Readers are interacting online in our blogs, forums, and articles. We present a sampling of their comments here unedited and in their own words.

on our website . . .

Handy Tip for IBM i DB2 .NET Provider & Visual Studio 2008

Thanks, Craig! This is by far the most life-changing article I've ever read on systeminetwork. You have no idea how frustrating it was talking to my IBM Partner about not being able to use VS2008 tools against the AS400. I could programatically code, but I couldn't easily link, for example, a gridView control to a DB2 source. When I went to TechEd in May, Microsoft folks were good enough to explain the problem (apparent lack of DDEX files for the provider), but were unable to assist in finding a solution. This article delivered. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
—from "Add the IBM Provider as a Data Source in Visual Studio 2008" [1]

How to Work with Those $@#_ Characters

Regarding option 1, if instead of creating a DDS logical, you create an SQL view, then the query won't automatically be routed to the CQE even though you've specified a "logical" on the SQL statement.

However, my preferred solution would be to use the system's long name support, to provide a long name, that doesn't contain special characters, for use by SQL based interfaces.

You can assign a long name to all the fields without changing the files Record Format Level Identifier, thus you won't even need to recompile existing RPG program to prevent a level check. It doesn't matter if you use SQL DDL and the "SYSTEM NAME" clause or DDS and the ALIAS keyword.
—from "Those $#@_ Characters!" [2]

in our blogs . . .

IBM Buying into Predictive Analytics

Great Idea if IBM does a lot better than they did with COGNOS! AND, Hey IBM! Buy SAP and get it over with!

Do a good job integrating your acquisitions into your product mix.
—from "IBM Sees BI Future Through SPSS Acquisition" [3]

Smart move from IBM. I agree with John about IBM acquiring SAP, just dont make a mess like Oracle has done acquiring "a thousand" different products and then trying to figure out what to do with them.

Working on JD Edwards I really dont know where we're going, ever since Oracle has acquired it.
—from "IBM Sees BI Future Through SPSS Acquisition" [4]

in our forums . . .

UPS Problem

Last night there was a power failure. The generator failed to start and the iSeries went down hard after the battery drained. We have a Liebert 65kVa UPS. We have a 525i on rel 5.4. Does anyone know how I should go about getting the two to talk so the iSeries can go down correctly? P.S. Did I mention it went down in the middle of the nightly backup.
—from our Backup, Recovery, & High Availability forum [5]

Who Else Pwns Your User Profiles?

Pwn is a term from the video gaming "culture", it means that you got your butt kicked.

An analogy... in sports, if one team were to completely blow out another team. For example if one basketball team beats another one by 60 points, the winner might go to the loser and say "pwnage! You got totally pwn'd!"

It originates as a typo of the word "own". "Dude, I owned you!" There was a video game many years ago (I forget which one) where the developers had mistyped "own" as "pwn". Since then, it became a part of the video gaming culture. "You got pwn'd or you got pwn3d" or "pure pwnage" is a common phrase when someone beats someone else.

More recently it has crept into the world of security. Someone taking over another person's computer... they "pwn" that computer.

I don't know if Shalom's use of Pwn was a typo or not... but I thought it was funny to see that phrase in these forums, so I had to comment.
—from our Security forum [6]

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