Monthly Archives: June 2022

Roblox: The best hope for older adults to participate in the evolution of technology.

(“cloudstubborn” connection?) > How to provide a way for older adults to participate in the rapid acceleration of technology offered by the cloud?

My dad is 85 years old. He has mild Parkinson’s where his hands shake slightly, he also has poor vision and uses glasses, and because of this, he has a hard time reading text on a standard computer screen.

He used to love suffering on the web, but now he can’t easily do it. The main problems are:

  1. Can’t easily control the standard mouse. Because his hands shake slightly, it is hard to precisely control the mouse pointer.
  2. Can’t see small text, the size that is common on most 15-inch laptops.
  3. Can’t type because of reason #1 above.
  4. Could never wear a Quest-like headset due to he already has really thick glasses and has trouble with balance. He requires minimal visual dis-orientation.
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In the near future, you will administer your IBMi LPAR by putting on your headset and entering the Metaverse…

This is just a late-night “riff” of creative writing. A very raw draft of a storyline of one possible version of the future……

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It’s about 8:30 AM, and my work day begins. As a system administrator for a large insurance company, I’m responsible for keeping everything running in our various data centers. Typically I login to my laptop and scan various dashboards and trouble ticket systems that report when something isn’t working right. There would be an alert or log entry describing some problem. The problems could come from any of our data centers around the world. I login to those remote systems and try to figure out is was wrong and attempt to fix it. When needed, other co-workers assist depending on the problem and what skill set might be needed to fix it. Sometimes an application breaks, or maybe a network connection stops working. Occasionally some piece of hardware goes bad. I spend my whole day looking at log files and error messages, emailing, talking, or chatting with other co-workers using collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, emailing, and calling hardware and software vendors whose products my company uses. 

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“My application can’t be moved to the cloud!”

My company provides the ability to host IBM Power AIX and IBMi application workloads in the cloud. We partner with two of the world’s largest technology companies to provide this service. During my daily activities as a Cloud Solutions Architect (aka Pre-Sales Engineer), I listen to many customers tell us about their “hopes and dreams” regarding moving legacy workloads to the cloud. These are definitely “Cloud Stubborn”. But when it comes to legacy applications based on IBM Power one of their common responses is:

“It is impossible to move my IBM Power-based application to the cloud.”

Of course, that begs the question “Why not?” The answer is often one of these:

  1. “My application is based on IBM’s AS/400 or more recently called IBMi, or IBM AIX.”
  2. “My application has hard-coded IP addresses compiled into the source code.”
  3. “There is no longer anyone around who knows about the code or applications that are still running.”
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