S/38 Archives - IT Jungle

Java License Fallout Continues Impacting IBM i Shops

October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

Oracle’s decision to restrict the previously free distribution of Java version 8 tools and runtimes is impacting the entire IT industry. In our little neck of the woods, the decision to charge businesses for using Oracle’s Java has forced IBM i shops to take a hard look at the technology platform, and in some cases look for alternative solutions.

Oracle ruffled feathers in the Java community in 2017, when it made substantial changes to its Java roadmap. The company announced that Java Standard Edition (SE) version 8, which is a legacy version of Java but is still in widespread use, …
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Guru: I’m A Number, You’re A Number, Everybody’s A Number

September 9, 2019 Ted Holt

Do you, like Bob Seger, sometimes feel that you are nothing more than a number? Me too. That’s because to many people, that’s exactly what we are. And if there’s one thing that computers are good at, it’s assigning numbers — to orders, to accounts, to invoices, to transactions, and of course, to people. Since we have to make the computer assign numbers, we may as well learn the modern way to do it.

In my earliest days of programming, I would store the last assigned of a series of numbers in a data file. (The S/34 and S/36 …
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