.:Publications

I. 5 Technologies That Will Change the World

After the Internet bubble burst, people stopped thinking about the transforming powers of technology, and technology companies were forced to stop crowing about how they were set to change the world. Instead, they ate crow -- and concentrated on staying alive.

But technology didn't stop evolving and maturing, no matter what the Nasdaq did. Imaginative researchers and engineers, by their nature, aren't very good at throttling back to a conservative idle.

So while shareholders nursed their battered portfolios and big companies chiseled away at their cost structures and employment rolls, these innovators kept working. They kept trying to develop technologies that would represent giant leaps forward, not just incremental baby steps.

We set off in search of those people who were bold enough to think that the world might at some point be ready to take a giant leap again and to believe that innovative technology can still put serious distance between a leader and the rest of the pack. More...

II. Working with the IFS in RPG IV

Traditionally, we've worked with a file system on OS/400 that was made up of libraries. Within each library are objects that are assigned a specific "object type" such as a file, a program or a command. Each object type has a strictly defined layout. Files, for example, contain members, which then contain records, which contain fields. Each of these pieces is given a strict definition of what it is, how it works, and how it can be used.

By contrast, other operating systems, such as UNIX, MS-DOS and Windows use file systems where each object is simply a collection of bytes. Applications can be written to write and read these bytes as data files, but they can also view them as programs, pictures, sounds, video files, or anything else that a programmer can dream up. In other words, their contents are not strictly defined by the operating system.

At some point in it's history it was decided that OS/400 should be extended to work with these "stream files."

Some problems needed to be solved in order to do this, however, because although these file systems are all similar, they are not exactly the same. MS-DOS filenames can be 8 characters long with a 3-character "extension", and cannot contain spaces in the filename. Windows extends the MS-DOS capability by adding the ability to have a much longer file name, plus they now allow spaces. And UNIX allows spaces and long filenames, and even makes the distinction between upper & lower case letters. In other words, in Windows "MyFile.txt" and "myfile.txt" would refer to the same file, but in UNIX they refer to two different files.

In order to make OS/400 capable of working with files and folders that adhere to all of these different rules, the Integrated File System (IFS) was born. In the IFS, many different file systems can be accessed using a common interface. Special directory names are used to denote which file system you're referring to. You can even define your own file system that uses your own user-defined rules if you wish! (But, we won't be covering that in this book.) More...