as you can get that more SQL services will be added with the i 7.3 release.

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh022216-story03.html

The Job Market For The People Who Make The IBM i Go
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

• After the Y2K and ERP booms were over in the early 2000s, the job openings per month rate he was working on fell to maybe eight to nine, and then a few years later it was down to five per month and now he is doing an average of two per month, he estimates.
• "Companies tend to run understaffed, and anything else or extra is a luxury," explains Langieri.
• The other thing that keeps companies from hiring, oddly enough, is the impossible jobs they are trying to fill, and in many cases, they just don't bother trying very hard.

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh022216-story01.html

Torbjorn Appehl on New Jobs, Data3 and Vegetarian Cooking
by Paul Tuohy

• Paul talks to Torbjörn Appehl, president of Data3 (Sweden’s User Group) and marketing director of Common Europe, about the revitalization of Data3 and the challenges for Common Europe.

Source: http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi/trends/iTALK-WITH-TUOHY/Torbjorn_Appehl/

Payday For The People Who Make The IBM i Go
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

• In our ongoing series on the people who run and program the IBM i platform and the industries where they work, we are now going to finally get to the meat of the issue: Payday for programming.
• In the early 1990s, the level of experience required for programmers went up faster than the salaries did, which happened as the Y2K and ERP bubbles of the late 1990s cooled off and, frankly, as the job pool aged and did not expand.
• The good news, if you don't like the boss and you are a programmer or administrator in that your pay was rising, on average, from 1995 through 2005 as MIS managers saw their pay slide when adjusted for inflation.

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh022916-story01.html

Where In The World Is IBM i?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

• In case you did not notice it, there is a new year here in 2016 and Big Blue has spent what must have been a fortune putting a new mobile-tuned website together for itself.
• No mention of Power Systems or IBM i anywhere, but there is a tag for IBM's new System z13s baby mainframes...

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh022916-story05.html

Easy Printing From CL
by Ted Holt

• CL cannot write to printer files. This is understandable, since CL fits into the category of job control languages. Even though I'd never use CL to build an aged receivables report, there are times when it is advantageous for a CL program to generate a report (i.e., produce a spooled file), and here are two fairly easy ways to do that.

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/fhg/fhg030116-story02.html

RPG Academy: /FREE Your Code - Convert Fixed-Format to Free-Format, Part 1
by Rafael Victoria-Pereira

• There are tools that "automagically" convert your code from fixed- to free-format, such as RDi (Rational Developer for Power Systems, formerly WDSC Web Studio Development Client) and other IDEs. However, you can do it manually.
• In most situations, converting code to free-format manually consists of the following:
  • Include the /FREE directive before the first line of code to convert.
  • Remove the Cs from the left side of the lines of code.
  • Whenever a Factor 1 position is filled, swap it with the operation code.
  • ...
• Source: http://www.mcpressonline.com/rpg/rpg-academy-/free-your-code-convert-fixed-format-to-free-format-part-1.html

And that's all for this week. For those of you wondering if you can get notified of these IBM i Pulse posts, you can! Just enter your email in the sidebar on the right.

Have a nice weekend!