RE: New IBM PTF Shipping Policy 1/31/07

Well, it makes sense.  In a non-critical situation _someone_ will have a
reasonable broadband connection.  If not the company then one of the IT
folks.  Before we upped our WAN & Internet bandwidth here I used to
submit my cume CD requests at work in the morning and then download them
over my cable Internet connection at home later on.  Then burn the CDs
or later copy the image files for virtual optical.

Heck, I've got Mb+ speeds to my PC via my cel phone.

But it does beg another question, one that hits me from time to time.
Consider that all recent machines come with a DVD drive and IBM knows
(to a high degree of certainty) what kind of optical drives it's
customers have installed.  At what point will IBM start shipping
releases on DVD instead of CD?  I don't mind CD images for downloading
PTFs; if something happens 95% of the way through a 650MB download it's
a little easier to handle the time to re-download v. restarting after a
glitch in a DVD image (say 95% through a 4.5GB file or 8+GB if
dual-layer).  But when I'm sitting there at the box loading disks one at
a time I'd rather the pile be as short as possible.  Besides there being
less chance of doing things in the wrong order and less chance of
getting defective media it'd also mean the time between disk swaps would
be greater and I wouldn't have to baby-sit the install as closely.
Loading CDs you can't really switch your attention away for very long as
each disk only takes a few minutes.  But with 7x the capacity of a CD, a
DVD would take at least 25 minutes to fully read so you'd have time to
take a proper bio-break and/or leave the data center and warm up a
little.

I don't load the OS out every day or even every month (really not
necessarily even every year) but it seems to me the process would be a
lot more customer-friendly if I only had 2-4 DVDs full of OS + LPPs
instead of the huge stack we now have.  It'd also be nice to simply
label the disks 1, 2, etc. instead of having to know the LIC disk goes
first, then the OS disks, then the optional LPPs.  Have the disk number
be in a large font and then say what's actually on the disk in a smaller
font.  For us on the list who can load or reload a machine blindfolded
this isn't much of an issue, but folks who are new to the iSeries or
only do release upgrades every 3+ years are going to be much more
nervous about the process and anything that can simplify their lives
would be A Good Thing(tm).