• IBM Builds Brain-Like Chip With 1 Million Neurons

  August 11, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM scientists last week rolled out SyNAPSE, a “neurosynaptic” chip that boasts the equivalent of 1 million programmable neurons and 256 million programmable synapses. The miniscule chip could hasten the transformation of society by enabling new brain-like “neuromorphic” applications, such as helping the blind see again, and perhaps other less philanthropic adventures. The introduction of the postage stamp-sized SyNAPSE chip, which is built on Samsung Electronic‘s 28 nanometer technology, is the culmination of a decade of research by IBM into non-von Neumann architectures, which have been the standard in computer design since 1946. IBM says it has made a

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• Busy Signals Coming From PowerRuby

  August 11, 2014 Dan Burger

  It has been almost a year since we found out about a company called PowerRuby, a coming together of the open source Ruby on Rails development environment and the IBM Power Systems user community. “There’s something special going on with Ruby and Rails,” we were told by one of the brightest young minds in the IBM i community, Aaron Bartell. Notable IBM i evangelists Steve Will, Alison Butterill, Jon Paris, and others eagerly encouraged IBM i developers to try it. A lot has happened for PowerRuby, although you might shake your head after reading the beta test site on

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• As I See It: The Final Escape

  August 11, 2014 Victor Rozek

  Lauren, Danielle, Lily, Rosco, and Zosia have at least two things in common: they are siblings, and they no longer have a father. Their Dad had been rather successful by all accounts, able to secure the bounty of Silicon Valley for himself and his family. But it wasn’t enough. Or perhaps it was too much. His death aboard his yacht at the hands of a distasteful-looking, tattooed prostitute will forever filter whatever his children thought they knew about their Father. Forrest Hayes’ demise had all the requisites of a media carnival: wealth, scandal, and drugs. Add to that a whiff

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• There’s Something Happening Here

  August 11, 2014 Dan Burger

  What makes working worthwhile? A paycheck that puts a smile on your face and a work environment that doesn’t smother your personal life? How important is it to be working for a company with a progressive approach to IT with people who want to grow professionally and who want to be part of what drives business success? If it was your responsibility to determine which technologies would be most useful to your business and how they fit in a budget and a skill set, could you lead those projects? “There is a line in the job descriptions of all my

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• IBM i Job Market: Not All Doom and Gloom

  August 11, 2014 Alex Woodie

  In early July we ran an article titled The New Normal For The IBM i Job Market, where we explored some of challenges that IBM i professionals are having in finding new jobs, particularly in California, and the structural changes that are impacting the workforce as a whole. There’s no doubt that these are tough times for many people, but those challenges also create opportunities for IBM i pros who have the ability to capitalize on them. There are many variables that factor into the employment equation and determine whether and how people are matched up with jobs. For

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• OpenVMS Spinout A Possible Prelude To An IBM i Future?

  August 11, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a few operating systems in the world that get both the tags “legacy” and “venerable” attached to them, one denoting a kind of dismissal or outright disdain and the other connoting respect and maybe even sometimes awe. IBM‘s MVS platform, which has also been called OS/390 and more recently known as z/OS, is certainly venerable and legacy if you don’t want to be accurate or generous, and so is OS/400, formerly known as i5/OS and now IBM i. And so is the VMS operating system for VAX, Alpha, and Itanium systems from Digital Equipment Corp,

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• When IBM i RGZPFM Doesn’t Want To Rebuild Access Paths

  July 30, 2014 Hey, Joe

  I’m trying to run this Reorganize Physical File (RGZPFM) command to reorganize one of my files while it’s active: RGZPFM FILE(lib_name/file_name) MBR(member_name) RBDACCPTH(*OPTIMIZE) ALWCANCEL(*YES) LOCK(*SHRUPD) But I keep getting this CPF3135 error: CPF3135 - Access path for member &2 already in use. This is not what I anticipated. Am I doing something wrong? –Alan My guess is that your RGZPFM command will complete correctly if you run the command using these parameters: RGZPFM FILE(lib_name/file_name) MBR(member_name) RBDACCPTH(*NO) ALWCANCEL(*YES) LOCK(*SHRUPD) The difference between this command and your command is that the Rebuild Access Paths

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• How Do I De-Edit? Let Me Count The Ways

  July 30, 2014 Ted Holt

  I’m sure that you, the professional that you are, are expert in the process of editing numbers. Unlike me, you may even have memorized the edit codes we often use in RPG and DDS source code. Editing is important because it makes life easier for the folks who use the software we produce. But do you know how to de-edit? These days data comes from many sources, and the people who send us this data (or from whom we glean it) don’t always give it to us in tidy packages. Converting such data to a usable format can be challenging,

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• Decisions, Decisions: Templates Or Snippets?

  July 30, 2014 Susan Gantner

  All you RSE (a.k.a., RDi, RDP, WDSC) users out there: Do you prefer templates or snippets? For some of you, the response may be “What’s a Template?” Or “What’s a Snippet?” For those readers, I’ll direct you to first learn more about the basics of both topics via earlier tips from Paul Tuohy, when he wrote about creating templates and creating snippets. If your answer to my original question about templates vs. snippets is “Yes” (meaning you like both), perhaps you don’t need to read the rest of this tip. As with several capabilities of the Rational toolset, these

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• SAP’s Q2 Bottom Line Pinched By Potential Lawsuit Charges

  July 28, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hot on the heels of Germany’s victory in the World Cup soccer tournament, software giant SAP is extolling the benefits of the HANA in-memory technology that the German team used to analyze its own players as well as do competitive analysis on its opponents before, during, and after matches. “When you think about what they accomplish with their smart use of big data, it amounts to making a complex game look simple,” explained co-CEO Bill McDermott in a conference call with Wall Street analysts going over SAP’s second quarter financial results. “And now we know that simple helps win the

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